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Art of the 20th Century
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The Mystical Manifesto
1946-1962
Painting with Arquebus and Nailbombs
At the same time as he produced the voluptuous nude of Mary Magdalene, Dali was working on a number of comparable pictures, and still questing for new techniques within a classical aesthetic repertoire. Among other things, he stuck real teeth and nails to his canvases. His most important works at this period included Hyperxiological Sky and the lost wax mould for a book binding using knives and forks, precious stones and choice pearls on a bronze ground, painted in leaf gold, intended for a single huge copy of The Apocalypse of St. John, done in 1960 by Joseph Foret. The cover was a bronze door weighing over two hundred kilograms and valued, at the time, at a million dollars. Dali saw the work as an apocalyptic upheaval, a blitz of lightning and fury, a creation - to accomplish which he first belaboured the wax plate supplied from Paris by Joseph Foret with an axe. Into the wax he introduced many and various objects, from honey cake (honey being meant as a spiritual image of the Old Testament) to golden needles in a blaze of rays about Christ. Above Christ Dali placed an agate as a symbol of purity, and at the very top, as if a kind of sun were crowning the ensemble, a shell with a small golden figurine at the tip, in a style reminiscent of 17th century French work. The knives and forks were a product of Dalinian logic: to Gala he explained that the Apocalypse could be eaten only when it had had time to mature, like a well-ripened cheese. The idea of eating, here as elsewhere in Dali, should doubtless be associated with the central importance of Communion in Christianity; we may also legitimately think of Revelation 10, 9: "And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey." Last but not least, Dali used nails - five hundred and eighty-five, corresponding (he announced) to Raimundus Lullus's five hundred and eighty-five categories of the soul. He shot nails into his etchings with an arquebus.
The Life of Mary Magdalene
1960
Hyperxiological Sky
1960
The Apocalypse of Saint John
1960
Christ. From "The Apocalypse of St. John"
1958-1960
Pieta. From "The Apocalypse of St. John"
1959
Cover of "The Apocalypse of St. John"
1958-61
In all his studies and apocalyptic explosions, Dali was concerned to use materials that seemed incompatibly opposed - nails, say, in a sky - and his experiments with polarities were invariably striking. He said that the Hyperxwlogical Sky was the first sky in history to be painted after a definition by his genius friend and fellow Cataloman, the least known of all philosophers, Francesco Pujols, according to whom the sky was a substance of colloidal origin. And the body of Mary Magdalene, too, was not a product of the artist's imagination but done from life models.
Woman Undressing
1959
Female Seated Nude
c. 1960
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I might not be able to shoot a bullet from an arquebus against paper, without tearing it, but I could shoot against a stone without breaking it. Persuaded by Foret, I wired to Paris to have an arquebus ready as soon as I arrived. My friend the painter Georges Mathieu presented me with a very precious fifteenth-century arquebus whose breech was inlaid with ivory. And on the 6th of November, 1956, surrounded by a hundred sheep sacrificed in a holocaust to the very first parchment copy, I fired, on board a barge on the Seme, the 'world's first lead bullet filled with lithographic ink. The shattered bullet opened the age of 'bulletism'. On the stone, a divine blotch appeared, a sort of angelic wing whose aerial details and dynamic strength surpassed all techniques ever employed before. In the week that followed I gave myself up to new and fantastic experiments. In Montmartre, before a delirious crowd, surrounded by eighty girls on the verge of ecstasy, I filled two hollowed-out rhinoceros horns with bread crumbs soaked in ink, and then calling upon the memory of my William Tell, I smashed them on the stone. The result was a miracle for which God should be thanked: the rhinoceros horns had drawn the two open arms of a windmill. Then a double miracle: when I received the first proofs a bad 'take' had left spots on them. I believed it my duty to incorporate and accentuate those spots in order to illustrate paranoiacally the whole electric mystery of the liturgy of this scene. Don Quixote encountered in the outside world the paranoiac giants he carried within himself. In the scene of the wine-skins, Dali recognised the hero's chimerical blood and the logarithmic curve that swells Minerva's forehead. Better still, Don Quixote, bemg a Spaniard and a realist, does not need an Aladdin's lamp. It is enough for him to take an acorn between his fingers, and the Golden Age is reborn.
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
1959
The Ecumenical Council
1960
The Trinity (Study for "The Ecumenical Council")
1960
Study for "The Ecumenical Council"
1960
As soon as I returned to New York, the television producers were fighting over my efforts at 'bulletism'. As for me, I slept all the time in order to find in my dreams the most effective and accurate way of firing my ink-filled bullets so as to arrange the holes mathematically. With armoury specialists from the New York Military Academy, I woke every morning to the sound of arquebus shots. Each explosion gave birth to a complete lithograph which I only had to sign for collectors to tear it from my hands at fabulous prices. Once again I perceived that I had been in advance of the ultimate scientific discoveries when I learned, three months after my first arquebus shot, that learned men used a gun and bullets like mine to try and discover the mysteries of creation.
In May of this year I was again in Port Lligat. Joseph Foret was waiting for me with the trunk of his car full of new stones. New blasts of the arquebus once more gave birth to Don Quixote. Overwhelmed by suffering, he was transfigured into an adolescent whose plaintive sadness did justice to his blood-crowned head. In a light worthy of Vermeer filtering through Hispano-Mauresque window niches, he read his tales of courtly love. With a tube of 'silly putty' like those that American children play with, I created spirals along which the lithographic ink ran: it was an angelic shape with a gilt fuzziness, the break of day. Don Quixote, paranoid microcosmos, merged into and then emerged from the Milky Way, which is nothing other than the path of Saint James.
Gala Nude From Behind Looking in an Invisible Mirror
1960
Leda's Swan
1959
Leda's Swan (Leda and the Swan)
1961
Saint James was watching over my work. He manifested himself on July the 25th, his name day, when, in the course of my experiments, I achieved an explosion that will remain forever glorious in the history of morphological science. It has been etched for eternity in one of the stones that Joseph Foret, with his saintly insistence, kept offering assiduously to the lightning strokes of my imagination. I took an empty Burgundy snail and filled it right up with lithographic ink. Next I slid it into the barrel of the arquebus and aimed at the stone at very close range. When I fired, a volume of liquid perfectly espousing the curve of the snail's spirals produced a splatter which after a long analysis I found to be increasingly divine, as if in fact there was nothing less than a state of 'pre-snailian galaxy' at the supreme moment of its creation. Saint James's Day will therefore go down in history as the day that witnessed the most categorical Dalinian victory over anthropomorphism.
The day following that blessed day, there was a storm and it rained tiny toads which were at once plunged into the ink and formed the pattern of Don Quixote's embroidered costume. These toads created the batrachian humidity opposed to the dazzling dryness of the high plains of Castile which reigned in the hero's head. Chimera of chimeras. Nothing was chimera any longer. Sancho appeared, while Don Quixote touched with his finger the dragons of Doctor Jung.
Today, when Joseph Foret has just laid on my table the very first copy, I can exclaim: 'Bravo Dali! You have illustrated Cervantes. Each of your explosions contains in truth a windmill and a giant. Your work is a bibliophilic giant, and it is the pinnacle of all the most fertile lithographic contradictions.'"
