The Life and Masterworks of Salvador Dalí. Eric Shanes

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СКАЧАТЬ I succeeded in recovering each of the images which I had seen the day before and I would then continue to perfect my hallucinatory work; when, by dint of habit, one of the discovered images became too familiar, it would gradually lose its emotive interest and would instantaneously become metamorphosed into ‘something else’, so that the same formal pretext would lend itself just as readily to being interpreted successively by the most diverse and contradictory configurations, and this would go on to infinity.

      The astonishing thing about this phenomenon (which was to become the keystone of my future aesthetic) was that, having once seen one of these images, I could always thereafter see it again at the mere dictate of my will, and not only in its original form but almost always further corrected and augmented in such a manner that its improvement was instantaneous and automatic.

      In time such an ability was augmented by other experiences, such as the discovery of a postcard view of an African village which, when looked at sideways, resembled the face of Picasso (in 1935 Dalí would turn that image into a painting that was later sadly destroyed). Undoubtedly a major influence upon Dalí as the creator of composite images was Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593), an Italian painter of fantastic human heads made out of pieces of meat, fish, fruit, vegetables and other foods, flowers, cereals and the like. Eventually Dalí’s employment of visual simile, punning, composite, double and multiple imaging would become one of the mainstays of his art, but it was certainly not based on anything as passive as dreaming. Dalí may occasionally have used dreams as the starting points for pictures, but more usually it was his highly developed and profoundly imaginative wakeful ‘inner-eye’ that provided him with his imagery. Such an ability to connect the appearances of things would prove integral to the ‘Paranoid-Critical Method’ that Dalí began to evolve after about 1930, whereby associationism, when taken to an extreme, could generate wildly imaginative and hallucinatory (or ‘paranoid’) states of mind.

      In June 1931 Pierre Colle gave Dalí his second Paris exhibition and introduced the painter to a New York dealer, Julien Levy, who in 1933 would mount his first one-man show in America. The 1931 Pierre Colle Gallery exhibition comprised twenty-one works, including the painting that would undoubtedly become Dalí’s most popular picture, The Persistence of Memory (which Colle later sold to Levy at the trade price of $250). The latter work was again exhibited in a group show of Surrealist paintings, drawings and photographs held early in 1932 by Levy in New York, and on that occasion it was bought by the New York Museum of Modern Art in a particularly shrewd and far-sighted piece of collecting.

      By 1932 Dalí was busier than ever. His customary method of work was to paint with the aid of a brilliant artificial light and a jeweller’s magnifying glass placed in one eye. A good number of the canvases produced at this time are extremely small – for example The Persistence of Memory is only 24.1 × 33 cm – which allowed the painter to work over much of the image with the finest of sable brushes, while the canvas itself has a very minute tooth so as to allow the creation of a high degree of detail without the brushmarks breaking up. And Dalí was not only creating fine paintings at this time. In 1933 he made perhaps his best set of etchings, namely the designs to illustrate a new edition of Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, which was commissioned by the Swiss publisher, Albert Skira. Moreover, during the early ’30s Dalí also began creating objects, such as those he displayed in a group Exhibition of Surrealist Objects held in 1933 at the Pierre Colle Gallery. It was very easy for him to do so, for in his paintings he had been creating for some years highly realistic spaces that he then filled with imaginatve constructs, such as the form that combines a woman, two men, a lion and a locust in The Enigma of Desire: My Mother, My Mother, My Mother of 1929. From creating such constructs in two dimensions it was a very short step to make them in three.

      Dalí’s first Surrealist objects had been elaborated in answer to a loss of direction felt by the Surrealists in 1929, when André Breton had instituted a commission that could propose new paths for the movement to follow; the advisory group comprised just Dalí and a young Marxist critic. Dalí had suggested the creation of Surrealist objects, and his idea was quickly taken up enthusiastically by other members of the Surrealist movement. Throughout the 1930s Dalí himself made a great number of objects, perhaps the most famous being his sofa in the Form of Mae West’s lips and his Lobster-Telephone. The piece of furniture evolved as the natural offshoot of one of Dalí’s most witty dual-image composites, the Face of Mae West (Useable as a Surrealist Apartment) of 1934–1935. Here the painter’s inventiveness in creating visual puns reached new heights of genius.

      In January 1933 another wealthy patron of the arts, the Prince Jean Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, was induced by Gala to persuade eleven other rich collectors (including the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noialles and an artistically-inclined, wealthy American widow, Caresse Crosby) to form a syndicate to support Dalí financially. The association was known as the ‘Zodiac’ group, and each of its members undertook to contribute the sum of 2500 francs annually in exchange for the right to choose a large painting or a smaller picture and two drawings. The month in which the choices were to be made was to be decided by lots drawn at a pre-Christmas dinner. This syndicate stayed in existence until Dalí fled to America in 1940.

      In 1932 Gala divorced Paul Éluard, and at the end of January 1934 Dalí married her in a civil ceremony in Paris, with her ex-husband as one of the witnesses. This was a frantically busy year for the painter, for in it he held no fewer than six one-man shows: two in Paris, two in New York (one of them solely of the Chants de Maldoror etchings), one in London and one in Barcelona. Just before the Barcelona exhibition opened in October, Dalí travelled to Figueres and sought forgiveness from his father, which was finally forthcoming after the painter’s uncle had pleaded on his behalf. Soon afterwards a political uprising in Barcelona forced the panic-stricken Dalí and Gala to make a headlong flight back to France by car (their driver was killed by a stray bullet on his return journey to Barcelona). This taste of the unsettled state of Spanish politics shook the very unworldly painter considerably and it profoundly coloured his attitude to later political events in Spain.

      Honey is Sweeter than Blood, 1941.

      Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 60 cm.

      Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California.

      Poetry of America, the Cosmic Athletes, 1943.

      Oil on canvas, 116.8 × 78.7 cm.

      Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres.

      In November 1934 the Dalís sailed for the United States, where they stayed until mid-January. The first showing of Dalí’s work in America had taken place in 1931, at a group exhibition held at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and his first one-man display there had followed at Julien Levy’s gallery in the autumn of 1933. For Dalí’s second one-man exhibition in New York in 1934, the painter overcame his fears of travel. The trip to America was assisted financially by Picasso who had continued to take an interest in his unusually talented compatriot (whom he once described wittily as ‘an outboard motor continually running’). Dalí’s characteristic social ineptitude surfaced on this journey, for on the train out of Paris he sat surrounded by all his canvases with strings connecting them to himself lest they be stolen en route, and with his back to the engine so as to arrive sooner at his destination. On board ship Dalí wore a lifejacket continuously, although he was also balanced enough to prepare for his disembarkation in New York in a suitably eccentric manner by getting the ship’s baker to prepare a bread loaf over two metres long with which to face reporters, who untypically ignored the unusual object. But apart from that initial setback, Dalí found in America an ideal homeland for his exhibitionism, and at an ideal time. The Great Depression was in full swing by 1934, but of course it barely touched the rich who sought ever more elaborate ways of spending their money and more inventive diversions from the harsh realities around them. Despite his anti-bourgeois stance of some СКАЧАТЬ