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‘I want you to kill me!’ [she replied].
Fortunately, Dalí refrained from carrying out such a macabre request. The story may indicate the calculated side of Gala’s personality, for it is hard to take her demand seriously – obviously she was just trying to match Dalí in eccentricity. Right after their relationship began Dalí’s hysteria disappeared, which demonstrates its psycho-sexual origin, and his lovemaking with Gala was probably the first sexual relationship he had ever had with a woman (as his unfamiliarity with deep kissing attests). It may also have been his last, for thereafter the painter appears to have preferred masturbation to sexual intercourse with his wife. As a child he had come across a medical textbook illustrating the clinical effects of venereal diseases, and this appears to have put him off having direct sexual relations for life, although he did sample such contacts on occasion. But in time Gala would easily find numerous substitute men with whom to satisfy her healthy libido.
Dalí remained convinced ever afterwards that Gala had saved him from outright madness that summer. Following her return to Paris in late September 1929 he threw himself further into his work in preparation for the Paris exhibition. He produced some of his finest masterworks that autumn, pictures such as a portrait of Paul Éluard, which Dalí freely admitted was a means of salving his conscience over his affair with the poet’s wife; The Enigma of Desire, in which the painter dealt with his relationship with his mother; and The Great Masturbator, a work that he called ‘the expression of my heterosexual anxiety’. The show itself, held in the Camille Goemans Gallery between November and December, included eleven paintings and was a great success, finally consolidating Dalí’s reputation with both the critics and the public. Breton wrote an introductory essay for the catalogue (although even then he harboured doubts about whether Dalí would fulfil his promise as a Surrealist artist), and that put the seal upon the painter’s acceptance by the Surrealist movement, with which he had aligned himself fully on the earlier visit to Paris that spring. The exhibition was a sell-out, and Breton bought a painting (Accommodations of Desire), as did a leading collector, the Vicomte de Noialles, who hung his acquisition (The Lugubrious Game) between pictures by Cranach and Watteau. Yet although the show was a success, Camille Goemans was deeply in debt and he was unable to pay Dalí what he owed him from the sale of his pictures. The Vicomte de Noialles thereupon stepped in and advanced 29,000 francs for another painting. With the money Dalí bought himself a fisherman’s cottage in Port Lligat, near Cadaqués, in March 1930.
Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skin of an Orchestra, 1936.
Oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm.
Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida.
Night and Day Clothes of the Body, 1936.
Gouache on paper, 30 × 40 cm.
Private collection.
In addition to buying pictures, the Vicomte de Noialles was to be important to Dalí in other ways. Subsequently he introduced Dalí to his next Parisian dealer, Pierre Colle, and he gave Buñuel and Dalí the money to make a further film, although Dalí was far less happy with Buñuel’s efforts this time round. The film, L’Age d’or, was even more violent and subversive than its predecessor, but Buñuel fashioned it into a specific attack upon clericalism, a narrowing of meaning that led Dalí to feel betrayed by his collaborator. Shortly after the premiere of L’Age d’or in 1930, right-wing thugs smashed up the cinema in which it was being shown and destroyed works of art that were hanging in the foyer, including a painting by Dalí.
Singularities, 1937.
Oil on canvas, 165 × 195 cm.
Estrada Museum, Barcelona.
After returning to Paris in 1929, Gala Éluard briefly returned to her husband. However, by the following year she had moved in with Dalí. The painter’s father took a very dim view of his son’s liaison with a married woman and mother who was, moreover, almost ten years older than his son. Additionally, Dalí senior was enraged by a print made by his son which depicted the Sacred Heart and bore the legend ‘Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of my Mother’. Understandably, Dalí’s father interpreted this as a gross insult to his dead wife. The ensuing rows culminated in Dalí senior disowning his son completely. Soon afterwards Dalí began using the story of William Tell’s shooting of an apple from his son’s head as a means of dealing with his strained love-hate relationship with his own father (see the William Tell of 1930, The Old Age of William Tell of 1931, and The Enigma of William Tell of 1933). In such comparatively direct treatments of the painter’s most deep-seated anxieties and preoccupations it is possible to detect a newfound psychological focusing of his art.
Dalí had long been familiar with the writings of Sigmund Freud, having read The Interpretation of Dreams when still a student in Madrid. The book made a profound impression on him, for as he recorded:
This book presented itself to me as one of the capital discoveries in my life, and I was seized with a real vice of – self-interpretation, not only of my dreams but of everything that happened to me, however accidental it might seem at first glance.
Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone, 1938.
Oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm.
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.
By the end of the 1920s Dalí had also read Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, with its exploration of sado-masochistic tendencies. Such writings were to prove fruitful for the painter not as subjects to be directly illustrated but as means of exploring his own fantasies pictorially. Within such a process the association of ideas and images became central, even if Dalí purposely employed those associations in a loose way so as not to imply specific meanings (it is the very ambiguity of meaning in his works that gives them their unusual imaginative potency). Moreover, in 1930 Dalí also began to build upon his immensely imaginative propensity for associating images through visual simile, the acute likeness that can exist between very different types of objects. Visual punning, whereby one thing stands for another, was also a favourite associative tool for an artist who could equally create images by bringing together objects that collectively constitute a very different kind of form. Then there are his double or treble images. Thus in the Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach of 1938, we can see numerous visual similes, as well as composite imaging, whereby different components serve to make up a head of Lorca and of an ‘Andalusian dog’, while in Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire of 1940 we can perceive in the centre either two people dressed in antique costumes or a bust of Voltaire – the image switches from one to another when we gaze hard.
According to Dalí himself, this faculty for perceiving dual or more images within a single image derived from his schooldays; as he stated in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí:
The great vaulted ceiling which sheltered the four sordid walls of the class was discoloured by large brown moisture stains, whose irregular contours for some time constituted my whole consolation. In the course of my interminable and exhausting reveries, my eyes would untiringly follow the vague irregularities of these mouldy silhouettes and I saw rising from this chaos, which was as formless as clouds, progressively concrete images which by degrees became endowed with an increasingly precise, detailed and realistic personality.
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