The Life and Masterworks of Salvador Dalí. Eric Shanes

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      Dalí’s father was shattered by the expulsion, which closed an official career in Spain to his son, although he grudgingly allowed the younger Salvador to return once again to Figueres where the boy embarked on his plan to ‘work for a year’. A show of the results was held at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona at the very end of 1926 when twenty paintings displayed an even wider range of styles than had been apparent in the works exhibited in the previous show. Once again Dalí was a huge success, with his pictures drawing a largely enthusiastic response from the press. But in his long-term planning to ‘work for a year’, Dalí had forgotten to take into account the Spanish army, and from February 1927 he had to spend nine months performing his compulsory military service, although the duties do not appear to have been too irksome. During that time Dalí managed to finish only a few pictures, but he did design the sets and costumes for the premiére of Lorca’s Mariana Pineda which opened in Barcelona on 24 June, and he also contributed drawings, poetry and prose to the highly esteemed Sitges journal L’Amic de les Arts. Amongst the prose pieces was his ‘Saint Sebastian’, in which Dalí alluded frequently to Lorca, who that summer again stayed with the painter at Cadaqués.

      Dalí’s professional contact with Lorca continued the following year when the painter contributed to a newly-founded journal entitled Gallo that was published in Lorca’s hometown of Granada in Andalucia, a review in which Lorca also took an active interest. In the second issue of Gallo in April 1928 Dalí republished an attack on Catalan cultural complacency and anti-modernism that he had co-authored with the writers Lluis Montanyà and Sebastià Gasch. This was the Catalan Anti-Artistic Manifesto or ‘Yellow Manifesto’ that had first been published in Barcelona the previous month. In tone the essay resembles the manifestos published over a decade earlier by the Italian Futurist poet, Marinetti, for it similarly praises the machine-age and attacks anti-modernist provincialism. Later that year Dalí published a further, similar feuilleton in which he again renounced Spanish provincialism and regionalism, in favour of modernity and the new.

      In the autumn of 1927 Dalí had written to Lorca:

      The works in question are pictures in which Dalí had begun wholeheartedly to explore Surrealism. Dalí’s engagement with Surrealist ideas had grown apace as he kept in touch with the latest developments in Paris through reading the journal of the French surrealists, La Révolution surréaliste, and other, similar literature. In Surrealism he sensed a form of thinking that would finally liberate his true self.

      Surrealism had evolved out of an earlier artistic grouping, known as Dada, which had been founded in Zurich in 1916 by the Romanian poet, Tristan Tzara, and by the German writer, Hugo Ball. Physically isolated in Switzerland by the Great War, and intellectually alienated by the assault on reason epitomised by that conflict, the Zurich Dadaists had turned their backs on rationalism altogether. Although Tzara re-established Dada in Paris after 1919, Dadaism soon lost impetus there, for it was essentially a nihilistic response to the world, preaching the destruction of all reason and rational communication. Surrealism, however, represented something more positive, for it wanted actively to liberate the subconscious into articulating responses to the world that were more direct than the ones created by rational thought. To this end, from the early 1920s onwards a group of leading artists, poets and intellectuals in Paris, led by André Breton, set out to explore the vast realms of thought and response that lay behind the irrational, which they held to be a more truthful mirror to reality than rationalism.

      By the late 1920s knowledge of Surrealism was widespread in Spanish intellectual circles, and of course awareness of the work of Spanish Surrealist painters living in Paris such as Joan Miró (and Picasso, who was also somewhat influenced by Surrealism at this time) contributed greatly to that growth of interest. Thus several articles on Miró appeared in 1927–1928 in L’Amic de les Arts, and throughout 1927 and 1928 Dalí worked through Miró’s influence, as well as that of other Surrealist painters and sculptors such as Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Masson and Jean Arp, in addition to that of proto-Surrealist artists like Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra. (Masson’s influence can especially be detected in The Spectral Cow.) In 1927 Dalí even experimented with automatic drawing, in which the conscious mind played no part whatsoever other than beginning and ending a seemingly random process of mark-making. Not until the American painter Jackson Pollock would explore automatic process as an end in itself a decade and a half later would this major strand in Surrealism receive fulfilment, but for Dalí in the late 1920s such a direct means of articulating the irrational proved unsatisfactory. Instead, he gradually moved towards forging a new union between the normal appearances of things and unreality. In this respect the influence of Tanguy, Ernst and de Chirico proved to be of seminal importance.

      A particular feature of the imagery of these three artists is the degree to which they married realistic landscape settings and rational space – the traditional, perspective-based space encountered in Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting – with strange and unreal objects placed in those lifelike surroundings. Usually Tanguy created a kind of vague, desert-like landscape in which to locate his weird, polymorphic creatures and objects, while de Chirico created semi-deserted cityscapes as, occasionally, did Ernst. Dalí took over the rational use of space and the realism to be found in the works of these three artists, and he also assimilated the polymorphic forms of Tanguy in the paintings he made after 1927. Subsequently it did not take much imagination for him to move on from the desert-like landscape backgrounds that Tanguy had commonly used, to the fantastic geological formations, vast spaces and limitless skies of his native Catalunya, and particularly those of the vast Empurdán plain around Figueres he had known since childhood. By employing such backgrounds Dalí was greatly helped in dealing with his own experiences. In time this employment of landscape would become one of the major strengths of his art, contributing greatly to the sense of disturbing unreality in his pictures and making him arguably the foremost landscape painter of the twentieth century.

      In the winter of 1928 Dalí also began working in another important creative sphere: film. A year earlier he had written an essay on the subject entitled ‘Film-Art, Anti-Artistic Thread’ which he had dedicated to his old friend from the Madrid Residencia, Luis Buñuel, who by that time was working in the Paris film industry. In the essay, Dalí extolled the freedom of visual imagery and movement enjoyed by film and deprecated the way that the medium was usually employed simply to recount a straightforward narrative, instead of cutting across normal meanings and timescales. Moreover, Dalí equally rejected the way that modernist artists who had experimented with cinema, such as Man Ray and Fernand Léger, had employed abstractive cinematic imagery in their films. For Dalí the power of film lay in its potential to marry ordinary objects and surroundings with non-rational dramatic situations, in order to create a new dimension of meaning and open up hitherto unexplored ways of apprehending reality.

      Dalí soon got the chance to turn theory into practice, for during the winter of 1928 Buñuel visited him in Figueres to show him the outline for a movie. Dalí instantly rejected this script as being too conventional, and in the following week he and Buñuel wrote a new scenario together. As Buñuel later recalled: