|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Art of the 20th Century
|
Art Styles
in 20th century Art Map
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Conquest of the Irrational
1936-1939
|
|
Dali and Gala, 1937. Photograph:
Man Ray
|
Civil War in Spain
In 1936, Spain was being torn apart by civil war. Dali
and Gala had to do without their retreats to Port Lligat. Instead they
travelled around Europe, and spent some time living in Italy. The
influence of the Renaissance masters Dali saw in the great art galleries
of Florence and Rome is clearly apparent in the groups of figures he
subsequently used in his paintings in order to establish multiple images,
as in Spain or The Invention of the Monsters. The latter is one of his paintings on the subject of
"premonitions of war": the artist explained that the foreground double
figure holding a butterfly and hourglass was the Pre-Raphaelite version of
the double portrait of Dali and Gala immediately behind it. True to his
principle of taking no interest in politics, Dali viewed the civil war
that was tormenting his country merely as a delirium of edibles. He
observed it as an entomologist might observe ants or grasshoppers. To him
it was natural history; to Picasso, by contrast, it was political reality.
What Guernica was for Picasso, The Burning Giraffe and
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans - Premonition of Civil
War were for Dali. Dali was not interested in the war
as such. His only interest was in the premonitions recorded in his
paintings: "Six months food come to
seem compulsive - "which shows a huge human body, all arms and legs
deliriously squeezing each other." Cooking is always associated with
smells. In the Secret Life Dali wrote eloquently of smells: "From
all parts of martyred Spain rose a smell of incense, of chasubles, of
burned curates' fat and of quartered spiritual flesh, which mingled with
the smell of hair dripping with the sweat of promiscuity from that other
flesh, concupiscent and as paroxysmally quartered, of the mobs fornicating
among themselves and with death."
|
|
|
|
Spain
1938
|
|
|
Study for "Spain"
1936
|
|
|
The Invention of the Monsters
1937
|
|
|
Creation of the Monsters
1937
|
|
|
The Burning Giraffe
1937
|
|
|
Burning Giraffe
1937
|
|
|
The Woman in Flames
1937
|
|
|
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans - Premonition of Civil War
1936
|
|
|
Study for "Premonition of
Civil War"
1935
|
Study for "Premonition
of Civil War"
1935
|
Study for "Premonition
of Civil War"
1935
|
|
|
|
Autumn Cannibalism
1936
|
|
|
Cannibalism of the Objects
1937
|
|
|
Drawers Cannibalism (Composition with Drawers)
1937
|
|
|
Untitled - Hysterical Scene
1937
|
|
|
The Hysterical Arch
1937
|
|
|
But in respect of his political stance,
Dali did concede: "I was definitely not a historic man. On the contrary, I
felt myself essentially anti-historic and apolitical. Either I was too
much ahead of my time or much too far behind, but never contemporaneous
with ping-pong-playing men." Dali wrote: "The Spanish Civil War changed
none of my ideas. On the contrary, it endowed their evolution with a
decisive rigor. Horror and aversion for every kind of revolution assumed
in me an almost pathological form. Nor did I want to be called a
reactionary. This I was not: I did not 'react' -
which is an attribute of unthinking matter. For I simply continued to
think, and I did not want to be called anything but Dali. But already the
hyena of public opinion 'was slinking around me, demanding of me with the
drooling menace of its expectant teeth that I make up my mind at last,
that I become Stalinist or Hitlerite. No! No! No! and a thousand times no!
I was going to continue to be as always and until I died, Dalinian and
only Dalinian! I believed neither in the communist revolution nor in the
national-socialist revolution, nor i n any other kind of revolution. I
believed only in the supreme reality of tradition [...] If revolutions are
interesting it is solely because in revolutionizing they disinter and
recover fragments of the tradition that was believed dead because it had
been forgotten, and that needed simply the spasm of revolutionary
convulsions to make them emerge, so that they might live anew. And through
the revolution of the Spanish Civil War there was going to be rediscovered
nothing less than the authentic Catholic tradition peculiar to Spam [...]
All — atheists, believers, saints,
criminals, grave-openers and grave-diggers, executioners and martyrs - all
fought with the unique courage and pride of the crusaders of faith. For
all were Spaniards."
|
|
|
Perspectives
1937 |
|
|
Average Pagan Landscape
1937 |
|
|
Knights of Death
1937
|
|
|
His friend Garcia Lorca was shot in his hometown of
Granada which was under occupation by Franco's forces. ("This was ignoble,
for they knew as well as I that Lorca was by essence the most apolitical
person on earth. Lorca did not die as a symbol of one or another political
ideology, he died as the propitiatory victim of that total and integral
phenomenon that was the revolutionary confusion.") Meanwhile, Dali was
studying the Renaissance. He planned to be the first advocate of the
Renaissance after the war. "The disasters of war and revolution in which
my country was plunged only intensified the wholly initial violence of my
aesthetic passion, and while my country was interrogating death and
destruction, I was interrogating that other sphinx, of the imminent
European 'becoming', that of the Renaissance." His attitude was
interpreted as typical Dali: superficial and frivolous. In fact, when
anarchists shot three of his Port Lligat fisherman friends, Dali wondered:
"Would I finally have to make up my mind to return to Spain, and share the
fate of those who were close to me?" It has to be admitted that, once he
had slept on the question, Dali decided that he wouldn't have to
return.
|
|
|
Narcissus and the Bulb
The Metamorphosis of Narcissus was Dali's first painting to be done
entirely in accordance with the paranoiac-critical method. Breton, in
What is Surrealism?, paid tribute to Dali's method, seeing it as an
instrument of the first importance, capable of use in painting, poetry,
film, the making of Surrealist artefacts, fashion, sculpture, art history,
and indeed any form of interpretation.
The painting meant a great deal to Dali. He observed
that if one gazed at the figure of Narcissus for some time, at a slight
distance, he gradually disappeared; and at that moment the metamorphosis
of the myth occurred. Suddenly, Narcissus was a hand, rising out of his
own reflection. That hand was holding in its fingertips the egg, seed or
bulb from which the new narcissus (or: the daffodil) would be born. Beside
it was a stone sculpture of a hand holding a narcissus sprouted and in
flower. To Dali's way of thinking, the painting represented the first
occasion on which a Surrealist work had offered a consistent
interpretation of an irrational subject. The paranoiac-critical method was
setting out to establish an indestructible assembly of exact details such
as Stendhal demanded if an account were to be given of the architecture of
St. Peter's in Rome (Dali's analogy).
|
|
Metamorphosis of Narcissus
1937
|
|
|
Study for "The Metamorphosis of Narcissus"
1937
|
|
Swans Reflecting Elephants
1937
|
|
|
The lyrical quality of poetic images is only of
philosophical significance if they aspire to the same precision as
mathematics, according to Dali. Poets are as obliged to supply proof as
scientists. In the case of Narcissus, a Cataloman saying is apt: if
someone is said to have a bulb in the head, it is the equivalent of having
a complex in the language of psychoanalysis - and a bulb, of course, can
produce a flower. At this point in Dali's commentary on The
Metamorphosis of Narcissus he waxed lyrical, addressing Narcissus
directly: "Do you understand, Narcissus? Symmetry, that divine hypnosis of
the spirit, is already filling your head with the incurable, atavistic,
slow sleep of plants, drying out the leathery kernel of your imminent
metamorphosis in your brain. The seed that was in your head has fallen
into the water. Man becomes plant once more, through the heavy sleep of
exhaustion, and the gods through the transparent hypnosis of their
passions. Narcissus, you are so motionless one might think you asleep. If
you were the rough, dark Hercules, one would say: he is sleeping like a
log, like a Herculean oak. But you, Narcissus, who are made of the shy
perfumed essences of transparent youth, are sleeping like a waterflower.
Now, as the great mystery approaches and the metamorphosis is shortly to
be accomplished, Narcissus, motionless, as slow of digestion as
carnivorous plants, is becoming invisible. Only the hallcinatory oval of
his white head remains, his head grown more tender, his chrysalis head
full of biological intent, his head held on fingertips above the water, by
the fingertips of a senseless, terrible hand, the shit-eating hand, the
deadly hand of his own reflection. When that head splits, when that head
is fissured, when that head breaks open, the flower will be there,
Narcissus, Gala - my Narcissus."
|
|
|
Palladio's Thalia Corridor
1937
|
|
Palladio's Corridor of Dramatic Surprise
1938
|
|
|
Study for "The False Inspection" (False Perspective)
1937
|
|
|
One day a young psychiatrist phoned Dali,
wanting to discuss an article Dali had contributed to Minotaure on
the phenomenon of paranoia. The young man was
Jacques Lacan. "We were surprised to discover that our views were equally
opposed, and for the same reasons, to the constitutionalist theories then
almost unanimously accepted." Both names, Lacan's and Dali's, have become
inseparable from the history of enquiry into paranoia: the artist's
through his paranoiac-critical method, the psychiatrist's initially
through the brilliant doctoral thesis that made him famous in October
1932. As Patrice Schmitt has observed: "Paranoia, in Dali's understanding,
is the very opposite of hallucination. It is an active method. It implies
critique. It has exact meanings and a phenomenological dimension. Within
the Surrealist movement, it stood opposed to automatism. Automatism was
practised in automatic writing and games of consequences, to which Dali
had introduced the Surrealists [...] Lacan, for his part, opposed
automatism in his thesis, since it transposed paranoiac interpretation
into an organic response; instead, he favoured phenomenological meaning.
If we compare the two approaches, we see that for Lacan the interpretative
moment is already an act of hallucination, but in fact that equivalence of
hallucination and interpretation is the very essence of the phenomenon.
For both Dali and Lacan, paranoia is pseudo-hallucinatory: this is their
first link. [...] Dali's dual-image pictures are the clearest
demonstration that delirium and interpretation are one and the same. In
the dual image, the clear distinctions of classicism come to seem
superannuated and incomprehensible, since delirium and interpretation are
simultaneous moments of the same type." Be that as it may, when Dali
described his meeting with the young Lacan in the
Secret Life what troubled him most was the fact that throughout their
interview, as he afterwards realized, he had had a square of white paper
sticking to the tip of his nose.
|
|
|
When Picasso sent Dali a
postcard showing a number of blacks, Dali saw that, considered a certain
way, it could be viewed as a face, and promptly took the card as his
starting point for the Paranoiac Visage. It would
be false, in this example, to distinguish between two moments: the wrong
interpretation of the card, and then a
rational delirium following. Rather, the two aspects of the process are of
identical, simultaneous importance. This was the point Dali and Lacan were
in agreement on.
|
|
The Rock at Caoe Creus known at the sleeping rock.
Geology sleeps without cease, 1937
|
Of Sleep, on one level an almost
exact painting of a rock at Cadaques, Dali wrote in the tenth issue of
Minotaure (winter 1937): "Thanks to the glorious paranoiac-critical
method we are obtaining ever more new, exact details. Sleep is a truly
monstrous chrysalis, its morphology and nostalgia propped on eleven
crutches, each of which is also a chrysalis and should be examined
separately. " Dali alluded to Michelangelo's spiral of sleep, and declared
that Gaudi had been right on this matter as on so many others. In the
Secret Life he also reportedthat he had often imagined sleep as a
huge, heavy head with a long, thin body balanced on the crutches of
reality. If ever those crutches break, wrote Dali, we feel we are falling:
it is the familiar sense of tumbling into vast vacancy at that moment when
sleep overcomes us. And when we suddenly awaken, he added, we may not
necessarily always realize that we are reliving the feeling of expulsion
that so traumatized us at birth.
|
|
|
Sleep
1937
|
