Phillip OSullivan The Lugubrious Game The Writers and Artists writings about this painting in the career

of Salvador Dali and Surrealism Born May 11, 1904 Paradoxically we can see in Salvador Dalis art a Marquis de Sade Justine like emphasis on violence and depravity as a way of liberation and freedom for the imagination. A really dead imagination to Dali is one of convention lacking all surprise, innovation or shock-of-recognition: this type of conventional art is/was all around the art community even/then and now in Spain. Dalis young adult friend Frederico Garcia Lorca and he agreed and utilized imagery of decay and death in their drawings, poems and articles in order to emphasize this and shock the viewer or reader into seeing more sharply by these devices; opening their eyes by threatening the view of what they saw. Ending his period with the army in 1927Dali summered in Cadaques with Garcia Lorca. While there Dali wrote a poem titled Saint Sebastin, later published in LAmic de les Aris and the newspaper El Gallo. A drawing being subsequently produced. Around this time in a letter from 1926 he wrote out of the San Sebastia theme this single eye, suddenly enlarged, encompasses
a whole scene of the bottom and surface of an ocean in which all poetic suggestions navigate, and where all the plastic possibilities are stabilized (Finkelstein:30) The drawing has a pronounced encephalic aspect in a headless torso with a fish apparatus emerging from the featureless absence. It has no head.1 Arabic transparent typeface

As quoted in haim finkelstein art and writing 1927 1942 salvador vdali san sebastia letter this single eye, suddenly enlarged, encompasses a whole scene of the bottom and surface of an ocean in which all poetic suggestions navigate, and where all the plastic possibilities are stabilized page 30 finkelstein.1926 This headless/heedless aspect of Dalis art opens up Freudian possibilities free of moral censorship and
1

The well crafted poetic prose made an impact on the Catalan literati. Dali created a metaphor of the arrow-riddled saint discovering armour in his faith and the artist carefully letting his imageryripen, and Dali elaborated on his ideas about painting being more accurate than the reality of photography. This argues for the greater psychological effect possible in art. Dali is beginning in these Barcelona/Madrid years to probe into his characteristic paranoid critical method of painting. He had earlier adopted a foppish dandy personae for himself as we see first in self portrait with Raphealish Neck and in a self portrait drawing from 1922. (illustrate) These ideas of ant decay, death and rotting donkeys, the putrescent priests of convention (see also Batailles Lord Ausch writing.) is also prevalent in the extremely artistic Film En Chien Andalu (The Andalusian Dogs) co-created in 1928-9 together with Bunuel another of Dalis Madrid artschool friends, with whom he wrote the shooting script and contributed graphic ideas including the famous cloudsun/eye-cutting scene early in the film. These three visual artists, intelligent, sensitive and culturally aware, inhabited a kind of Madrid Art Academy and Barcellona artworld anti-art faction, they were against calm, ordered, sensible and sentimental art. They were aware of Picasso, Miro and the Paris artscene, collage and photography so much that cubism to them, was, in being the most recently established avant garde style, that it was this advanced art that had become dead, conventional, and must be overthrown for them to make their own mark. Even this modern art was putrid, rotting and had to be expunged by shocking devices and strategies. Despite their own moviemaking and wide open to all kinds of creative allowances. It is Bataille, whom he later meets in Paris, who is philosophically closer to Dali at this point, than the Surrealist leader Andre Breton later. Althought, realistically it is to Lorca whom he owes a closer contemporary creative partnership in Spain.

incorporation of photagraphic devices such as in their own collaging. Notwithstanding this appreciation and cooptation the necessity to kill the old rot was paramount. For this they armed themselves with de Sade, Freud and Surrealism. To create a valid Spanish surrealism required an opposite turgid sentimental realism to which their own extreme de Sade hyper-reality could be opposed. To name the name the name of their own other (for all is other to the other; another other-as it were, though not to be too precious or facetious about this obvious philosophical point) their opposite numbers were competitively close and almost allied in an overall artworld project. Yet sufficiently different from their own coalescing creative purpose as to function fully as other; another cultural stream that they could communicate with, understand and debate with. The instrument of that artistic debate was the abstraction builtinto cubism, futurism, impressionism and expressionism: all of them denying classic codes of realism, scientific psychology and narrative; all essential ingredients in the poems, films and drawings they were making. They were a kind of proto-surrealist group or para-Dada; working alongside a French anti-art movement from within Spain. Their chosen talisman image was that of violence, putrefaction, death, deacay and forbidden sexualities. Everything else was rotten and culturally in a state of decay. One image in particular would stand out amoung the Orphic encephalic torsos and knifelike vaginal/female toothed visions such as appears in Honey is Sweeter than Blood, the San Sebastian encephalic drawing and Apparatus with Hand. It is the image of the ant strewn corpse, the ants sucking blood juices from a rotting field donkey in the Catalan countryside; a scene both Lorca and Dali had frequently seen while out walking. This putrefaction of the rotting donkey kind appears to be a Dali expression also for what Clement Greenberg would call, in another context, Kitsch. Although, as one can easily imagine: each today could apply the term/s to the other. The vividness of this deadly talismanic device and its equally associated scandalous tropes (encephalic torsos, dead heads, explicit

Freudian sex organs, burning objects, random correlations, bodily distortions and erotic distortions generally) would eventually be the miniaturist tool to prise open the Parisian artworld to them. The minutiae of shock and perverse seductions, coprophilic excrement, overt shit and sabotaging fingerings (as uncovered here) would be his futureanti-art, anti-research (he failed art theory in the Madrid academy) approach to conquering the Paris art Gallery world. In the meantime Barcelona welcomed these newcomers, especially Dali in his new exhibitions at the druis Gallery

NOTES As quoted in haim finkelstein art and writing 1927 1942 salvador vdali san sebastia letter this single eye, suddenly enlarged,encompasses a whole scene of the bottom and surface of an ocean in which all poetic suggestions navigate, and where all the plastic possibilities are stabilized page 30 finkelstein.

1926 31finkelstein) how ironic then that greenberg may well have thought dalis art putrescent in both their senses. Art as the art of looking finlel 321926 circa Honey is sweeter than blood 1927 apparatus and hand 1927 s Lorcas exhibit of drawings 1927

lorca acting dead and his head appearing dead in dalis work sweeter b a putrefied donkey buzzing with small minute hands representing the beginning of spring 'poem' Gaceta Literaria 1927 soft and hard paradigm 'the sewing needles plunge into small nickels soft and sweet' 'poem of small things L'Amic de les Arts' 1927 totally anarchic ambiance' pg 42 finkelstein

masson ernst tanguy lorca miro picasso arp poetic autonomy ... of the image and of the imagination. the putrefied ass 1928 catalogue note for an arp exhibition by breton 'that canaries never sing sop well as when placed in the bottom of an aquarium' Oui 1 pg45 fellatio fingering coprophilia anal penetration shitting wounds death killing putrefaction rotting decay fear of homosexuality yet homoerotic imaginings. Fratricide encephalic headless heedless masturbation perversion copulation incest etc molestation absent sex frustration freudian lacan letting go inhibitions hysteria yet letting go devices for letting go. Paranoid critical method not 'letting go' no automatism

excrement blood blood tubes vessels spurting droplets/arrows what is repugnant/yet at bottom, desirable murder/violence violation terror fear desire fright sensitivity anal sadistic/masochist domanatrix gala the 'back' that disdains him so he gets back at the backrejecting femininity- by sabotaging imagery; anal fingering and the like. Coded camoflaged and disguised hidden. Enlarged hands signifying masturbation 57 finkelstein erotic provocations / incongruent with their surroundings ie coded/hidden layered with other more exposed exposures/ explicit overt depravity disguising misogyny (even from himself) or deliberate to be seen in future another day = fascism. Counter pose bretons love of women deflected love for more sympathetic too-close-to-home bataille bataille thus much more affinity with dalki asthetic and disguises codes and deeper meanings. A hidden love for women empowered by hatred given dutch courage out of fear of direct approach in opening stages of sufferagette age dihide to hide a secret perversion by a revealed one hidden layers of meaning dialectics of the soft and hard hidden and overt perversions to 1928 arps morphology beautiful yet e arly in march 1929 script of en chien andalou with bunuel '' boats vulva vagina uterus womb breasts soft forms dali publishes article oui1 105 'review of anti-artistic tendencies' march 1929 reviews peret french poems

review of lorcas poetry patina-artificial antique- equals caca or shit waste products of the past fink 67 dalis 'poetry of the mass manufactured' march 1928 Arte Nouveuuae Collage Freud Bataille Breton Dali other critics art historians,. Date Barcelona prior. More beautiful before and after/ more complex characteristic method later seminal and canononical History of Dada Surrewalism New York Dada Paris dada Magazines Breton Barcelona why surrealism there? Barcelona characteristics Paris reasons for step-up? Pressure of artscene Breton bataille contesting.

Who Breton Philosophy?Who bataille. Philosophy Batailles illustration Barcelona pictures plus other 'significant' examples

Prior to Paris 1929 stock market crash. Not so complex imagery collage, freud etc surrealism

Dal became intensely interested in film when he was young, going to the theatre most Sundays. He was part of the era where silent films were being viewed and drawing on the medium of film became popular. He believed there were two dimensions to the theories of film and cinema: "things

themselves", the facts that are presented in the world of the camera; and "photographic imagination", the way the camera shows the picture and how creative or imaginative it looks.[67] Dal was active in front of and behind the scenes in the film world. He created pieces of artwork such as Destino, on which he collaborated with Walt Disney. He is also credited as co-creator of Luis Buuel's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, a 17-minute French art film co-written with Luis Buuel that is widely remembered for its graphic opening scene simulating the slashing of a human eyeball with a razor. This film is what Dal is known for in the independent film world. Un Chien Andalou was Dal's way of creating his dreamlike qualities in the real world. Images would change and scenes would switch, leading the viewer in a completely different direction from the one they were previously viewing. The second film he produced with Buuel was entitled L'Age d'Or, and it was performed at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930. L'Age d'Or was "banned for years after fascist and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink bomb and inkthrowing riot in the Paris theater where it was shown."[68] Although negative aspects of society were being thrown into the life of Dal and obviously affecting the success of his artwork, it did not hold him back from expressing his own ideas and beliefs in his art. Both of these films, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, have had a tremendous impact on the independent surrealist film movement. "If Un Chien Andalou stands as the supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the unconscious, then L'ge d'Or is perhaps the most trenchant and implacable expression of its revolutionary intent."[69]

Dal also worked with other famous filmmakers, such as Alfred Hitchcock. The most well-known of his film projects is

probably the dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound, which heavily delves into themes of psychoanalysis. Hitchcock needed a dreamlike quality to his film, which dealt with the idea that a repressed experience can directly trigger a neurosis, and he knew that Dal's work would help create the atmosphere he wanted in his film. He also worked on a documentary called Chaos and Creation, which has a lot of artistic references thrown into it to help one see what Dal's vision of art really is. He also worked on the Disney short film production Destino. Completed in 2003 by Baker Bloodworth and Roy E. Disney, it contains dreamlike images of strange figures flying and walking about. It is based on Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez' song "Destino". When Disney hired Dal to help produce the film in 1946, they were not prepared for the work that lay ahead. For eight months, they continuously animated until their efforts had to come to a stop when they realized they were in financial trouble. They had no more money to finish the production of the animated film; however, it was eventually finished and shown in various film festivals. The film consists of Dal's artwork interacting with Disney's character animation. Dal completed only one other film in his lifetime, Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975), in which he narrated a story about an expedition in search of giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. The imagery was based on microscopic uric acid stains on the brass band of a ballpoint pen on which Dal had been urinating for several weeks.[70]

PLAN

Proposal Essay

Phillip OSullivan

Writing Around The Lugubrious Game (1929) By Salvador Dali The Essay Proposal is to examine the Painting 'The Lugubrious Game' By Salvador Dali at the time of its exhibition in Paris. Responses to the Painting will be looked at, particularly as in the writings and from the various standpoints, of Andre Breton, Salvador Dali and Bataille. At least half to two thirds of the essay will cover these aspects. Secondarily the surrounding context of surrealism and Marxism (a little) and Psychology, as in the work of Sigmund Freud will be examined in the light of Salvador Dali's espoused 'paranoid critical-analytical method'. Batailles diagram will be examined as in this light. Thirdly the writer will briefly offer his own analysis of the picture, based on the above and on examining later artworks and views arising out of Salvador Dalis career and pictorial development in so much as it throws hindsight-insights back into our combined understanding of the picture. With the belief, that the plain dispute between Breton and Bataille, has left some oversights and gaps for interpretation, free of that conflict. There is no necessary art historical need to accept either Batailles or Bretons views as final and all conclusive. The Essay however will substantially leave the 'received' interpretations from these sources intact and only seeks to sketch an exploration of other possibilities. The principle contention will be the observation of an overall 'back view of a woman figure' for its overall schema, where the most 'exploded' umbrella-hatted oval shape above right comprises the 'head', which we see as if 'inside'. This being consistent with Dalis later exploding quantum pictures and with the many 'back views' of women we see in Dalis oeuvre. Some other secondary possible interpretations will also be detailed in regard to these inner features, particularly in regard to Freudian 'oral' understandings; accepting, any lack, or pretence of expert knowledge. However for the essay, rudimentary research into Freuds concept of the oral phase will be outlined. Plainly the painting includes erotic references and notes on fellatio, cunnilingus, 'phallic' and vaginal symbols, masturbation as well as castration fears and images; in fact, possibly the whole sexual peccadillo machinery. The introductions and conclusion of the essay will briefly insert the picture into an art

historical narrative covering both the artists career and that of other surrealists, and within the longer history of weird and perplexing images pertaining to the art canon. ................................................................................................. NOTES Coversheet. Writers Bataille Breton Dali Others secondary Pictorial analysis.Bataille Dali myself 300 words Reviewers- historical context concept psychology paranoia method. surrealism dada exhibition automatism imagination Avida dollars he was to become incipient then? Gathered up in the backwash of Hindsight... Other works like it more clearly in later oeuvre ie exploded quantum mechanics view and rear end view/face turning away so typical of his work. Image coded quadrants Batailles schema. Discussed. Gridded Overlooked areas Egg room Atlas anatomy cerebrum Adolf hitler dildo anal Methods of seeing hologram mentally generated hologram Duchamp large glass. Distorting images morph Holbein. Anamorphic images slanted Holbein Ascobobli ? Brueghal? Heronimous Bosch.Leonardo Ernst De Chirico Carra etc. Weird fantasy history. Aubrey Beardsley. 3d bifocal image/ double images so painted areas do double or triple visionary duty. Secret images hidden imagery trick on public... how he fooled the public flirting with fraud. Scatological/erotic imagery Phillip Trusttrum sideways photographs. Squinted seeing. Overlapped optically Reversed inverted perverted images rotated Pictorial criminal treachery. madness Title Dismal Sport Lugubrious Game Sport with the viewer/critic other artists/ manufactured in full psychological knowledge in the studio an artwork of tricks. Inserted between two critics. ..................................................................................................... 300 words 263/563 658/ 400 words. 1311words -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------BIBLIOGRAPHY General Sources Moorehouse, Paul. Dali 2001 PRC Publishing London Bradbury, Kirsten. Essential Dali DemseyParr 1999 Bath. Klingsohr-Leroy, Cathrin. Surrealism Taschen 2005 Romero, Luis. DALI Chartweil Books Seacaucus 1975 Ades, Dawn. Dali Thames & Hudson 1982 London Naret, Giles. Dali Taschen 2004 Los Angeles. PRIMARY Source Finkelstein Haim Salvador Dali's Art and Writings 1927-1942: The Metaphoses of Narcissus Cambridge University Press 1996 Plus texts in Reader.

Salvador Dal

This is a Catalan name. The first family name is Dal and the second is Domnech. Salvador Dal

Salvador Dal photographed by Carl Van Vechten on November 29, 1939 Birth name Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dal i Domnech (1904-05-11) Figueres, Catalonia, Spain Died January 23, 1989(1989-01-23) (aged 84) Figueres, Catalonia, Spain Nationality Spanish Field Painting, Drawing, Photography, Sculpture, Writing, Film Training San Fernando School of Fine Arts, Madrid Movement Cubism, Dada, Surrealism Works The Persistence of Memory (1931) Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment, (1935) Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936) Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) Ballerina in a Death's Head (1939) Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944)

The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946) Galatea of the Spheres (1952) Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954)

Salvador Domnec Felip Jacint Dal i Domnech, Marquis de Pbol (May 11, 1904 January 23, 1989), commonly known as Salvador Dal (Catalan pronunciation: [so i]), was a prominent Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres.

Dal was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.[1] [2] His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dal's expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dal attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes"[3] to a self-styled "Arab lineage," claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dal was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem and to the irritation of his critics.[4]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Madrid and Paris 1.3 1929 through World War II 1.4 Later years in Catalonia 2 Symbolism 3 Endeavors outside painting 4 Politics and personality 5 Legacy 6 Listing of selected works 6.1 Novels 7 Gallery 8 See also 9 Notes 10 References 11 External links

[edit] Biography [edit] Early life

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dal i Domnech was born on May 11, 1904 at 8:45 am GMT[5] in the town of Figueres, in the Empord region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain.[6] Dal's older brother, also named Salvador (born October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dal i Cus, was a middle-class lawyer and notary[7] whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrs, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors.[8] When he was five, Dal was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation,[9] a concept which he came to believe.[10] Of his brother, Dal said, "...[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections."[11] He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."[11]

Dal also had a sister, Ana Mara, who was three years younger.[7] In 1949, she published a book about her brother, Dal As Seen By His Sister.[12] His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers Sagibarba and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqus, the trio played football together.

Dal attended drawing school. In 1916, Dal also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation trip to Cadaqus with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris.[7] The next year, Dal's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919.

In February 1921, Dal's mother died of breast cancer. Dal was sixteen years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul."[13] After her death, Dal's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dal did not resent this marriage, because he had a great love and respect for his aunt.[7]

[edit] Madrid and Paris

Wild-eyed antics of Dal (left) and fellow surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris on June 16, 1934, photographed by Carl Van Vechten.In 1922, Dal moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid[7] and studied at the Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine Arts). A lean 1.72 m (5 ft. 7 in.) tall,[14] Dal already drew attention as an eccentric and dandy man. He wore long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and knee breeches in the style of English aesthetes of the late 19th century.

At the Residencia, he became close friends with (among others) Pepn Bello, Luis Buuel, and Federico Garca Lorca. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion,[15] but Dal rejected the poet's sexual advances. [16]

However, it was his paintings, in which he experimented with Cubism, that earned him the most attention from his fellow students. At the time of these early works, Dal probably did not completely understand the Cubist movement. His only information on Cubist art came from magazine articles and a catalog given to him by Pichot, since there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time. In 1924, the still-unknown Salvador Dal illustrated a book for the first time. It was a publication of the Catalan poem "Les bruixes de Llers" ("The Witches of Llers") by his friend and schoolmate, poet Carles Fages de Climent. Dal also experimented with Dada, which influenced his work throughout his life.

Dal was expelled from the Academia in 1926, shortly before his final exams, when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him.[17] His mastery of painting skills was evidenced by his realistic Basket of Bread, painted in 1926.[18] That same year, he made his first visit to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso, whom the young Dal revered. Picasso had already heard favorable reports about Dal from Joan Mir. As he developed his own style over the next few years, Dal made a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Mir.

Some trends in Dal's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s. Dal devoured influences from many styles of art, ranging from the most academically classic to the most cutting-edge avant garde. [19] His classical influences included Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer, and Velzquez.[20] He used both classical and modernist techniques, sometimes in separate works, and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his

works in Barcelona attracted much attention along with mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.

Dal grew a flamboyant moustache, influenced by seventeenth-century Spanish master painter Diego Velzquez. The moustache became an iconic trademark of his appearance for the rest of his life.

[edit] 1929 through World War II In 1929, Dal collaborated with surrealist film director Luis Buuel on the short film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). His main contribution was to help Buuel write the script for the film. Dal later claimed to have also played a significant role in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts.[21] Also, in August 1929, Dal met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, [22] born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant ten years his senior, who at that time was married to surrealist poet Paul luard. In the same year, Dal had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. His work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years. The Surrealists hailed what Dal called the paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.[7][8]

Meanwhile, Dal's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don Salvador Dal y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala, and saw his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals. The last straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona newspaper that

his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing of the "Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ", with a provocative inscription: "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait."[23]

Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dal refused, perhaps out of fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group, and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on December 28, 1929. His father told him that he would disinherit him, and that he should never set foot in Cadaqus again. The following summer, Dal and Gala rented a small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He bought the place, and over the years enlarged it, gradually building his much beloved villa by the sea.

The Persistence of MemoryIn 1931, Dal painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory,[24] which introduced a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic. This idea is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape, and the other limp watches, shown being devoured by ants.[25]

Dal and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony. They later remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958.

Dal was introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy in 1934. The exhibition in New York of Dal's works, including Persistence of Memory, created an immediate sensation. Social Register listees feted him at a specially organized "Dal Ball." He showed up wearing a glass case on his chest, which contained a brassiere.[26] In that year, Dal and Gala also attended a masquerade party in New York, hosted for them by heiress Caresse Crosby. For their costumes, they dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper. The resulting uproar in the press was so great that Dal apologized. When he returned to Paris, the Surrealists confronted him about his apology for a surrealist act.[27]

While the majority of the Surrealist artists had become increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dal maintained an ambiguous position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art. Leading surrealist Andr Breton accused Dal of defending the "new" and "irrational" in "the Hitler phenomenon," but Dal quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention."[28] Dal insisted that surrealism could exist in an apolitical context and refused to explicitly denounce fascism. [citation needed] Among other factors, this had landed him in trouble with his colleagues. Later in 1934, Dal was subjected to a "trial", in which he was formally expelled from the Surrealist group.[22] To this, Dal retorted, "I myself am surrealism."[17]

In 1936, Dal took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture, entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques, was delivered while wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet.[29] He had arrived carrying a billiard cue

and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind."[30]

Also in 1936, at the premiere screening of Joseph Cornell's film Rose Hobart at Julian Levy's gallery in New York City, Dal became famous for another incident. Levy's program of short surrealist films was timed to take place at the same time as the first surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, featuring Dal's work. Dal was in the audience at the screening, but halfway through the film, he knocked over the projector in a rage. My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made, he said. "I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it." Other versions of Dal's accusation tend to the more poetic: "He stole it from my subconscious!" or even "He stole my dreams!"[31]

At this stage, Dal's main patron in London was the very wealthy Edward James. He had helped Dal emerge into the art world by purchasing many works and by supporting him financially for two years. They also collaborated on two of the most enduring icons of the Surrealist movement: the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.[citation needed]

In 1938, Dal met Sigmund Freud thanks to Stefan Zweig. Later, in September 1938, Salvador Dal was invited by Gabrielle Coco Chanel to her house La Pausa in Roquebrune on the French Riviera. There he painted numerous paintings

he later exhibited at Julien Levy Gallery in New York.[32][33] La Pausa has been partially replicated at the Dallas Museum of Art to welcome the Reves collection and part of Chanel's original furniture for the house.[34]

In 1939, Breton coined the derogatory nickname "Avida Dollars", an anagram for Salvador Dal, and a phonetic rendering of the French avide dollars, which may be translated as "eager for dollars".[35] This was a derisive reference to the increasing commercialization of Dal's work, and the perception that Dal sought self-aggrandizement through fame and fortune. Some surrealists henceforth spoke of Dal in the past tense, as if he were dead.[citation needed] The Surrealist movement and various members thereof (such as Ted Joans) would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against Dal until the time of his death and beyond.

In 1940, as World War II was in full swing at Europe, Dal and Gala moved to the United States, where they lived for eight years. After the move, Dal returned to the practice of Catholicism. "During this period, Dal never stopped writing," wrote Robert and Nicolas Descharnes.[36]

In 1941, Dal drafted a film scenario for Jean Gabin called Moontide. In 1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal. He wrote catalogs for his exhibitions, such as that at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1943. Therein he expounded, "Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have

led to a totalitarian system. ... Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college." He also wrote a novel, published in 1944, about a fashion salon for automobiles. This resulted in a drawing by Edwin Cox in The Miami Herald, depicting Dal dressing an automobile in an evening gown.[36] Also in The Secret Life, Dal suggested that he had split with Buuel because the latter was a Communist and an atheist. Buuel was fired (or resigned) from MOMA, supposedly after Cardinal Spellman of New York went to see Iris Barry, head of the film department at MOMA. Buuel then went back to Hollywood where he worked in the dubbing department of Warner Bros. from 1942 to 1946. In his 1982 autobiography Mon Dernier soupir (English translation My Last Sigh published 1983), Buuel wrote that, over the years, he rejected Dal's attempts at reconciliation.[37]

An Italian friar, Gabriele Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an exorcism on Dal while he was in France in 1947.[38] In 2005, a sculpture of Christ on the Cross was discovered in the friar's estate. It had been claimed that Dal gave this work to his exorcist out of gratitude,[38] and two Spanish art experts confirmed that there were adequate stylistic reasons to believe the sculpture was made by Dal. [38]

[edit] Later years in Catalonia Starting in 1949, Dal spent his remaining years back in his beloved Catalonia. The fact that he chose to live in Spain while it was ruled by Franco drew criticism from progressives and from many other artists.[39] As such, it is probable that

the common dismissal of Dal's later works by some Surrealists and art critics was related partially to politics rather than to the artistic merit of the works themselves. In 1959, Andr Breton organized an exhibit called Homage to Surrealism, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Surrealism, which contained works by Dal, Joan Mir, Enrique Tbara, and Eugenio Granell. Breton vehemently fought against the inclusion of Dal's Sistine Madonna in the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York the following year.[40]

Late in his career, Dal did not confine himself to painting, but experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: he made bulletist works[41] and was among the first artists to employ holography in an artistic manner.[42] Several of his works incorporate optical illusions. In his later years, young artists such as Andy Warhol proclaimed Dal an important influence on pop art.[43] Dal also had a keen interest in natural science and mathematics. This is manifested in several of his paintings, notably in the 1950s, in which he painted his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns. According to Dal, the rhinoceros horn signifies divine geometry because it grows in a logarithmic spiral. He also linked the rhinoceros to themes of chastity and to the Virgin Mary.[44] Dal was also fascinated by DNA and the hypercube (a 4-dimensional cube); an unfolding of a hypercube is featured in the painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).

Dal's postWorld War II period bore the hallmarks of technical virtuosity and an interest in optical illusions, science, and religion. He became an increasingly devout

Catholic, while at the same time he had been inspired by the shock of Hiroshima and the dawning of the "atomic age". Therefore Dal labeled this period "Nuclear Mysticism." In paintings such as "The Madonna of Port-Lligat" (first version) (1949) and "Corpus Hypercubus" (1954), Dal sought to synthesize Christian iconography with images of material disintegration inspired by nuclear physics.[45] "Nuclear Mysticism" included such notable pieces as La Gare de Perpignan (1965) and The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968 70). In 1960, Dal began work on the Dal Theatre and Museum in his home town of Figueres; it was his largest single project and the main focus of his energy through 1974. He continued to make additions through the mid1980s.[citation needed]

In 1968, Dal filmed a humorous television advertisement for Lanvin chocolates.[46] In this, he proclaims in French "Je suis fou de chocolat Lanvin!" (I'm crazy about Lanvin chocolate) while biting a morsel causing him to become crosseyed and his moustache to swivel upwards. In 1969, he designed the Chupa Chups logo in addition to facilitating the design of the advertising campaign for the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest and creating a large on-stage metal sculpture that stood at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

Dal in 1972.In the television programme Dirty Dal: A Private View broadcast on Channel 4 on June 3, 2007, art critic Brian Sewell described his acquaintance with Dal in the late 1960s, which included lying down in the fetal position

without trousers in the armpit of a figure of Christ and masturbating for Dal, who pretended to take photos while fumbling in his own trousers.[47][48]

In 1980, Dal's health took a catastrophic turn. His nearsenile wife, Gala, allegedly had been dosing him with a dangerous cocktail of unprescribed medicine that damaged his nervous system, thus causing an untimely end to his artistic capacity. At 76 years old, Dal was a wreck, and his right hand trembled terribly, with Parkinson-like symptoms. [49]

In 1982, King Juan Carlos bestowed on Dal the title of Marqus de Dal de Pbol[50][51] (English: Marquis of Dal de Pbol) in the nobility of Spain, hereby referring to Pbol, the place where he lived. The title was in first instance hereditary, but on request of Dal changed for life only in 1983.[50] To show his gratitude for this, Dal later gave the king a drawing (Head of Europa, which would turn out to be Dal's final drawing) after the king visited him on his deathbed.

Sant Pere in Figueres, scene of Dal's Baptism, First Communion, and funeral

Dal Theatre and Museum in Figueres, where he is also buried

Dal's crypt at the Dal Theatre and Museum in Figueres, stating his titlesGala died on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dal lost much of his will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself, possibly as a suicide attempt, or perhaps in an attempt to put himself into a state of suspended animation as he had read that some microorganisms could do. He moved from Figueres to the castle in Pbol, which he had bought for Gala and was the site of her death. In 1984, a fire broke out in his bedroom[52] under unclear circumstances. It was possibly a suicide attempt by Dal, or possibly simple negligence by his staff.[17] In any case, Dal was rescued and returned to Figueres, where a group of his friends, patrons, and fellow artists saw to it that he was comfortable living in his TheaterMuseum in his final years.

There have been allegations that Dal was forced by his guardians to sign blank canvases that would later, even after his death, be used in forgeries and sold as originals.[53] As a result, art dealers tend to be wary of late works attributed to Dal.[citation needed]

In November 1988, Dal entered the hospital with heart failure, and on December 5, 1988 was visited by King Juan Carlos, who confessed that he had always been a serious devotee of Dal.[54]

On January 23, 1989, while his favorite record of Tristan and Isolde played, he died of heart failure at Figueres at the age of 84, and, coming full circle, is buried in the crypt of his

Teatro Museo in Figueres. The location is across the street from the church of Sant Pere, where he had his baptism, first communion, and funeral, and is three blocks from the house where he was born.[55]

The Gala-Salvador Dal Foundation currently serves as his official estate.[56] The U.S. copyright representative for the Gala-Salvador Dal Foundation is the Artists Rights Society. [57] In 2002, the Society made the news when they asked Google to remove a customized version of its logo put up to commemorate Dal, alleging that portions of specific artworks under their protection had been used without permission. Google complied with the request, but denied that there was any copyright violation.[citation needed]

[edit] Symbolism Dal employed extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the hallmark "soft watches" that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed.[25] The idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dal when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot day in August. [58]

The elephant is also a recurring image in Dal's works. It first appeared in his 1944 work Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The elephants, inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk,[59] are portrayed "with long, multijointed, almost invisible legs of desire"[60] along with obelisks on their backs. Coupled with

the image of their brittle legs, these encumbrances, noted for their phallic overtones, create a sense of phantom reality. "The elephant is a distortion in space," one analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure."[60] "I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly." Salvador Dal, in Dawn Ades, Dal and Surrealism.

The egg is another common Dalesque image. He connects the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love;[61] it appears in The Great Masturbator and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus. The Metamorphosis of Narcissus also symbolized death and petrification. Various animals appear throughout his work as well: ants point to death, decay, and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the human head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house when he first met Sigmund Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear.[61]

[edit] Endeavors outside painting

The Dali Atomicus, photo by Philippe Halsman (1948), shown before its supporting wires were removed.Dal was a versatile artist. Some of his more popular works are sculptures and other objects, and he is also noted for his contributions to theatre, fashion, and photography, among other areas.

Two of the most popular objects of the surrealist movement were Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips Sofa, completed by Dal in 1936 and 1937, respectively. Surrealist artist and patron Edward James commissioned both of these pieces from Dal; James inherited a large English estate in West Dean, West Sussex when he was five and was one of the foremost supporters of the surrealists in the 1930s.[62] "Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for [Dal]," according to the display caption for the Lobster Telephone at the Tate Gallery, "and he drew a close analogy between food and sex."[63] The telephone was functional, and James purchased four of them from Dal to replace the phones in his retreat home. One now appears at the Tate Gallery; the second can be found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt; the third belongs to the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at the National Gallery of Australia.[62]

The wood and satin Mae West Lips Sofa was shaped after the lips of actress Mae West, whom Dal apparently found fascinating.[22] West was previously the subject of Dal's 1935 painting The Face of Mae West. Mae West Lips Sofa currently resides at the Brighton and Hove Museum in England.

Between 1941 and 1970, Dal created an ensemble of 39 jewels. The jewels are intricate, and some contain moving parts. The most famous jewel, "The Royal Heart", is made of gold and is encrusted with 46 rubies, 42 diamonds, and four emeralds and is created in such a way that the center "beats" much like a real heart. Dal himself commented that

"Without an audience, without the presence of spectators, these jewels would not fulfill the function for which they came into being. The viewer, then, is the ultimate artist." (Dal, 1959.) The "Dal Joies" ("The Jewels of Dal") collection can be seen at the Dal Theater Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, where it is on permanent exhibition.

In theatre, Dal constructed the scenery for Federico Garca Lorca's 1927 romantic play Mariana Pineda.[64] For Bacchanale (1939), a ballet based on and set to the music of Richard Wagner's 1845 opera Tannhuser, Dal provided both the set design and the libretto.[65] Bacchanale was followed by set designs for Labyrinth in 1941 and The ThreeCornered Hat in 1949.[66]

Dal became intensely interested in film when he was young, going to the theatre most Sundays. He was part of the era where silent films were being viewed and drawing on the medium of film became popular. He believed there were two dimensions to the theories of film and cinema: "things themselves", the facts that are presented in the world of the camera; and "photographic imagination", the way the camera shows the picture and how creative or imaginative it looks.[67] Dal was active in front of and behind the scenes in the film world. He created pieces of artwork such as Destino, on which he collaborated with Walt Disney. He is also credited as co-creator of Luis Buuel's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, a 17-minute French art film co-written with Luis Buuel that is widely remembered for its graphic opening scene simulating the slashing of a human eyeball with a razor. This film is what Dal is known for in the

independent film world. Un Chien Andalou was Dal's way of creating his dreamlike qualities in the real world. Images would change and scenes would switch, leading the viewer in a completely different direction from the one they were previously viewing. The second film he produced with Buuel was entitled L'Age d'Or, and it was performed at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930. L'Age d'Or was "banned for years after fascist and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink bomb and inkthrowing riot in the Paris theater where it was shown."[68] Although negative aspects of society were being thrown into the life of Dal and obviously affecting the success of his artwork, it did not hold him back from expressing his own ideas and beliefs in his art. Both of these films, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, have had a tremendous impact on the independent surrealist film movement. "If Un Chien Andalou stands as the supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the unconscious, then L'ge d'Or is perhaps the most trenchant and implacable expression of its revolutionary intent."[69]

Dal also worked with other famous filmmakers, such as Alfred Hitchcock. The most well-known of his film projects is probably the dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound, which heavily delves into themes of psychoanalysis. Hitchcock needed a dreamlike quality to his film, which dealt with the idea that a repressed experience can directly trigger a neurosis, and he knew that Dal's work would help create the atmosphere he wanted in his film. He also worked on a documentary called Chaos and Creation, which has a lot of artistic references thrown into it to help one see what Dal's vision of art really is. He also worked on the Disney short film production Destino. Completed in 2003 by Baker Bloodworth and Roy E. Disney, it contains dreamlike images

of strange figures flying and walking about. It is based on Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez' song "Destino". When Disney hired Dal to help produce the film in 1946, they were not prepared for the work that lay ahead. For eight months, they continuously animated until their efforts had to come to a stop when they realized they were in financial trouble. They had no more money to finish the production of the animated film; however, it was eventually finished and shown in various film festivals. The film consists of Dal's artwork interacting with Disney's character animation. Dal completed only one other film in his lifetime, Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975), in which he narrated a story about an expedition in search of giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. The imagery was based on microscopic uric acid stains on the brass band of a ballpoint pen on which Dal had been urinating for several weeks.[70]

Dal built a repertoire in the fashion and photography industries as well. In fashion, his cooperation with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli is well-known, where Dal was hired by Schiaparelli to produce a white dress with a lobster print. Other designs Dal made for her include a shoeshaped hat and a pink belt with lips for a buckle. He was also involved in creating textile designs and perfume bottles. In 1950, Dal created a special "costume for the year 2045" with Christian Dior.[65] Photographers with whom he collaborated include Man Ray, Brassa, Cecil Beaton, and Philippe Halsman.

With Man Ray and Brassa, Dal photographed nature; with the others, he explored a range of obscure topics, including (with Halsman) the Dal Atomica series (1948)inspired by

his painting Leda Atomica which in one photograph depicts "a painter's easel, three cats, a bucket of water, and Dal himself floating in the air."[65]

References to Dal in the context of science are made in terms of his fascination with the paradigm shift that accompanied the birth of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century. Inspired by Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in 1958 he wrote in his "Anti-Matter Manifesto": "In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg."[71]

In this respect, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, which appeared in 1954, in hearkening back to The Persistence of Memory, and in portraying that painting in fragmentation and disintegration summarizes Dal's acknowledgment of the new science.[71]

Architectural achievements include his Port Lligat house near Cadaqus, as well as the Dream of Venus surrealist pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair, which contained within it a number of unusual sculptures and statues. His literary works include The Secret Life of Salvador Dal (1942), Diary of a Genius (195263), and Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution (1927 33). The artist worked extensively in the graphic arts, producing many etchings and lithographs. While his early work in printmaking is equal in quality to his important paintings as he grew older, he would sell the rights to

images but not be involved in the print production itself. In addition, a large number of unauthorized fakes were produced in the eighties and nineties, thus further confusing the Dal print market. He took a stab at industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Dal decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's Studio Linie.[72]

One of Dal's most unorthodox artistic creations may have been an entire person. At a French nightclub in 1965, Dal met Amanda Lear, a fashion model then known as Peki D'Oslo.[73] Lear became his protg and muse,[73] writing about their affair in the authorized biography My Life With Dal (1986).[74] Transfixed by the mannish, larger-than-life Lear, Dal masterminded her successful transition from modeling to the music world, advising her on selfpresentation and helping spin mysterious stories about her origin as she took the disco-art scene by storm. According to Lear, she and Dal were united in a "spiritual marriage" on a deserted mountaintop.[73] Referred to as Dal's "Frankenstein,"[75] some believe Lear's name is a pun on the French "L'Amant Dal," or Lover of Dal. Lear took the place of an earlier muse, Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin Dufresne), who had left Dal's side to join The Factory of Andy Warhol.[76]

An avid cheese maker, Dali would sometimes engross himself in cheese-making for over 4 months at a time. His favorite cheese was swiss.[citation needed]

[edit] Politics and personality

Dal in the 1960s wearing the flamboyant mustache style he popularized.Salvador Dal's politics played a significant role in his emergence as an artist. In his youth, he embraced both anarchism and communism, though his writings account anecdotes of making radical political statements more to shock listeners than from any deep conviction. This was in keeping with Dal's allegiance to the Dada movement.

As he grew older his political allegiances changed, especially as the Surrealist movement went through transformations under the leadership of Trotskyist Andr Breton, who is said to have called Dal in for questioning on his politics. In his 1970 book Dal by Dal, Dal was declaring himself an anarchist and monarchist.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Dal fled from fighting and refused to align himself with any group. Likewise, after World War II, George Orwell criticized Dal for "scuttling off like a rat as soon as France is in danger" after Dal prospered there for years: "When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near." In a notable 1944 review of Dal's autobiography, Orwell wrote, "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dal is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being."[77]

After his return to Catalonia after World War II, Dal became closer to the authoritarian Franco regime. Some of Dal's statements supported the Franco regime, congratulating Franco for his actions aimed "at clearing Spain of destructive forces."[39] Dal, having returned to the Catholic faith and becoming increasingly religious as time went on, may have been referring to the Republican atrocities during the Spanish Civil War.[78][79] Dal sent telegrams to Franco, praising him for signing death warrants for prisoners.[39] He even met Franco personally[80] and painted a portrait of Franco's granddaughter.

He also once sent a telegram praising the Conductor, Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceauescu, for his adoption of a scepter as part of his regalia. The Romanian daily newspaper Scnteia published it, without suspecting its mocking aspect. One of Dal's few possible bits of open disobedience was his continued praise of Federico Garca Lorca even in the years when Lorca's works were banned. [not in citation given][16]

Dal, a colorful and imposing presence in his ever-present long cape, walking stick, haughty expression, and upturned waxed mustache, was famous for having said that "every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dal."[81] The entertainer Cher and her husband Sonny Bono, when young, came to a party at Dal's expensive residence in New York's Plaza Hotel and were startled when Cher sat down on an oddly shaped sexual vibrator left in an easy chair. When signing autographs for fans, Dal would always keep their pens. When interviewed by Mike Wallace on his 60 Minutes

television show, Dal kept referring to himself in the third person, and told the startled Mr. Wallace matter-of-factly that "Dal is immortal and will not die." During another television appearance, on The Tonight Show, Dal carried with him a leather rhinoceros and refused to sit upon anything else.[citation needed]

[edit] Legacy Salvador Dal has been cited as major inspiration from many modern artists, such as Damien Hirst, Noel Fielding, Jeff Koons and most other modern surrealists. Salvador Dali's manic expression and famous moustache have made him something of a Cult icon for the bizarre & surreal.

[edit] Listing of selected works Main article: List of works by Salvador Dal

The Philadelphia Museum of Art used a surreal entrance display including its steps, for the 2005 Salvador Dal exhibitionDal produced over 1,500 paintings in his career[82] in addition to producing illustrations for books, lithographs, designs for theatre sets and costumes, a great number of drawings, dozens of sculptures, and various other projects, including an animated short film for Disney. He also

collaborated with director Jack Bond in 1965, creating a movie titled Dal in New York. Below is a chronological sample of important and representative work, as well as some notes on what Dal did in particular years.[2]

In Carlos Lozano's biography, Sex, Surrealism, Dal, and Me, produced with the collaboration of Clifford Thurlow, Lozano makes it clear that Dal never stopped being a surrealist. As Dal said of himself: "the only difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist."[35]

1910 Landscape Near Figueras 1913 Vilabertin 1916 Fiesta in Figueras (begun 1914) 1917 View of Cadaqus with Shadow of Mount Pani 1918 Crepuscular Old Man (begun 1917) 1919 Port of Cadaqus (Night) (begun 1918) and Selfportrait in the Studio 1920 The Artist's Father at Llane Beach and View of Portdogu (Port Aluger) 1921 The Garden of Llaner (Cadaqus) (begun 1920) and Self-portrait 1922 Cabaret Scene and Night Walking Dreams 1923 Self Portrait with L'Humanite and Cubist Self Portrait with La Publicitat 1924 Still Life (Syphon and Bottle of Rum) (for Garca Lorca) and Portrait of Luis Buuel

1925 Large Harlequin and Small Bottle of Rum and a series of fine portraits of his sister Anna Maria, most notably Figure at a Window 1926 The Basket of Bread and Girl from Figueres 1927 Composition with Three Figures (Neo-Cubist Academy) and Honey is Sweeter than Blood (his first important surrealist work) 1929 Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) film in collaboration with Luis Buuel, The Lugubrious Game, The Great Masturbator, The First Days of Spring, and The Profanation of the Host 1930 L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age) film in collaboration with Luis Buuel 1931 The Persistence of Memory (his most famous work, featuring the "melting clocks"), The Old Age of William Tell, and William Tell and Gradiva 1932 The Spectre of Sex Appeal, The Birth of Liquid Desires, Anthropomorphic Bread, and Fried Eggs on the Plate without the Plate. The Invisible Man (begun 1929) completed (although not to Dal's own satisfaction) 1933 Retrospective Bust of a Woman (mixed media sculpture collage) and Portrait of Gala With Two Lamb Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder, Gala in the Window 1934 The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table and A Sense of Speed 1935 Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus and The Face of Mae West 1936 Autumn Cannibalism, Lobster Telephone, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)

and two works titled Morphological Echo (the first of which began in 1934) 1937 Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Swans Reflecting Elephants, The Burning Giraffe, Sleep, The Enigma of Hitler, Mae West Lips Sofa and Cannibalism in Autumn 1938 The Sublime Moment and Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach 1939 Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time 1940 Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, The Face of War 1941 Honey is Sweeter than Blood 1943 The Poetry of America and Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man 1944 Galarina and Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening 194448 Hidden Faces, a novel 1945, Basket of BreadRather Death than Shame and Fountain of Milk Flowing Uselessly on Three Shoes; also this year, Dal collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on a dream sequence to the film Spellbound, to mutual dissatisfaction 1946 The Temptation of St. Anthony 1948 Les Elephants 1949 Leda Atomica and The Madonna of Port Lligat. Dal returned to Catalonia this year 1951 Christ of Saint John of the Cross and Exploding Raphaelesque Head

1951 Katharine Cornell, a portrait of the famed actress 1952 Galatea of the Spheres 1954 The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (begun in 1952), Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) and Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity 1955 The Sacrament of the Last Supper, Lonesome Echo, record album cover for Jackie Gleason 1956 Still Life Moving Fast, Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas 1957 Santiago el Grande oil on canvas on permanent display at Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, NB, Canada 1958 The Meditative Rose 1959 The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus 1960 Composicin Numrica (de fond prparatoire inachev) 1960 Dal began work on the Teatro-Museo Gala Salvador Dal and Portrait of Juan de Pareja, the Assistant to Velzquez 19631964 They Will All Come from Saba a work in water color depicting the Magi at St. Petersbur's Dali Museum 1965 Dal donates a gouache, ink and pencil drawing of the Crucifixion to the Rikers Island jail in New York City. The drawing hung in the inmate dining room from 1965 to 1981[83] 1965 Dal in New York 1967 Tuna Fishing

1969 Chupa Chups logo 1969 Improvisation on a Sunday Afternoon, television collaboration with the rock group Nirvana 1970 The Hallucinogenic Toreador, acquired in 1969 by A. Reynolds Morse & Eleanor R. Morse before it was completed 1972 La Toile Daligram, Helena Devulina Diakanoff dit., GALA 1973 "Le Diners De Gala", an ornately illustrated cook book 1976 Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea 1977 Dal's Hand Drawing Back the Golden Fleece in the Form of a Cloud to Show Gala Completely Nude, Very Far Away Behind the Sun (stereoscopical pair of paintings) 1983 Dal completes his final painting, The Swallow's Tail 2003 Destino, an animated short film originally a collaboration between Dal and Walt Disney, is released. Production on Destino began in 1945 The largest collections of Dal's work are at the Dal Theatre and Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, followed by the Salvador Dal Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, which contains the collection of A. Reynolds Morse & Eleanor R. Morse. It holds over 1,500 works from Dal. Other particularly significant collections include the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Salvador Dal Gallery in Pacific Palisades, California. Espace Dal in Montmartre, Paris, France, as well as the Dal Universe in London, England, contain a large collection of his drawings and sculptures.

The unlikeliest venue for Dal's work was the Rikers Island jail in New York City; a sketch of the Crucifixion he donated to the jail hung in the inmate dining room for 16 years before it was moved to the prison lobby for safekeeping. Ironically, the drawing was stolen from that location in March 2003 and has not been recovered.[83]

[edit] Novels Under the encouragement of poet Federico Garca Lorca, Dal attempted an approach to a literary career through the means of the "pure novel". In his only literary production, Hidden Faces (1944), Dal describes, in vividly visual terms, the intrigues and love affairs of a group of dazzling, eccentric aristocrats who, with their luxurious and extravagant lifestyle, symbolize the decadence of the 1930s.

[edit] Gallery Gala in the Window (1933) Marbella. Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas (1956) Puerto Jos Bans. Homage to Newton (1985) Signed and numbered cast no. 5/8. Bronze with dark patina. Size: 388 x 210 x 133cm. UOB Plaza, Singapore

Dal's homage to Newton, with an open torso and suspended heart to indicate "open-heartedness," and an open head indicating "open-mindedness" the two very qualities important for science discovery and successful human endeavours. Children at Dali's exhibition in Sakp Sabanc Museum, Istanbul [edit] See also Little Ashes [edit] Notes 1.^ "Phelan, Joseph, ',The Salvador Dal Show". Artcyclopedia.com. http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature2005-03.html. Retrieved 2010-08-22. 2.^ a b Dal, Salvador. (2000) Dal: 16 Art Stickers, Courier Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-41074-9. 3.^ Ian Gibson (1997). The Shameful Life of Salvador Dal. W. W. Norton & Company. http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gibson-dali.html. Gibson found out that "Dal" (and its many variants) is an extremely common surname in Arab countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria or Egypt. On the other hand, also according to Gibson, Dal's mother family, the Domnech of Barcelona, had Jewish roots. 4.^ Saladyga, Stephen Francis. "The Mindset of Salvador Dal". lamplighter (Niagara University). Vol. 1 No. 3, Summer 2006. Retrieved July 22, 2006. 5.^ Birth certificate and "Dal Biography". Dal Museum. Dal Museum.

http://www.salvadordalimuseum.org/history/biography.html. Retrieved 2008-08-24. 6.^ Dal, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal, 1948, London: Vision Press, p.33 7.^ a b c d e f Llongueras, Llus. (2004) Dal, Ediciones B Mexico. ISBN 84-666-1343-9. 8.^ a b Rojas, Carlos. Salvador Dal, Or the Art of Spitting on Your Mother's Portrait, Penn State Press (1993). ISBN 0-27100842-3. 9.^ Salvador Dal. SINA.com. Retrieved on July 31, 2006. 10.^ Salvador Dal biography on astrodatabank.com. Retrieved September 30, 2006. 11.^ a b Dal, Secret Life, p.2 12.^ "Dal Biography 19041989 Part Two". artelino.com. http://www.artelino.com/articles/dali.asp. Retrieved 2006-0930. 13.^ Dal, Secret Life, pp.152153 14.^ As listed in his prison record of 1924, aged 20. However, his hairdresser and biographer, Luis Llongueras, states Dal was 1.74 m (5 ft 8 12 in) tall. 15.^ For more in-depth information about the Lorca-Dal connection see Lorca-Dal: el amor que no pudo ser and The Shameful Life of Salvador Dal, both by Ian Gibson. 16.^ a b Bosquet, Alain, Conversations with Dal, 1969. p. 1920. (PDF format) (of Garcia Lorca) 'S.D.:He was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice .... I was extremely annoyed, because I wasnt homosexual, and I wasnt interested in

giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis--vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dal's asshole. He eventually bagged a young girl, and she replaced me in the sacrifice. Failing to get me to put my ass at his disposal, he swore that the girls sacrifice was matched by his own: it was the first time he had ever slept with a woman.' 17.^ a b c Salvador Dal: Olga's Gallery. Retrieved on July 22, 2006. 18.^ "Paintings Gallery #5". Dali-gallery.com. http://www.dali-gallery.com/html/galleries/painting05.htm. Retrieved 2010-08-22. 19.^ Hodge, Nicola, and Libby Anson. The AZ of Art: The World's Greatest and Most Popular Artists and Their Works. California: Thunder Bay Press, 1996. Online citation. 20.^ "Phelan, Joseph". Artcyclopedia.com. http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature-2005-03.html. Retrieved 2010-08-22. 21.^ Koller, Michael. Un Chien Andalou. senses of cinema January 2001. Retrieved on July 26, 2006. 22.^ a b c Shelley, Landry. "Dal Wows Crowd in Philadelphia". Unbound (The College of New Jersey) Spring 2005. Retrieved on July 22, 2006. 23.^ Gibson, Ian (1997). The shameful life of Salvador Dal. London: Faber and Faber. pp. 2389. ISBN 0-571-19380-3. 24.^ Clocking in with Salvador Dal: Salvador Dal's Melting Watches (PDF) from the Salvador Dal Museum. Retrieved on August 19, 2006.

25.^ a b Salvador Dal, La Conqute de lirrationnel (Paris: ditions surralistes, 1935), p. 25. 26.^ Current Biography 1940, pp219220 27.^ Luis Buuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buuel, Vintage 1984. ISBN 0816643873 28.^ Greeley, Robin Adle (2006). Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, Yale University Press. p. 81. ISBN 0-30011295-5. 29.^ Jackaman, Rob. (1989) The Course of English Surrealist Poetry Since the 1930s, Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 0-88946932-6. 30.^ Current Biography 1940, p219 31.^ "Program Notes by Andy Ditzler (2005) and Deborah Solomon, ',Utopia Parkway:The Life of Joseph Cornell (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003)". Andel.home.mindspring.com. http://andel.home.mindspring.com/cornell_notes.htm. Retrieved 2010-08-22. 32.^ Salvador Dal Exhibition, Exhibition Catalogue February 16 through May 15, 2005 33.^ http://philadelphia.about.com/od/salvador_dali/a/salvador_da li_a.htm 34.^ Bretell, Richard R. (1995). Impressionist paintings, drawings, and sculpture from the Wendy and Emery Reeves Collection. Dallas Museum of Art. ISBN 9780936227153. 35.^ a b Artcyclopedia: Salvador Dal. Retrieved September 4, 2006.

36.^ a b Descharnes, Robert and Nicolas. Salvador Dal. New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1993. p. 35. 37.^ Luis Buuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buuel (Vintage, 1984) ISBN 0816643873 38.^ a b c Dal's gift to exorcist uncovered Catholic News October 14, 2005 39.^ a b c Navarro, Vicente, PhD "The Jackboot of Dada: Salvador Dal, Fascist". Counterpunch. December 6, 2003. Retrieved July 22, 2006. 40.^ Lpez, Ignacio Javier. The Old Age of William Tell (A study of Buuel's Tristana). MLN 116 (2001): 295314. 41.^ The Phantasmagoric UniverseEspace Dal Montmartre. Bonjour Paris. Retrieved on August 22, 2006. 42.^ The History and Development of Holography. Holophile. Retrieved on August 22, 2006. 43.^ Hello, Dal. Carnegie Magazine. Retrieved on August 22, 2006. 44.^ Elliott H. King in Dawn Ades (ed.), Dal, Bompiani Arte, Milan, 2004, p. 456. 45.^ Salvador Dal Bio, Art on 5th. Retrieved July 22, 2006. Archived May 4, 2006 at the Wayback Machine. 46.^ Salvador Dal at Le Meurice Paris and St Regis in New York Andreas Augustin, ehotelier.com, 2007 47.^ "Scotsman review of Dirty Dal". The Scotsman. UK. http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=869862007. Retrieved 2010-08-22. 48.^ The Dali I knew By Brian Sewell, thisislondon.co.uk

49.^ Ian Gibson (1997). The Shameful Life of Salvador Dal. W. W. Norton & Company. 50.^ a b Excerpts from the BOE Website Herldica y Genealoga Hispana 51.^ Dal as "Marqus de Dal de Pbol" Boletn Oficial del Estado, the official gazette of the Spanish government 52.^ "Dal Resting at Castle After Injury in Fire". The New York Times. September 1, 1984. Retrieved July 22, 2006. 53.^ Mark Rogerson (1989). The Dal Scandal: An Investigation. Victor Gollancz. ISBN 0575037865. 54.^ Etherington -Smith, Meredith The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dal p. 411, 1995 Da Capo Press, ISBN 0306806622 55.^ Etherington -Smith, Meredith The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dal pp. xxiv, 411412, 1995 Da Capo Press, ISBN 0306806622 56.^ http://www.salvador-dali.org/en_index.html | The GalaSalvador Dal Foundation website 57.^ http://arsny.com/requested.html | Most frequently requested artists list of the Artists Rights Society 58.^ Salvador Dal, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal (New York: Dial Press, 1942), p. 317. 59.^ Michael Taylor in Dawn Ades (ed.), Dal (Milan: Bompiani, 2004), p. 342 60.^ a b Dal Universe Collection. County Hall Gallery. Retrieved on July 28, 2006. 61.^ a b "Salvador Dal's symbolism". County Hall Gallery. Retrieved on July 28, 2006

62.^ a b Lobster telephone. National Gallery of Australia. Retrieved on August 4, 2006. 63.^ Tate Collection | Lobster Telephone by Salvador Dal. Tate Online. Retrieved on August 4, 2006. 64.^ Federico Garca Lorca. Pegsos. Retrieved on August 8, 2006. 65.^ a b c Dal Rotterdam Museum Boijmans. Paris Contemporary Designs. Retrieved on August 8, 2006. 66.^ Past Exhibitions. Haggerty Museum of Art. Retrieved August 8, 2006. 67.^ "Dali & Film" Edt. Gale, Matthew. Salvador Dal Museum Inc. St Petersburg, Florida. 2007. 68.^ "L'ge d'Or (The Golden Age)" Harvard Film Archive. 2006. April 10, 2008. 69.^ Short, Robert. "The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema, Persistence of Vision" Vol. 3, 2002. 70.^ Elliott H. King, Dal, Surrealism and Cinema, Kamera Books 2007, p. 169. 71.^ a b Dal: Explorations into the domain of science. The Triangle Online. Retrieved August 8, 2006. 72.^ [Anon.] (1976). "Faenza-Goldmedaille fr SUOMI". Artis 29: 8. ISSN 0004-3842. 73.^ a b c Prose, Francine. (2000) The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists they Inspired. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-055525-4. 74.^ Lear, Amanda. (1986) My Life with Dal. Beaufort Books. ISBN 0825303737.

75.^ Lozano, Carlos. (2000) Sex, Surrealism, Dal, and Me. Razor Books Ltd. ISBN 0953820505. 76.^ Etherington-Smith, Meredith. (1995) The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dal. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306806622. 77.^ Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali, by George Orwell 78.^ "Payne, Stanley G. THE A History of Spain and Portugal, Vol. 2, Ch. 26, p. 648651 (Print Edition: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973) (LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE Accessed May 15, 2007)". Libro.uca.edu. http://libro.uca.edu/payne2/payne26.htm. Retrieved 201008-22. 79.^ De la Cueva, Julio Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition and Revolution: On Atrocities against the Clergy during the Spanish Civil War, Journal of Contemporary History Vol XXXIII 3, 1998 80.^ Salvador Dal pictured with Francisco Franco[dead link] 81.^ The Surreal World of Salvador Dal. Smithsonian Magazine. 2005. Retrieved August 31, 2006. 82.^ "The Salvador Dal Online Exhibit". MicroVision. http://www.daliweb.tampa.fl.us/collection.htm. Retrieved 2006-06-13. 83.^ a b "Dal picture sprung from jail". BBC. 2003-03-02. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2812683.stm. [edit] References Linde Sabler. "Dal". London: Haus Publishing, 2004 (paperback, ISBN 978-1-904341-75-8).

Salvador Dali interviewed by Mike Wallace on The Mike Wallace Interview April 19, 1985 [edit] External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Salvador Dal Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Salvador Dal

Biographies and news Dal's surreal wind-powered organ lacks only a rhinoceros UbuWeb: Salvador DalInterview and bank advertisement. Salvador Dal in the INA Archives A collection of interviews and footage of Dal in the French television The Master Visualizer Other links Salvador Dal at the Museum of Modern Art Article on Dal's religious faith The Salvador Dal photo library 60.000 photos Article on Dal's opera poem tre Dieu: opra-pome, audiovisuel et cathare en six parties (Being God: a Cathar Audiovisual Opera-Poem in Six Parts) Watch Un Chien Andalou at LikeTelevision Gala-Salvador Dal Foundation English language site St. Petersburg Dal Museum Kurutz, Steven, "Hello, Dali: Surrealist Museum Becomes a Reality", The Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog, January 11,

2011, 4:46 pm ET. Interview with St. Petersburg (FL) museum director Dr. Hank Hine about new building. "The shameful life of Salvador Dal" (the witches of Llers)". Dal and Fages: "that intelligent and most cordial of collaborations" Exhibitions Espace DalThe unique permanent exhibition in France (Museum & Dal Fine Art Galleries) Dal & Film Tate Modern, London Museum-Gallery Xpo: Salvador Dal, Marquis de Pbol in Bruges Museum of Modern Art Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Salvador Dal. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California. Authority control: LCCN: n79021554 | VIAF: 64004109 v d eSalvador Dal

List of works

Selected paintings Landscape Near Figueras (1910) Vilabertran (1913) Fiesta in Figueres (191416) Port of Cadaqus (Night) (191819) The Artist's Father at Llane Beach (1920) The Garden of Llaner (Cadaqus) (192021) Cabaret Scene (1922) Cubist Self-Portrait with "La Publicitat" (1923)

 Self-portrait with L'Humanitie (1923) Portrait of Luis Buuel (1924) Siphon and Small Bottle of Rum (1924) The Basket of Bread (1926) Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood (1927) The Lugubrious Game (1929) The First Days of Spring (1929) The Great Masturbator (1929) The Persistence of Memory (1931) The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table (1934) Morphological Echo (193436) Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus (1935) Autumn Cannibalism (1936) Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936) The Burning Giraffe (1937) Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938) The Sublime Moment (1938) Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (1939) The Face of War (1940) Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) Honey is Sweeter than Blood (1941) Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943) Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944) Galarina (194445) Basket of Bread (1945) The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946) The Elephants (1948) Leda Atomica (1949) The Madonna of Port Lligat (1949) Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951) Galatea of the Spheres (1952) The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (195254) Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954) Young Virgin AutoSodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (1954) The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955) Living Still Life (1956) The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1958 59) The Ecumenical Council (195960) Galacidalacidesoxyribonucleicacid (1963) Tuna Fishing (196667) The Hallucinogenic Toreador (196870) La Toile Daligram (1972) The Swallow's Tail (1983)

Other works Writings: Un Chien Andalou (1929) L'Age d'Or (1930) Giraffes on Horseback Salad (1937) Libretto for Bacchanale (1939) The Secret Life of Salvador Dal (1942, autobiography) Films: Un Chien Andalou (1929) L'Age d'Or (1930) Spellbound (1945, dream sequence) Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975, narration) Animated films: Destino (1946, completed 2003) Logos: Chupa Chups Opera: tre Dieu (1985) Sculpture: Lobster Telephone (1936) Mae West Lips Sofa (1937) Costumes: costumes for Garca Lorca's play Mariana Pineda (1927) Novels: Hidden Faces (1944)

Related articles Castle of Pbol Dal Universe Espace Dal Dal Theatre and Museum Salvador Dal Museum Salvador Dal (film) Little Ashes Gala Dal Paranoiaccritical method

Persondata Name Dal, Salvador Alternative names Dal, Salvador Felip Jacint, Domnech; Dal, Salvador Felipe Jacinto, Domnech Short description 20th century Catalan surrealist artist

Date of birth May 11, 1904 Place of birth Figueres, Catalonia, Spain Date of death January 23, 1989 Place of death Figueres, Catalonia, Spain

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal %C3%AD" Categories: Salvador Dal | 1904 births | 1989 deaths | Catalan artists | Catalan painters | Exorcism | Lgion d'honneur recipients | Marquesses of Spain | Modern artists | Modern painters | People from Alt Empord | People with Parkinson's disease | Spanish sculptors | Spanish people | Spanish painters | Spanish printmakers | Spanish Roman Catholics | Surrealist artists | 20th-century painters This page was last modified on 17 July 2011 at 22:45.

Web www.all-art.org

Art of the 20th Century Salvador Dali If You Act the Genius, You Will Be One! 1910-1928 The Proof of Love 1929-1935 The Conguest of the Irrational 1936-1939 The Triumph of Avida Dollars 1939-1946

The Mystical Manifesto 1946-1962 Paths to Immortality 1962-1989 illustrations: Biblia Sacrata, Marquis de Sade, Faust, The Art of Love, Don Quixote, Divine Comedy, Decameron, Casanova, Les Caprices de Goya Paths to Immortality 1962-1989 I'm not the clown!" cried Dali in his own defence. "But in its naivety this monstrously cynical society does not see who is simply putting on a serious act the better to hide his madness. I cannot say it often enough: I am not mad. My clear-sightedness has acquired such sharpness and concentration that, in the whole of the century, there has been no more heroic or more astounding personality than me, and apart from Nietzsche (who finished by going mad, though) my equal will not be found in other centuries either. My painting proves it."

In point of fact, Dali observed the gradual decline of modern art with contempt. As it slid into nothingness, he laughed to see what Duchamp's ready-mades in Dada and Surrealist days had led to. He was amused to see the urinal Duchamp had exhibited in New York in 1911 as a sculpture titled Fontaine. "The first person to compare the cheeks of a young woman with a rose was plainly a poet. The second, who repeated the comparison, was probably an idiot. All the theories of Dadaism and Surrealism are being monotonously repeated: their soft contours have prompted countless soft

objects. The globe is being smothered in ready-mades. The fifteen-metre loaf of bread is now fifteen kilometres long... People have already forgotten that the founder of Dadaism, Tristan Tzara, stated in his manifesto in the very infancy of the movements: 'Dada is this. Dada is that... Either way, it's crap.' This kind of more or less black humour is foreign to the new generation. They are genuinely convinced that their neo-Dadaism is subtler than the art of Praxiteles."

Dali painting "The Medusa of Sleep" on Gala's forehead Dali recalled: "During the last war, between Arcachon and Bordeaux, Marcel Duchamp and I talked about the newly awoken interest in preparations using excrement; tiny secretions taken from the navel were considered 'luxury editions'. I replied that I would have liked to have a navel secretion of Raphael. Now a well-known Pop artist is selling artists' excrement in Verona, in extremely stylish flacons, as a luxury item. When Duchamp realised that he had scattered the ideas of his youth to the winds, until he himself was left with none, he most aristocratically declined to play the game, and prophetically announced that other young men were specializing in the chess match of contemporary art; and then he began to play chess..."

And Dali observed: "At the time there were just seventeen people in Paris who understood the ready-mades - the very few ready-mades by Marcel Duchamp. Nowadays there are seventeen million who understand them. When the day comes that every object that exists is a ready-made, there will no longer be any ready-mades at all. When that day comes, originality will consist in creating a "work of art out of sheer urgent compulsion. The moral attitude of the ready-

made consists in avoiding contact with reality. Ready-mades have subconsciously influenced the photo-realists, leading them to paint ready-mades by hand. There can be no doubt that if Vermeer van Delft or Gerard Dou had been alive in 1973, they would have had no objection to painting the interior of a car or the outside of a telephone box..." Medusa's Head 1962 The Alchemist 1962

Galacidalacidesoxyribonucleicacid 1963

Dali declared: "It is quite correct that I have made use of photography throughout my life. I stated years ago that painting is merely photography done by hand, consisting of super-fine images the sole significance of which resides in the fact that they were seen by a human eye and recorded by a human hand. Every great work of art that I admire was copied from a photograph. The inventor of the magnifying glass was born in the same year as Vermeer. Not enough attention has yet been paid to this fact. And I am convinced that Vermeer von Delft used a mirror to view his subjects and make tracings of them. Praxiteles, most divine of all sculptors, copied his bodies faithfully, without the slightest departure. Velazquez had a similar respect for reality, with complete chastity..." And: "The hand of a painter must be so faithful that it is capable of automatically correcting

constituents of Nature that have been distorted by a photograph. Every painter must have an ultra-academic training. It is only through virtuosity of such an order that the possibility of something else becomes available: Art."

Dali prophetically added: "I foresee that the new art will be what I term 'quantum realism'. It will take into account what the physicists call quantum energy, what mathematics calls chance, and what the artists call the imponderable: Beauty. The picture of tomorrow will be a faithful image of reality, but one will sense that it is a reality pervaded with extraordinary life, corresponding to what is known as the discontinuity of matter. Velazquez and Vermeer were divisionists. They already intuited the fears of modern Man. Nowadays, the most talented and sensitive painters merely express the fear of indeterminism. Modern science says that nothing really exists, and one sees scientists passionately debating photographic plates on which there is demonstrably nothing of a material nature. So artists who paint their pictures out of nothing are not so far wrong. Still, it is only a transitional phase. The great artist must be capable of assimilating nothingness into his painting. And that nothingness will breathe life into the art of tomorrow." Hercules Lifts the Skin of the Sea and Stops Venus for an Instant from Waking Love 1963 On 15 October 1962, Dali exhibited The Battle of Tetuan in the Palacio del Tinell in Barcelona, alongside the picture by Mariano Fortuny that had inspired it. To Dali's way of thinking, it was the start of a war of pictures. In his own work, as in Fortuny's, virtuosity was a function of carefully quantified patchwork and dabs, from which substance the

images emerged suddenly. Dali illuminatingly commented that when he considered the patterning of print on a newspaper, what he saw was The Battle of Tetuan. Or soccer games. In the Diary of a Genius he wrote (3 September 1963):

"I have always been in the habit of looking at papers upside down. Instead of reading the news, I look at it and I see it. Even as an adolescent, I saw, among the typographical spirals, and just by squinting, soccer games as they would look on television. It even happened that before half time, I had to go and rest, so exhausted was I by the ups and downs of the game. Today, holding the papers upside down, I see divine things moving at such a pace that I decide, in a sublime inspiration of Dalinian pop art, to have pieces of newspapers repainted which contain aesthetic treasures that are often worthy of Phidias.

I shall have these newspapers, in outsize enlargements, quantified by fly droppings... This idea occurs to me when I notice the beauty of certain newspaper collages, yellowed and a bit flyspecked, by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

This evening, while I am writing, I am listening to the radio, which is resounding with the boom of guns that are deservedly being fired for Braque's funeral. Braque - who is famous among other things for his aesthetic discovery of news-paper collages. And I dedicate in homage to him my most transcendent and much more instantaneously famous bust of Socrates quantified by flies." The Battle of Tetuan

1961-62

Arabs. Study for "The Battle of Tetuan" 1960-61 electrocular Monocle and the Paranoiac-Critical Method Dali took a lively interest in every kind of scientific development, and in spring 1962 he returned from America with an "electrocular monocle". This astounding gadget had been developed by the electronics section of a major aeronautics company. A recorder registered images and transferred them televisually to a telescopic tube that substituted for a screen, a telescope so constructed that the eye could distinguish the televised image yet at the same time see everything in its field of vision in a perfectly normal way. For Dali, the painter needed a second type of vision, occasioned by irritation of the retina. This double vision, which others were prompting with the help of mescahn, hallucinogenic mushrooms or LSD, could be caused by the "electrocular monocle" instead. In conversations with a professor named Jayle, a leading optics specialist, over the course of several years, Dali had been expressing the wish to have a kind of contact lens filled with fluid introduced into the eye - so that images controlled from outside could even be registered during sleep.

Mohammed's Dream (Homage to Fortuny) 1961 Arab 1962

Dali was so excited by the "electrocular monocle" that he immediately had one installed in the Catalan beret he frequently wore. Dali - it is worth mentioning -never wore a hat proper, but nonetheless liked to cover his head with the most curious of headgear: for him, anything that touched his hair possessed symbolic meaning. In his youth he had shaved his head for the sake of doing so - to balance a sea urchin. He was once even observed scooping out the soft inside of a crouston loaf, which resembles a tricorn hat in shape, and entering the most exclusive club in Figueras, the "Sport Figuerenc", wearing his impromptu hat causing a scandal amongst the members. Later in London he made a public appearance wearing a diving suit, and posed for photographer Cecil Beaton in a fencer's mask.

If we are to grasp Dali's art correctly, we need to see how capable he was of reigning in his imagination and his dreams, in order to suit them to the subjects of his paintings. His "paranoiac-critical" activity could be visited on random materials suddenly and unexpectedly. For example, at a time when Fortuny's The Battle of Tetuan had become an obsession with Dali, he happened upon a major component of the picture he himself planned to paint on the same subject - in the American news magazine Time. One winter evening in New York he discovered, in a trodden and crumpled copy he found in the snow, a photograph of a fantastic Arabian scene, and, quickly picking it up, declared: "I have found my battle of Tetuan." His imagination was always rapid, as this anecdote concerning a newspaper photograph reminds us. Arabs - the Death of Raimundus Lullus

1963 udy for Deoxyribonucleic Acid Arabs 1963 As a whole, Dali' s work as a painter was governed by a quest ruled by the need to discipline his inspiration and technique. In 1948, at a time when he was working on Leda Atomica, he began to take an active interest in the Divine Proportions laid down in the 15th century by Fra Luca Pacioli. With the assistance of Prince Matila Ghyka, a Romanian mathematician, Dali spent almost three months calculating the mathematical disposition of Leda Atomica. In all his works to follow, his procedure was the same; he used the golden section, the canon, and the principles of divine proportion. Not long after, in the Nova Geometria of Raimundus Lullus, he discovered arguably the most perfect square in aesthetics, known as the Figura Magistralis. Lullus's treatise was taken by the architect of El Escorial, Juan de Herrera, as his guide when he composed his discourse on cubic form; and Dali drew upon this work in the composition of paintings such as Corpus Hypercubus, now in New York's Metropolitan Museum. As with most great artists, it was in fact an innate sixth sense for proportion that enabled Dali to run the gamut of the aesthetic range. He was able to endow the rules with life as he desired, whether they derived from antiquity, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Every good painter, Dali said, should proceed as Velazquez did: using his sense of proportion and obeying every rule in the book to the letter in the first version of a painting - and then smashing up the lot, and indeed standing several of the rules on their heads. Macrophotographic Self-Portrait with the Appearance of Gala

1962 custom in Spain is for a woman to place her maiden name before her married name and to associate the former with the latter through a possessive "of", to emphasize that the woman belongs to that particular man. The title of a book by Robert Descharnes, Dalide Gala, thus inevitably suggests that Dali belonged to Gala - and is quite correct to do so. It was Gala who inspired Dali, Gala who kept him under control, Gala who saw to the practicalities of their life together. In the Secret Life, Dali confirmed that he would have been nothing without Gala. It is useful to read Descharnes' book if we are to understand his work, and to see that Gala was not only his wife but also adopted the roles of his mother and sister. Psychiatrist Pierre Roumeguere wrote a study of Dali's personality which nicely complements Dali's own mythology of Gala. In it, Dali is cast as Pollux, while his dead brother is Castor and Gala Helen. That is to say, after having been Leda's mother, Gala became the immortal sister of Pollux, and Leda's daughter. Roumeguere's theory changes the contours of the Port Lligat house: suddenly we have to accommodate an extra oval, the egg in which Gala and Dali were united, in our ideas.

Fifty Abstract Paintings Which as Seen from Two Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen from Six Yards Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger

1963 from now on, Dali lived with two idees fixes: that of the Dioscuri, and that of cybernetic science. His mind was busy looking for correlations between the two areas. One of the preliminary sketches for The Battle of Tetuan bears the dedication, "For Helen from her Dioscuri". Dali was excited to discover that the word "cybernetic" was etymologically derived from the Greek "kybernetes", a steersman or pilot. For Plato, the pilot's task was clear. The captain chose a harbour into which the craft was to be sailed. The helmsman adjusted the rudder in order to steer the vessel in the required direction. And the pilot ensured that the helmsman was continually aware how to use his rudder in order to reach the harbour. In this joint effort, the captain took the decision on a goal, the helmsman steered, and the pilot gave guidance. The pilot, in other words, is cybernetic in terms of his activity; and this derivation and meaning of the word struck Dali powerfully, since he saw himself as the pilot of his own life. But he went a step further and found a way of associating this with his other current obsession, with the Dioscuri. Was it not the task of Castor and Pollux, in antiquity, to guide ships ? Having made this connection, Dali averred that, with the remote guidance of the Dioscuri, he was piloting the boat of their life, with Gala's hand firmly on the rudder. venus with Drawers 1964 venus' Otorhinologic Head 1964 The Sacred Heart of Jesus 1962

St. George and the Dragon 1962 Twist in the Studio of Velazquez 1962 Vision of Fatima 1962 Madonna with a Mystical Rose 1963 Untitled (Still Life with Lilies) 1963 The Judgement of Paris 1963 Portrait of My Dead Brother 1963 Landscape with Flies 1964 Untitled (St. John) 1964 The Sun of Dali 1965 Female Nude (after restoration) 1964

Bust of Dante 1964 Modern Rhapsody" from the 1957 series "The Seven Arts" THE CONQUEST OF

THE IRRATIONAL

"The Conquest of the Irrational" of 1935, one of several manifestos Dali wrote, is reprinted here as translated from the French by Joachim Neugroschel. The images shown on this page are not intended to match the context.

THE WATERS WE SWIM IN We all know that the brilliant and sensational progress of the individual sciences, the glory and honour of the space and the era we live in, involves, on the one hand, the crisis and the overwhelming disrepute of logical intuition, and on the other hand, the respect for irrational factors and hierarchies as new positive and specifically productive values.

We must bear in mind that pure and logical intuition, pure intuition, I repeat, a pure maid of all work, in the private homes of the particular sciences, had been carrying about in her womb an illegitimate child who was nothing less than the child of physics proper; and by the time Maxwell and Faraday were at work, this son was noticeably weighed down with an unequivocal persuasiveness and a personal force of gravity that left no doubt about the father of the child: Newton.

Because of this downward pull and the force of gravity, pure intuition, after being booted out of the homes of all the particular sciences, has now turned into pure prostitution, for we see her offering her final charms and final turbulences in the brothel of the artistic and literary world.

It is under cultural circumstances like these that our contemporaries, systematically cretinised by the mechanism and architecture of self-punishment, by the psychological congratulations of bureaucracy, by ideological chaos, and the austerity of imagination, by paternal wastelands of emotion, and other wastelands, waste their energy biting into the senile and triumphal tastiness of the plump, atavitic, tender, military, and territorial back of some Hitlerian nursemaid, in order to finally manage to communicate in some fashion or other with the consecrated totemic host which has been whisked away from under their very noses and which, we all know, was nothing but the spiritual and symbolical sustenance that Catholicism has been offering for centuries to appease the cannibalistic frenzy of moral and irrational starvation.

For, in point of fact, the contemporary hunger for the irrational is always keenest before a cultural dining table offering only the cold and unsubstantial leftovers of art and literature and the burning analytical preciseness of the particular sciences, momentarily incapable of any nutritive synthesis because of their disproportionate scope and specialisation, and in all events totally unassimilable except by speculative cannibalism. Here lies the source of the enormous nutritive and cultural responsibility of surrealism, a responsibility that has been growing more and more objective, encroaching, and exclusivist with each new cataclysm of collective famine, each new gluttonous, viscous, ignominious and sublime bite of the fearful jaws of the masses wolfing down the congested, bloody, and preeminently biological cutlet of politics.

It is under these circumstances that Salvador Dali, clutching the precise apparatus of paranoid-critical activity, and less willing than ever to desert his uncompromising cultural post, has for a long time now been suggesting that we might do well to eat up the surrealities, too; for we surrealists are the sort of high-quality, decadent, stimulating, immoderate and ambivalent foodstuff which, with the utmost tact and intelligence, agrees with the gamy, paradoxical and succulently truculent state proper to, and characteristic of, the climate of moral and ideological confusion in which we have the honour and the pleasure to be living.

For we surrealists, as you will realise by paying us some slight attention, are not quite artists, nor are we really scientists; we are caviar, and believe me, caviar is the

extravagance and the very intelligence of taste, especially in concrete times like the present in which the above mentioned hungering for the irrational, albeit an incommensurable, impatient, and imperialist hungering, is so exasperated by the salivary expectations of waiting, that in order to arrive progressively at its glorious conquests close by, it must first swallow the fine, heady, and dialectical grape of caviar, without which the heavy and stifling food of the next ideologies would threaten immediately to paralyse the vital and philosophical rage of the belly of history.

For caviar is the life experience not only of the sturgeon, but of the surrealists as well, because, like the sturgeon, we are carnivorous fish, who, as I have already hinted, swim between two bodies of water, the cold water of art and the warm water of science; and it is precisely due to that temperature and to our swimming against the current that the experience of our lives and our fecundation reaches that turbid depth, that irrational and moral hyperlucidity possible only in the climate of Neronian osmosis that results from the living and continuous fusion of the soles thickness and its crowned heat, the satisfaction and the circumcision of the sole and the corrugated iron, territorial ambition and agricultural patience, keen collectivism and visors propped up by letters of white on the old billiard cushions and letters of white on the old millyard Russians, all sorts of warm and dermatological elements, which, in short, are the coexisting and characteristic elements presiding over the notion of the imponderable, a sham notion unanimously recognised as functioning as an epithet for the elusive taste of caviar and hiding the timid and gustatory germs of concrete irrationality, which, being merely the apotheosis and the paroxysm of the objective imponderable, constitutes the

divisionist exactness and precision of the very caviar of imagination and will constitute, exclusively and philosophically, the terribly demoralising and terribly complicated result of my experiences and inventions in painting.

For one thing is certain: I hate any form of simplicity whatsoever.

MY FORTIFICATIONS It seems perfectly transparent to me that my enemies, my friends and the general public allegedly do not understand the meaning of the images that arise and that I transcribe into my paintings. How can anyone expect them to understand when I myself, the maker, dont understand my paintings either.

The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand their meaning doesnt imply that these paintings are meaningless: on the contrary, their meaning is so deep, complex, coherent and involuntary that it eludes the simple analysis of logical intuition.

In order to reduce my paintings to the level of the vernacular and explain them, I should have to submit them to special

analyses, preferably of a scientific rigor and as ambitiously objective as possible. After all, any explanation occurs a posteriori, once the painting exists as a phenomenon.

My sole pictorial ambition is to materialise by means of the most imperialist rage of precision the images of concrete irrationality. The world of imagination and the world of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident, consistent, durable, as persuasively, cognoscitively and communicably thick as the exterior world of phenomenal reality. The important thing, however, is that which one wishes to communicate: the irrational concrete subject.

The pictorial means of expression are concentrated on the subject. The illusionism of the most abjectly arriviste and irresistible mimetic art, the clever tricks of a paralysing foreshortening, the most analytically narrative and discredited academicism, can become sublime hierarchies of thought when combined with new exactness of concrete irrationality as the images of concrete irrationality approach the phenomenal Real, the corresponding means of expression approach those of great realist painting Velasquez and Vermeer de Delft to paint realistically in accordance with irrational thinking and the unknown imagination. Instantaneous photography, in colour and done by hand, of superfine, extravagant, extra-plastic, extrapictorial, unexplored, deceiving, hypernormal, feeble images of concrete irrationality images momentarily unexplainable and irreducible either by systems of logical intuition or by rational mechanisms.

The images of concrete irrationality are thus authentically unknown images.

Surrealism, in its first period, offers specific methods for approaching the images of concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusively passive and receptive role of the surrealist subject, are being liquidated to make way for new surrealist methods of the systematic exploration of the irrational. The pure psychic automatism, dreams, experimental oneirism, surrealist objects with symbolic functioning, the ideography of instincts, phosphenomenal and hypnagogical irritation, etc, now occur per se as nonevolutive processes.

Furthermore, the images obtained offer two serious inconveniences:

(1) they cease being unknown images, because by falling into the realm of psychoanalysis they are easily reduced to current and logical speech albeit continuing to offer an uninterpretable residue and a very vast and authentic margin of enigma, especially for the greater public;

(2) their essentially virtual and chimerical character no longer satisfies our desires or our principles of verification first announced by Breton in his Discourse on the Smidgen of Reality.

Ever since, the frenzied images of surrealism desperately tend toward their tangible possibility, their objective and physical existence in reality. Only those people who are unaware of this can still flounder about in the gross misunderstanding of the poetic escape, and continue to believe our mysticism of the fantastic and our fanaticism of the marvellous.

I, for my part, believe that the era of inaccessible mutilations, unrealisable bloodthirsty osmoses, flying visceral lacerations, hair-rocks, catastrophic uprootings, is over as far as experimentation goes, although this era may quite probably continue to constitute the exclusive iconography of a large period of surrounding surrealist painting.

The new frenzied images of concrete irrationality tend toward their real and physical possibility; they go beyond the domain of psychoanalysable virtual hallucinations and manifestations.

These images present the evolutive and productive character characteristic of the systematic fact. Eluards and Bretons attempts at simulation, Bretons recent objectpoems, Ren Magrittes latest pictures, the method of Picassos latest sculptures, the theoretical and pictorial activity of Salvador Dali, etc .... prove the need of concrete materialisation in current reality, the moral and systematic condition to assert, objectively and on the level of the Real, the frenzied unknown world of our rational experiences.

Contrary to dream memory, and the virtual and impossible images of purely receptive states, which one can only narrate, it is the physical facts of objective irrationality with which one can really hurt oneself.

It was in 1929 that Salvador Dali turned his attention to the internal mechanism of paranoid phenomena, envisaging the possibility of an experimental method based on the power that dominates the systematic associations peculiar to paranoia; subsequently this method was to become the frenzied-critical synthesis that bears the name of paranoidcritical activity.

Paranoia: delirium of interpretative association involving a systematic structure paranoid-critical activity: spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the interpretative-critical association of delirium phenomena.

The presence of active and systematic elements peculiar to paranoia warrant the evolutive and productive character proper to paranoid-critical activity. The presence of active and systematic elements does not presuppose the idea of voluntarily directed thinking or of any intellectual compromise whatsoever; for, as we all know, in paranoia, the active and systematic structure is consubstantial with the delirium phenomenon itself any delirium phenomenon with a paranoid character, even an instantaneous and sudden one, already involves the systematic structure in full and merely objectifies itself a posteriori by means of critical intervention.

Critical activity intervenes uniquely as a liquid revealer of systematic images, associations, coherences, subtleties such as are earnest and already in existence at the moment in which delirious instantaneity occurs and which, for the moment to that degree of tangible reality, paranoid-critical activity permits to return to objective light. Paranoid-critical activity is an organising and productive force of objective chance.

Paranoid-critical activity does not consider surrealist images and phenomena in isolation, but ia a whole coherent context of systematic and significant relationships. Contrary to the passive, impartial, contemplative and aesthetic attitude of irrational phenomena, the active, systematic, organising, cognoscitive attitude of these same phenomena are regarded as associative, partial, and significant events, in the authentic domain of our immediate and practical lifeexperience.

The main point is the systematic-interpretative organisation of surrealist experimental sensational material, scattered and narcissistic.

In fact, the surrealists events during the course of a day: nocturnal emissions, distorted memories, dreams, daydreaming, the concrete transformation of the nighttime phosphene into a hypnagogical image or the waking phosphene into an objective image, the nutritive whim, intrauterine claims, anamorphic hysteria, deliberate retention of urine, involuntary retention of insomnia, the chance image of exclusivist exhibitionism, an abortive act, a

delirious address, regional sneezing, the anal wheelbarrow, the minute error, Lilliputian malaise, the supernormal physiological state, the painting one stops oneself from painting, the painting one does paint, the territorial telephone call, the upsetting image, etc, etc, all this, I say, and a thousand other instantaneous or successive concerns, revealing a minimum of irrational intentionality, or, just the opposite, a minimum of suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of the precise apparatus of paranoid-critical activity, in an indestructible deliriointerpretative system of political problems, paralytical images, questions of a more or less mammalian nature, playing the role of an obsessive idea.

Paranoid-critical activity organises and objectifies exclusivistically the unlimited and unknown possibilities of the systematic association of subjective and objective phenomena presenting themselves to us as irrational concerns, to the exclusive advantage of the obsessive idea.

Paranoid-critical activity thus reveals new and objective meanings of the irrational; it tangibly makes the very world of delirium pass to the level of reality.

Paranoid phenomena: well-known images with a double figuration the figuration can be multiplied theoretically and practically-everything hinges on the paranoid capacity of the author.

The basis of associative mechanisms and the renewal of obsessive ideas permits, as is the case in a recent painting of Salvador Dalis, the presentation, in the course of elaboration, of six simultaneous images none of which undergo the slightest figurative transformation an athletes torso, a lions head, a generals head, a horse, the bust of a shepherdess, a skull.

Different spectators see different images in the same painting; it goes without saying that the realisation is scrupulously realistic.

An example of paranoid-critical activity: Salvador Dalis next book, "The Tragic Myth of Millets 'Angelus', in which the method of paranoid-critical activity is applied to the delirium fact that constitutes the obsessional character of Millets painting.

Art history must therefore be refurbished in accordance with the method of paranoid-critical activity; according to this method, such apparently dissimilar paintings as Leonardos "Mona Lisa", Millets "Angelus", Watteaus "Embarkation for Cythera" actually depict the very same subject matter, that is to say, exactly the same thing.

THE ABJECTION AND MISERY OF ABSTRACTION-CREATION The flagrant lack of philosophic and general culture in the cheerful propellers of that model of mental deficiency that calls itself abstract art, abstraction-creation, nonfigurative art, etc, is one of the authentically sweetest things from the viewpoint of the intellectual and modern desolation of our era.

Retarded Kantians, sticky with their scatological golden means, never stop wanting to offer us on the new optimism of their shiny paper, this soup of abstract aesthetics, which in reality is even worse than those colossally sordid warmedup noodle soups of neo-Thomism, which even the most convulsively famished cats wouldnt touch with a 10-foot pole.

If, as they claim, forms and colours have their own aesthetic value beyond their representational value and their anecdotal meaning, then bow could they resolve and explain the classical paranoid image,with its double and simultaneous representation, which can easily offer a strictly imitative image, ineffective from their point of view and yet, with no change, an image thats plastically valid and rich?

Such is the case with that tiny ultra-anecdotal figurine of a sprightly reclining pickaninny in the style of Meissonier; the boy, if looked at vertically is merely the ultra-rich and even plastically succulent shadow of a Pompeian nose highly respectable on account of its degree of abstraction-creation!

The ingenious experiment of Picasso simply proves the material conditional nature, the deifying and ineluctable nature, in regard to the physical and geometric precisions of aesthetic systems, biological and frenetic systems of the concrete object. Since I feel inspired to do so, permit me to speak to you in verse: The biological and dynastic phenomenon that constitutes the Cubism of Picasso was the first great imaginative cannibalism surpassing the experimental ambitions of modern mathematical physics. Picassos life will form the not yet understood polemical basis in accordance with which physical psychology will reopen a gap of living flesh and obscurity in philosophy. For because

of the anarchic and systematic materialist thought of Picasso we shall know physically experimentally and without the problematic psychological innovations with a Kantian flavour of the gestalt-ists all the misery of objects of conscience localised and comfortable with their cowardly atoms the infinite and diplomatic sensations. For the hypermaterialist thought of Picasso proves that the cannibalism of the race

devours the intellectual species that regional wine soaks the family fly of the phenomenologist mathematics of the future that there is such a thing as extra-psychological strict figures intermediary between the imaginative fat and the monetary idealisms between transfinite arithmetics and sanguinary mathematics between the structural entity of an obsessive sole and the conduct of living beings in contact with the obsessive sole

for the sole in question remains totally exterior to the understanding of the gestalt theory since this theory of the strict figure and structure has no physical means allowing the analysis or even the registering of human behaviour with regard to structures and figures objectively manifest as

physically delirious for there is no such thing now as far as I know as a physics of psychopathology a physics of paranoia which might be considered simply the experimental basis of the coming philosophy of the psychopathology the coming philosophy of paranoid-critical activity which some day I shall try to envisage polemically If I have the time and the inclination.

"Singularities", circa 1936

HERACLITUS TEARS There exists a perpetual and synchronic physical materialisation of the great semblances of thought such as Heraclitus meant when he intelligently wept his heart out at the self-modesty of nature.

The Greeks realised it in their statues of psychological gods, a transformation of the obscure and turbulent passions of man into a clear, analytical, and carnal anatomy.

Today, physics is the new geometry of thought; and, while for the Greeks, space such as Euclid understood it was merely an extremely distant abstraction inaccessible to the timid three-dimensional continuum that Descartes was to proclaim later on, nowadays space has, as you know, become a terribly material, terribly personal, and terribly meaningful physical object that squeezes us all like real blackheads.

Whereas the Greeks, as I have said above, materialised their Euclidean psychology and feelings in the nostalgic and divine muscular clarity of their sculptors, Salvador Dali, faced in 1935 with the anguishing and colossal problem of Einsteinian space-time, is not content with anthropomorphism, libidinous arithmetic, or flesh: instead, be makes cheese.

Take my word for it, Salvador Dalis famous melted watches are nothing but tender paranoid-critical Camembert, the extravagant and solitary Camembert of time and space.

In conclusion, I must beg your pardon, before the authentic famine that I assume honours my readers, for having begun this theoretical meal, which one might have hoped to be wild and cannibalistic, with the civilised imponderable factor of caviar and finishing it with the even headier and deliquescent imponderable of Camembert.

Dont let yourself be taken in: these two superfine semblances of the imponderable conceal a finer, well-known, sanguinary, and irrational grilled cutlet that will eat all of us up. Palette: lorca's 'Ode to Dali'

1904-1929, Spain, Cadaques, Dali Museum Florida, Family, Gala, Morse, Religion & the occult alis sister Ana Maria was born. Seen here in his 1924 portrait, she would be almost the only female model in his paintings until he met his wife Gala in 1929. In 1949 she published a memoir, Dali as Seen by His Sister.

Dali was, by his own ready admission, thoroughly spoiled by his family. Apart from being barred from fraternising with the

household staff in the kitchen, he wrote in The Secret Life, I was allowed to do anything I pleased. I wet my bed till I was eight for the sheer fun of it. I was the absolute monarch of the house. Nothing was good enough for me. My father and mother worshiped me.

On the day of the Feast of Kings I received among innumerable gifts a dazzling kings costume a gold crown studded with great topazes and an ermine cape; from that time on I lived almost continually disguised in this costume.

Perhaps inevitably, his sister would suffer as a result of Salvadors elevated status in the household. When he was six, in 1910, he recalled, the appearance of Halleys comet created quite a stir. When everyone rushed up to the terrace of the house one day upon hearing that it was visible, Dali remained paralysed because someone had suggested its tail might touch the earth and destroy it.

When he finally set out to join them he noticed Ana crawling through a doorway.

I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as though it had been a ball, and continued running, carried away with a delirious joy induced by this savage act.

But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me down into his office, where I remained for punishment till dinnertime.

The fact of not having been allowed to see the comet has remained seared in my memory as one of the most intolerable frustrations of my life. I screamed with such rage that I completely lost my voice.

Noticing how this frightened my parents, I learned to make use of the stratagem on the slightest provocation.

On another occasion when I happened to choke on a fishbone my father, who couldnt stand such things, got up and left the dining room holding his head between his hands. Thereafter on several occasions I simulated the hacking and hysterical convulsions that accompany such choking just to observe my fathers reaction and to attract an anguished and exclusive attention to my person.

Salvadors brutal kicking of his sister didnt prevent him from lunging to her defence when the family doctor came to the house to pierce her earlobes. Reacting to what he perceived as outrageous cruelty, he waited for the doctor to settle into position to perform the operation.

Then I broke into the room brandishing my leather-thonged mattress beater and whipped the doctor right across the face, breaking his glasses. He was quite an old man and he

cried out with pain. When my father came running in he fell on his shoulder

Since then I loved to be sick, if only for the pleasure of seeing the little face of that old man whom I had reduced to tears.

In The Secret Life, Dali happily chronicled his horrendous childhood behaviour. It should be stressed, however, that biographer Ian Gibson found little that was bizarre in Dalis youth, the suggestion being that Salvador deliberately invented myths to enliven this era and cast himself in a cruel and macabre light.

Dali remembered catching a bat and biting it nearly in two, and at school the Immaculate Conception primary school, run by the Brothers of the Marist Order deliberately throwing himself down stone staircases just so he could relish the attention he received.

The Broken Bridge and the Dream, 1945

Earlier in his autobiography, Dali described another cruel episode. He was five at the time, and walking alongside a smaller boy on a tricycle, pushing him along. They were on the edge of the village of Cambrils near Barcelona, he wrote, and came to a bridge under construction.

Salvador was suddenly seized with the impulse to injure the boy. He made sure no one was watching and pushed the child over the edge, sending him five metres to the rocks below.

The boy was laid up for a week with a badly injured head, but in the initial commotion back at the house, Dali sat in a parlour chair quietly eating cherries. I dont recall having experienced the slightest feeling of guilt over this incident, he wrote.

There is no doubt that Dali really committed this atrocious deed, Carlos Rojas and Alma Amell insist in their 1993 biography Salvador Dali, Or The Art of Spitting on Your Mothers Portrait.

They note with surprise, though, that as if his superego censored at least a symbolic part of these memories, he gives the wrong name for the place.

Since he places the location near Barcelona, they say, it couldnt have been Cambrils, which is in Tarragona, but Cabrils, some 120 kilometres away. Below is a almost surrealistic Google Earth image of houses on a hill in Cabrils.

Rosa Salleras, another Figueras native, was a childhood friend of Dalis, six years younger but a frequent playmate, a kind of younger sister, as Ewen Carmichael described her in a 2004 article for the Scotsman, a recollection of meeting her before her death two years earlier.

Their parents summer homes were next to each other in Cadaqus, and when Rosa was nine and Dali 16 he painted her standing high above the Bay of Cadaqus.

On first glance it appears raw and amateurish, Carmichael wrote, but on closer inspection the true genius of Dali shines through. It is an extraordinary painting for one so young and captured the mood of the child-woman.

Rosa said Dali, always short of money and materials, painted a landscape on the reverse side.

Its not clear what painting theyre discussing, but the 1918 canvas above View of Port dAlguer, Cadaqus in the collection of the Dali Museum in Florida was originally owned by Rosa Salleras de Naveira, and then by Barcelonas Galeria Maragall, where Eleanor and Reynolds Morse purchased it.

Below, two canvases that might stand in, but painted much later and hardly amateurish.

Girl of Cadaques, from 1926

Portrait of a Girl in a Landscape (Cadaques), circa 1926

Rosa remembered Dali who she characterised as timid, shy and always blushing in front of girls teaching her to catch bats by tying white cloths to the top of poles and waving them around until the bats fell exhausted to the ground.

Dalis father, she said, was a sort of dictatorial man who reminded her of Mussolini.

And Rosa remembered, as well, Ana Marias dismay when Gala arrived on the scene.

Dalis sister was furious, she said. And she was hurt. I think she was very jealous because she was always in the front row. Whenever Salvador was invited, Ana Maria was invited. She was the first lady. Then when Salvador met and married Gala, Ana Maria didnt have any place.

0 Comments

1904-1929, 1930-1939, Spain, Paris, Cadaques, Da Vinci, Family, Picasso, Sex, Vermeer, Velazquez

The promise of the Tower Mill

The Pichot family of Barcelona the name is often seen as Pixtot, the Catalan version, and Dali spelled it Pitchot in his 1942 autobiography also had a farm-estate just outside Figueras called El Moli de la Torre, the Tower Mill.

Various sources say its just on the way into town along the highway that runs from Roses on the Cap de Creus peninsula across the Empord plain. In the Google Earth image above you can see the husks of some buildings. The N-260 motorway from Roses slices up into Figueras, parallel with the smaller Carrer del Port de la Selva. The blacktop thoroughfare looping off the N-260, past the ruins, is Cami del Moli. The area is all industrial, with a water-purification plant nearby and, alongside the Cami del Moli, a canal that, at a stretch, might once have powered a mill.

Its not much evidence on which to hang a claim that this is where Dali learned to paint, at the Pichot family business, a fulling mill, but his story is prone to apparitions in the heat of the Catalonian sun.

Fulling mills, sometimes called tucking or walking mills, are where cloth, usually woollen, is cleaned of oil, dirt and other impurities, a process that makes it thicker. The adolescent Dali was more interested in other things he found on the estate, the female family members and labourers included.

There were, most importantly though, Ramon Pichots paintings, hung throughout the house, a source of fascination for Salvador, who in turn began committing the surrounding landscape to canvas as early as 1914.

Salvador was a chronically ill child, and not all of his ailments were imaginary, so my parents decided to send me to the country for a rest; I was to visit the Pitchot family.

My parents before me had already undergone the influence of the personality of the Pitchot family. All of them were artists and possessed great gifts and an unerring taste. Ramon Pitchot was a painter, Ricardo a cellist, Luis a violinist, Maria a contralto who sang in the opera.

Pepito was, perhaps, the most artistic of all without, however, having cultivated any of the fine arts in particular. But it was he who created the house at Cadaques, and who had a unique sense of the garden and of life in general.

Mercedes, too, was a Pitchot 100 per cent, and she was possessed of a mystical and fanatical sense of the house. She married that great Spanish poet Eduardo Marquina, who

brought to the picturesque realism of this Catalonian family the Castillian note of austerity and of delicacy which was necessary for the climate of civilisation of the Pitchot family to achieve its exact point of maturity.

Pepito Pichot persuaded Dalis father to let the boy take lessons from the German portrait and landscape artist Siegfrid Burmann, who was staying in Cadaques at the time.

The mills tower resonated like a dream image in The Dream Approaches from 1933, above, and below, The Horseman of Death and The Tower, both from a year later.

In The Dream Approaches, a sheet covers what could be a coffin, atop which sits an object resembling female genitalia. The tower is a decrepit symbol of death as well as desire. In his autobiography Dali recalled the tower mill as the setting for his first sexual and violent urges toward a girl. Theres little doubt that the tower recurs in his art as a phallic symbol.

Naked, and comparing myself to my schoolfriends, I discovered that my penis was small, pitiful and soft, Dali told Andre Parinaud in 1976 for what became The Unspeakable Confessions Of Salvador Dali.

I can recall a pornographic novel whose Don Juan machinegunned female genitals with ferocious glee, saying that he enjoyed hearing women creak like watermelons. I convinced myself that I would never be able to make a woman creak like a watermelon.

Having a small penis is a common self-criticism among men, of course, but biographer Ian Gibson, having scoured Salvadors adolescent writings with a magnifying glass, said hed found ample evidence in the frank outpourings that the young Dalis relationship with his first girlfriend had suffered because of his shortcoming and he ended up masturbating frequently.

Presumably the revelation is important to art historians trying to track the meaning of Dalis paintings, in which masturbation, like the tower, was a regular theme.

Louis Markoya of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, Dalis protege in the 1970s, has serious doubts about Gibsons credibility, but points out that Salvador had his own spin on the subject in his book Dali on Modern Art: The Cuckolds of Antiquated Modern Art. Intriguingly, he said he could tell the size of any given artists penis by his work.

The artists he disliked most tended to have large penises that he said weighed them down and made them stupid and incapable of painting or drawing anything beautiful. The

reverse was true for geniuses, including himself, Raphael, Vermeer, Leonardo and Velazquez. (He rated himself against these same individuals as an artist, too. See this post.)

Not only did the smaller glans allow you to be a genius (allowing a lightness only angels can appreciate and acquire), but it brought you further along on the evolutionary scale, closer to the angels themselves, Louis says by way of explaining Dalis reasoning.

As with many things Dali, he cited some proofs which included the sizes of Raphaels cherubs penises, and the size of Leonardos Vitruvian Man, whom he insisted was modelled after Leonardo himself.

One place Dali said he was stumped, Louis continues, was with Picasso, who, Dali said, had a large penis, and was also a genius, something that Dali said was no easy feat, and it even garnered extra admiration for his Spanish compatriot but at the same time he cuckolded him, since Dali was naturally more evolved, angelic and capable of ascension.

Sold at auction in 2007 for $2,368,000, Nostalgic Echo from 1935 features another sort of tower, this one the belltower at Ana Maria Dalis school in Figueras, according to Robert Descharnes. A girl skipping rope can be seen inside, an echo of the figure on the ground before it.

Even Descharnes, Dalis close friend and the most widely accepted authority on his work, couldnt place the other elements, but in 1941 Museum of Modern Art curator James Thrall Soby suggested a keyhole forming the letter i in the pentagonal portal, an image repeated by the bell tower.

Morphological Echo came after this work, and Giorgio de Chiricos Mystery and Melancholy of a Street preceded it, and from the latter there is indeed an echo of imminent danger in the isolation.

De Chiricos calm and tranquility, Dali said, was dramatic because constantly threatened. All that geometric anaesthesia was moving because it abandoned futurism and vaguely foreshadowed surrealism.

Detail from A Hairdresser Preoccupied by the Persistence of Good Weather, 1932

Just as crucially in the Dali hierarchy of emblems, the Tower Mill was the first place he ever saw a crutch, and he explained in The Secret Life how it came to be such a ubiquitous feature of his art.

He and his cousin Julia were helping fetch ladders for the linden-blossom pickers from the tower attic, immense and

dark, cluttered with miscellaneous objects and heretofore out of bounds to him.

I immediately discovered two objects which stood out with a surprising personality. One was a crown of gilded laurel stems that had been made for an opera star performing in Barcelona, and the second was a crutch, of which Dali immediately took possession.

I felt that I should never again in my life be able to separate myself from it, such was the fetishistic fanaticism which seized me at the very first without my being able to explain it. The superb crutch!

Already it appeared to me as the object possessing the height of authority and solemnity. It immediately replaced the old mattress beater with leather fringes which I had adopted a long time ago as a sceptre and which I had lost one day

I victoriously descended into the garden, hobbling solemnly with my crutch in one hand. This object communicated to me an assurance, an arrogance even, which I had never been capable of until then.

SUPPORT GROUP: Clockwise from top left, The Persistence of Fine Weather detail, Meditation on the Harp, The

Spectre of Sex Appeal detail and Average Atmospherocephalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Making a Cranial Harp

The totemic power of his crutch was bolstered when he used it to poke at and then flip over his pet hedgehog when he found it dead and maggot-ridden. Clearly it was a tool useful even against death, and it came in supremely handy again a decade later, when Dali was struggling to gain entry into Paris high society.

He reasoned that the artistocratic and wealthy were people who, instead of standing on the world with both feet, balance themselves on a single foot, like storks, keeping in touch with the common base of the world only by what is strictly necessary.

This they did by tolerating the occasional pederastic and drug-addicted artists. Dali would gain their support, he decided, by being their crutch instead of these pitiful creatures.

I had the original idea of not coming with empty hands, like all the rest. I arrived, in fact, with my arms loaded with crutches! One thing I realised immediately: It would take quantities and quantities of crutches to give a semblance of solidity

And I inaugurated the pathetic crutch to support the monstrous development of certain atmospheric-cephalic skulls crutches to make architectural and durable the fugitive pose of a choreographic leap, to pin the ephemeral butterfly of the dancer with pins that would keep her poised for eternity. Crutches, crutches, crutches, crutches.

I even invented a tiny facial crutch of gold and rubies [based on the one found in Self-portrait with Fried Bacon see this post]. Its bifurcated part was flexible and was intended to hold up and fit the tip of the nose. The other end was softly rounded and was designed to lean on the central hollow above the upper lip. It was therefore a nose crutch, an absolutely useless kind of object to appeal to the snobbism of certain criminally elegant women, just as some beings wear monocles without having any other need of them than to feel the sacred tug of their exhibitionism incrusted in the flesh of their own face.

My symbol of the crutch so adequately fitted and continues to fit into the unconscious myths of our epoch that, far from tiring us, this fetish has come to please everyone more and more

When I had made my first attempt at keeping the aristocracy standing upright by propping it with a thousand crutches, I looked it in the face and said to it honestly, Now I am going to give you a terrible kick in the leg.

The aristocracy drew up a little more the leg that it kept lifted, like a stork. Go ahead, it answered, and gritted its teeth to endure the pain stoically, without a cry. Then, using all my might, I gave it a terrific kick right in the shin.

It did not budge. I had therefore propped it well. Thank you, it said to me. Never fear, I answered as I left, kissing its hand, Ill be back. With the pride of your one leg and the crutches of my intelligence, you are stronger than the revolution that is being prepared by the intellectuals, whom I know intimately.

You are old, and dead with fatigue, and you have fallen from your high place, but the spot where your foot is soldered to the earth is tradition. If you should happen to die, I would come at once and place my own foot in that very imprint of tradition which has been yours, and immediately I would curl up my other leg like a stork. I am ready and able to grow old in this attitude, without tiring.

The Average, Fine and Invisible Harp, 1934

0 Comments

1904-1929, 1970-1979, 1980-Forever, Spain, Dali TheatreMuseum, Figueras, Gala, Pubol Castle, Meissonier

The Dali Theatre-Museum

The original theatre structure in which the museum now stands was designed by architect Roca i Bros. It burned down in 1939 and remained a gutted husk until Dali was convinced to place his museum there.

The museum officially opened on September 28, 1974, and the adjoining Torre Gorgot became part of it later, rechristened Torre Galatea. This is where he lived in his old age, following Galas death, and where the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation now has its offices.

In the courtyard garden that now spans the area where the theatre stalls once perched is the installation entitled Carnaval, which includes one of the Dalis Cadillacs, on which Ernst Fuchs statue of Queen Esther rides; a marble bust by Franois Girardon; a reproduction of Michelangelos The Slave; and, as seen in the photo above, a boat that once belonged to Gala and a column of car tires.

Nearby is the Rainy Taxi, and ringing the courtyard are paintings by Evarist Valls.

Also on the ground floor are the Sala de Peixateries the Fish Shop which is where you can see Soft Self-portrait with Grilled Bacon and Portrait of Picasso. Another room with Dalis drawings on view connects to the maestros crypt.

Few visitors realise they are walking directly about the tomb as they cross the white marble slab in the middle of the redbrick floor of the main hall. The crypt is behind a wall decorated with a cross and the words Salvador Dali Domeneci, Pubol Markisi, 1904-1989.

The theatres old stage, now crowned by a geodesic dome designed by Emilio Prez Piero, is occupied by Dalis towering backdrop for the ballet Labyrinth, and to one side

is Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Metres Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

To the left is the Sala del Tresor the Treasure Room which has Basket of Bread, Galarina, Atomic Leda and The Spectre of Sex Appeal on view. To the right is the popular Mae West Room.

On the next floor up is the Sala Palau del Vent the Wind Palace Room. Here, where Dali exhibited his art in public for the first time at age 14, is the Sistine-like ceiling fresco he toiled on during the mid-1970s. He painted himself and Gala as if ascending into Heaven, and from their torsos, cabinet drawers open to pour out gold coins.

A post by Eric on the website Classical Values claims this artwork, featured in an official Dali calendar one year, is somehow related to the museums geodesic cupola, showing 16 figures arrayed as if part of a zodiac.

In the adjacent room is Poetry of America, and to the left the Sala de les Joies the Jewel Room with 39 pieces Dali designed between 1932 and 1970, along with the preparatory drawings.

On the third floor Dalis private art collection is shown, including works by Meissonier, Fortuny, Modest Urgell, Gerard Dou, El Greco, Marcel Duchamp and Bouguereau along with some of his own, such as Automatic Beginning of a Portrait of Gala.

On the second floor is the gallery of paintings by Antoni Pichot, of the local family that meant so much to Dali.

Appointed by Dali the theatre-museums director, Antoni Pichot was at his side daily the last nine years of his life, watching him putter as best he could, listening always to the music of Tristan and Isolde.

When Dali asked him to run his museum Pichot balked. Im a painter, not a manager.

Thats exactly what I want, Dali replied, a manager who doesnt do anything! Youre perfect.

Pichot remembered first meeting Dali in 1950. His father took him along at the end of each summer to see what the maestro had come up with, and that summer, he said it was The Last Supper. Pichot can be forgiven for slipping on the year: The Sacrament of the Last Supper was done in 1955.

The Pichots home in Figueras was levelled by a bomb during the civil war, and they moved to San Sebastian. There, Antonis drawing instructor was none other than Juan Nuez Fernndez, who had taught Dali in Figueras 30 years before.

In 1972 Dali had a chance to see Pichots studio and enigmatically pronounced his one of his works the painting of Opus Dei. He carted it off, and the next day phoned to ask Antoni to help him with the museum, where his art would appear on permanent display.

Pichot paints the rocks of Cape Creus, seeing in each stone people and stories that almost suggest a paranoiac-critical approach.

Dali had once coached him: Spread an armload of your beach stones on a table and you get The Battle of Constantine by Raphael. Lets see if youre able to paint that. Antoni obliged, and Dali wrote the the introduction for Pichots 1958 Barcelona exhibition where his own The Battle of Constantine was featured.

When the rocks awaken from their long sleep, he said, the noise is that of a ferocious battle.

The four monsters in the theatre-museum are pieces Pichot created with Dali in 1975, made with rocks, boards, tree limbs, parts of a whale skeleton and conch shells.

Above and right, Dali makes a grand show for the press photographers on an October 1968 visit to the Spanish Congress in Madrid.

He was in the capital to make a pitch to state minister Sanchez-Arjona on behalf of the museum in Figueras.

The theatre-museum may well have remained a dream had it not been for Figueras mayor in the early 1960s, Ramon Guardiola. Dali unveiled plans for the museum at a reception the town held in his honour on August 12, 1961. Guardiola knew from the start what he was up against if he was to help Dali make this dream a reality: Two prominent government officials found excuses not to attend the reception.

The party was a success just the same, even if a fierce north wind prevented a helicopter from hauling off the dead bull from the surrealist corrida Dali had arranged. The town council presented him with a medal it had minted for the occasion, the Silver Leaf, and unveiled a plaque on the house where he was born. And, amid the ruins of the old municipal theatre, the artist revealed his grand scheme for a museum of his own.

The fund-raising was now to begin, but Guardiola soon learned that there was scant enthusiasm about donating money to support the project. In terms of officialdom, only the head of the Girona regional government and a few prominent citizens were interested.

Just the same, Guardiola hired architect Ros de Ramis and secured a small grant from the Information and Tourism Ministry. Dali didnt help matters by announcing that, based on his belief that originals and reproductions would have the same value in the future, he would fill the museum with copies of his paintings.

He then asked that one of Buckminster Fullers geodesic domes be erected over the museum courtyard. And when work on the museum failed to begin, he threatened to move the project to Paris or Perpignan instead.

Gala put in her two pesetas, telling Guardiola that if construction hadnt begun by the time she and Salvador returned the following spring, she would send six anarchists from Paris to blow up what remains of the theatre.

A close-up of the drenched mannequin inside the Rainy Taxi at the museum.

For his anguish, belatedly, the town of Figueras posthumously awarded the Silver Leaf to Guardiola in 1975, in recognition of his role in the museums construction.

Guardiola had moved to Figueras in 1950, and five years later met Dali at the local high school, which at the time was the provisional home of the Museum of the Empord. Dali promised some of his artwork, though nothing ever came of it.

Guardiola tried again, this time asking Dali to provide something for the title page of the museum magazines December 1955 issue. This he did, and at the same time he developed an admiration for Guardiolas knowledge about plant cultivation.

When, on his annual return to Port Lligat in the spring of 1956, Dali found that a winter chill had killed off most of the olive trees in the area, he was heartsick. Olives meant a great deal to him. He often called Gala Oliveta, and Garca Lorca had referred to Dalis olive-coloured voice. The olive groves of Cadaques were to Dali like some grey and venerable hairs that crown the philosophical head of the hills.

So he sought Guardiolas advice, and an expert was found who offered a formula with which to treat the ailing trees. Dali prepared the potion himself, and within a few weeks there were again signs of life. He packed some specimens in

a box and took them to the agricultural institute in Girona for analysis.

When the box was opened, a cloud of insects fell out. The cause was found, and the remedy, and most of the olive trees were saved.

Below, a photo of Dali evaluating the sketches of art students who would visit the museum and consult him on a weekly basis at times during the 1970s.

2 Comments

1904-1929, Spain, Cadaques, Family, Figueras, Religion & the occult

In a festive mood

Every January 20, the feast day of Saint Sebastian, the more pious citizens of Cadaques climb a steep path in a 90-minute procession up Mount Pen to the Sant Sebasti Hermitage, an old house perched in the midst of cork oak. The photo below was posted by lluiscanyet on Panoramio.

Ive read that its owned by Sebastian Guinness, a scion of the Irish brewing family who owns a gallery in Dublin named for him. For its opening in 2008 Guinness produced the lost Warhol portrait of Farah Diba Pahlavi, the exiled empress of Iran, claiming hed bought from the Warhol estate.

At any rate, the structure partway up 600-metre Mount Pen is privately owned and opened to the public only on January 20. From the property you can pick out fragments of the landscape that Dali painted in his youth. Just to the south is the Pichot familys summer house.

In earlier centuries the hermitage doubled as a talaia a look-out from which the villagers could watch for approaching pirates, whose harbour raids were a frequent menace.

Dali was 16 or 17 when he painted Fiesta at the Hermitage, above, and with a detail below, on one side of a piece of cardboard and The Fair of the Holy Cross at Figueras, show a little further down, on the other.

The first depicts a celebration of feast day of Saint Sebastian. Dali included himself chatting up a pair of young women who are arm in arm.

Dali biographer Dawn Ades glimpsed his political interests in Fiesta at the Hermitage, a subtle sense of social division in the isolation of the gypsy in a headscarf in the centre.

The second side, the verso, has the annual fete of the title on the feast day of the Holy Cross in May, for which Dali was hired to paint posters. Its chaotic, and Dali probably deliberately tried to tone this down in his later, simpler, less populous pictures of town fetes.

Here he was trying to capture what he termed the living bazaar, a great music box that during the festivities engulfed Plaa de la Palmera, where his family lived (Dali was by then in Madrid). Footballers and bullfighters mingle with gypsies and circus performers, bashful girls and shameless boys.

Football was just catching on in Figueras, and two of Dalis schoolmates, Jaume Miravidles and Joan Maria Torres, played for Uni Esportiva. He did portraits of both, and shown here is that of Miravidles.

Both sides of the double painting of the festivals are finished works, together now on view at the Dali-Theatre Museum, but the Hermitage side was originally shown along with seven other paintings Dali contributed to the Catalan Students Association exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona in late January 1922.

The dual painting was shown publicly again a few months later, at the Exhibition of Empord Artists in Figueras, though its not known which side.

Critics found them derivative, but even if Dali winced at perceived allusions to Nogus and other artists, he took them overall as a compliment.

Dalis sister Ana Maria described the church festivals in her 1951 book All Year Round in Cadaqus.

On the feast of Saint Sebastian, to this day, the parish priest carries a baroque statue of the saint in procession up a hill, through the olive groves, to the church, leading a band of musicians and the faithful.

Romeria Pilgrimage, from 1921

The young girls, with red, blue, magenta and yellow dresses, seem like flowers amidst the earthy greyness of the old ladies dresses, Ana Maria Dali wrote. Just like an allegory to the earth and the flowers born of it.

Everybody carries bags, baskets full of meat, wine bottles, baskets of sea urchins. The odd dog, of the sort that they call around here basket dogs, because they have the job of guarding the food bag while the master works, follows along friskily and absent-mindedly. The very young couples hang back a little behind the others, holding hands.

At the top of the hill by the chapel a luncheon of seafood and ribs is prepared as music for sardana dancing is played, while inside the church the Saint Sebastian songs are sung.

Soon after his decommissioning from the army in 1927, while summering in Cadaques with Garcia Lorca, Dali wrote a poem titled Saint Sebastin that was published in LAmic de les Aris and the newspaper El Gallo.

The cleverly poetic prose sent a ripple through Catalan literati. Dali concocted a metaphor between the arrowriddled saint finding armour in his faith and the artist patiently letting his painting ripen, and elaborated on his ideas about painting being more precise than photography.

The painting shown here is Saint Sebastian from 1982.

Lorca's 'Ode to Dali'

86 Words 133 617words 23272 words 23330/ 460 words 23823 960 words. 23907/1050 23981/ 1140 24233/1392 24289/1442