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Art of the 20th Century
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Paths to Immortality
1962-1989
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Portrait of Gala (Gala Against the Light)
1965
Crucifixion (Dedication: For
Gala Queen of the Divine Dali)
1965
Gala considered Dali as Leda considered the swan. The swan was spermatozoic. The divine egg of Pollux and Helen, twins from a single egg, is already present in the belly of the swan (Leda and the Swan). In The Railway Station at Perpignan, we have a transposed image of Gala and Dali, in which figures from Millet's Angelus (again) are arrested in atavistic attitudes, in front of a sky that is suddenly transformed into a gigantic Maltese cross. At the railway station at Perpignan, which is similar in structure to the universe, again, Dali was painting the saga of Gala and Dali, a thing of light and ecstasy and ejaculation.
The Railway Station at
Perpignan
1965
Homage to Millet
1965
The Art of the Pompiers Quantified: Homage to Meissonier
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Tuna Fishing
1967
Study for "Tuna Fishing"
1966-67
The Progress of "Tuna Fishing"
1966-67
The Progress of "Tuna Fishing"
1966-67
The Progress of "Tuna Fishing"
1966-67
The Progress of "Tuna Fishing"
1966-67
 Study for "Tuna Fishing" 1966-67 |
 Study for "Tuna Fishing" 1966-67 |
 Large Figure for "Tuna Fishing" 1966-67 |
 Large Figure for "Tuna Fishing" 1966-67 |
After Pop art and Op art, Dali was doing his personal version of the Pompiers. His invitation to the show announced that Dali would be offering tuition in drawing and composition, from models, and demonstrating the truth of the great master Ingres' maxim that draughtsmanship was the most honest aspect of art. Dali needed two whole summers (1966 and 1967) to paint Tuna Fishing, a work full of dionysian figures. The picture was a kind of testament, the fruit of forty years of devoted searching for means of visual expression. In it, Dali combined all the styles he had worked in: Surrealism, "refined Pompierism", pointillism, action painting, tachism, geometrical abstraction, Pop art, Op art and psychedelic art. The painting has proved as significant as his 1931 soft watch masterpiece, The Persistence of Memory. Dali himself offered this account of it: "It is the most ambitious picture I have ever painted, because its subtitle is Hommage a Meissonier. It is a revival of representational art, which was underestimated by everyone except the Surrealists throughout the period of so-called 'avant-garde' art. It was my father who told me of the epic subject. Though he was a notary in Figueras, Catalonia, he had a talent for story-telling that would have been worthy of a Homer. He also showed me a print he had in his office by a Swiss artist - one of the Pompiers — showing a tuna catch; that picture also helped me create this painting. What finally made me decide to take the subject, which had been tempting me my whole life long, was my reading of Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the universe and cosmos are finite - which the latest scientific discoveries have confirmed. It then became clear to me that it was that finite quality, the contractions and frontiers of the cosmos and universe, that made energy possible in the first place. The protons, antiprotons, photons, pi-mesons, neutrons, all the elementary particles have their miraculous, hyper-aesthetic energy solely because of the frontiers and contraction of the universe. In a way, this liberates us from the terrible Pascalian fear that living beings are of no importance compared with the cosmos; and it leads us to the idea that the entire cosmos and universe meet at a certain point - which, in this case, is the tuna catch. Hence the alarming energy in the painting! Because all those fish, all those tuna, and all the people busy killing them, are personifications of the finite universe - that is to say, all the components of the picture (since the Dali cosmos is restricted to the circumscribed area of the tuna catch) achieve a maximum of hyper-aesthetic energy in it. Thus Tuna Fishing is a biological spectacle par excellence, since (following my father's description) the sea, which is initially cobalt blue and by the end is totally red with blood, represents the super-aesthetic power of modern biology. Every birth is preceded by the miraculous spurting of blood, 'honey is sweeter than blood', blood is sweeter than blood. Currently America has the privilege of blood, because America has the honour of having the Nobel Prize winner Watson who was the first to discover the molecular structure of desoxyribonucleic acid which, together with the atom bomb, constitutes the essential guarantee of future survival and hibernation for Dali. "
