•Biography•Early Years•Classical Years•Surreal Years•Paranoid Critical Method•Essey(G.Orwell)•A Brief Biography
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí I Domenech was born at 8:45 on the morning of May 11, 1904 in the small agricultural town of Figueres, Spain. Figueres is located in the foothills of the Pyrenees, only sixteen miles from the French border in the principality of Catalonia. The son of a prosperous notary, Dalí spent his boyhood in Figueres and at the family's summer home in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques where his parents built his first studio. As an adult, he made his home with his wife Gala in nearby Port Lligat. Many of his paintings reflect his love of this area of Spain.
The young Dalí attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Early recognition of Dalí's talent came with his first one-man show in Barcelona in 1925. He became internationally known when three of his paintings, including The Basket of Bread (now in the Museum's collection), were shown in the third annual Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928.
The following year, Dalí held his first one-man show in Paris. He also joined the surrealists, led by former Dadaist Andre Breton. That year, Dalí met Gala Eluard when she visited him in Cadaques with her husband, poet Paul Eluard. She became Dalí's lover, muse, business manager, and chief inspiration.
Dalí soon became a leader of the surrealist movement. His painting, The Persistance of Memory , with the soft or melting watches is still one of the best-known surrealist works. But as the war approached, the apolitical Dalí clashed with the surrealists and was "expelled" from the surrealist group during a "trial" in 1934. He did however, exhibit works in international surrealist exhibitions throughout the decade but by 1940, Dalí was moving into a new style that eventually became known as his "classic" period, demonstrating a preoccupation with science and religion.
Dalí and Gala escaped from Europe during World War II, spending 1940-48 in the United States. These were very important years for the artist. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Dali his first major retrospective exhibit in 1941. This was followed in 1942 by the publication of Dali's autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali.
As Dalí moved away from Surrealism and into his classic period, he began his series of 19 large canvases, many concerning scientific, historical or religous themes. Among the best known of these works are The Hallucinogenic Toreador , and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in the museum's collection, and The Sacrament of the Last Supper in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
In 1974, Dalí opened the Teatro Museo in Figueres, Spain. This was followed by retrospectives in Paris and London at the end of the decade. After the death of his wife, Gala, in 1982, Dalí's health began to fail. It deteriorated further after he was burned in a fire in his home in Pubol in 1984. Two years later, a pace-maker was implanted. Much of this part of his life was spent in seclusion, first in Pubol and later in his apartments at Torre Galatea, adjacent to the Teatro Museo. Salvador Dalí died on January 23, 1989 in Figueres from heart failure with respiratory complications.
As an artist, Salvador Dalí was not limited to a particular style or media. The body of his work, from early impressionist paintings through his transitional surrealist works, and into his classical period, reveals a constantly growing and evolving artist. Dalí worked in all media, leaving behind a wealth of oils, watercolors, drawings, graphics, and sculptures, jewels and objects of all descriptions.
Whether working from pure inspiration or on a commissioned illustration, Dalí's matchless insight and symbolic complexity are apparent. Above all, Dalí was a superb draftsman. His excellence as a creative artist will always set a standard for the art of the twentieth century.
When Salvador Dalí was born in 1904 in Figueras, Spain, he was actually the third Salvador Dalí. His father was named Salvador, and he had an older brother, who had died 9 months before Dalí's own birth. Because of the incredibly coincidental dates between the death of the first child and the birth of the second, Salvador Dalí's parents chose to look at the second son as a reincarnation of the first, and as such, treated him accordingly. OUR Salvador Dalí was actually told that he was the reincarnation of his dead brother, and Dalí himself admits that the ghostly memory of this lost sibling was to haunt him for the rest of his life. He was taken to the grave of the older brother, and given free reign over the Dalí household. One of the young boy Dalí's favorite pastimes was parading about in a blue sailor suit or preferably, an emperor's costume. The royal treatment accorded to him by his parents was the result of their fears surrounding the death of their first son. The golden treatment and always present shadow of his elder brother caused in him a distinct shift in personality.
It is this treatment as a young child that relates directly to Dalí's formation of a very unique and conspicuous personality. He says in several of his writings that the dualistic stresses imposed upon him, that of living both as himself, and his dead brother, caused in him a particular obsession with decay and putrefaction. This is where many of his disturbing images of things like decaying corpses, insects, and other disturbing images began forming. In addition, Dalí was often teased by the local schoolchildren, who often threw insects, especially grasshoppers at him. The grasshopper became a distinct symbol of revulsion and horror for Dalí, especially during his Surrealist period. Thus it can be said that the events of Dalí's first 7 or so years of life profoundly influenced his psyche and thus his destiny. This is very much in accordance with the Freudian principles of psychoanalysis, which point to young childhood as a critical development stage, especially with regards to the parents.
The Dalí's were not about to have another burial. Dalí was often tended by his childhood nurse Lucia, who pops up in many of his Surrealist paintings, but he was seldom truly ill. One of the best examples of Lucia appearing in a later work is The Weaning of Furniture, Nutrition which was completed in 1934, which makes it a Surrealist painting.
Another child was born to the Dalí Family in 1908. Anna Maria Dalí, the baby of the family, came to be one of Dalí's most close childhood attachments, and also served as a model for many of Dalí's academic works later in life. Although there was the typical young sibling rivalry, Dalí's antics still allowed him to reign as the young dictator in the family.
The scholar Dalí was not an overwhelmingly brilliant academician. However, this author is convinced that Dalí was aware of his own genius at a young age. He began painting in earnest at about the age of 10, although his more notable works begin at age 13. During this period, Dalí would often visit the Pichot family, who lived just outside Figueras. The Pichot were very artistic in their own right; in fact, many of Salvador Dalí's earliest influences can be tracked directly to the Pichot. Ramon was a painter, while Ricard was a cellist who became the subject for one of Dalí's early Impressionist works. The Pichot encouraged Dalí's early interest in art, and soon his father set him up his own small studio complete with easel and other needed equipment. One later work by Dalí, Three Young Surrealist Women... has specific details that refer back to Dalí's love of the Pichot family. This particular Surrealist work is covered in another section in greater detail.
Most of the works done by Dalí as a young teenager were of the landscape surrounding Cadaqués and Figueras.
Another important aspect of the landscape in and around Dalí's home were the ruins near Ampurius. These more than millennia old Roman garrison ruins were the playground for Dalí's imagination. This sense of continuity with an ancient heritage is probably at least partially responsible for Dalí's love of his Catalan heritage.
This deep rooted love for his heritage is seen over and over again throughout Dalí's works, thus making this area of study an important one in understanding the man behind the myth.Yet another facet of Dalí's life at this point was the beginning of his formal art training, at the hands of Juan Nunez. Studying under Nunez at the Municipal Drawing School, Dalí absorbed the basics of draughtsmanship, painting and engraving. In 1917, Dalí's father arranged a small exhibition of his son's charcoal drawings at their home. It was to be the first of many occasions in which people would marvel at the wonder of Salvador Dalí's abilities.
At the time that Salvador Dalí's mother died in 1921, Dalí thought of himself mainly as a Impressionist painter, influenced especially by Ramon Pichot's own landscapes and seascapes of the time. Although Dalí's father remarried his late wife's sister soon thereafter, this was a turbulent time for Dalí, as he struggled to form his own adult identity away from that of his family, and especially is father. Soon thereafter, in 1922, Dalí was accepted at the Special School of Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving, also known as the Academia de San Fernando, in Madrid.
Once he passed the entrance exams, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes ( the student dormitories) where he was destined to meet with other great young minds of his time. At the age of 18, Dalí had become a part of the young elite, an emerging group of intellectuals that would have a profound effect on Dalí. The most important of his associates at this time were Luis Bunuel and Frederico Garcia Lorca. Both of these individuals, as we shall see, were important to Dalí's continued intellectual development.
It was in about 1923 that Dalí first started to experiment with cubism, often locked away in the seclusion of his own room. It is speculated that his first contact with cubism came from a futurist catalog that had been brought to him by the patriarch of the Pichot family, Pepito. Most of his colleagues were still experimenting with Impressionism, which, as we have seen, Dalí had mastered some years before. When his peers discovered him secretly at work on the Cubist paintings, he instantly became somewhat of a campus personality, vaulting from standard membership to a leader of an avant garde group of young Spanish intellectuals. Here is an interesting image, Dalí's Picture ID from the San Fernando Academy which shows what he looked like at about this time.
In 1926 Dalí was expelled from the San Fernando Academy, because of his refusal to take his final oral exams. When told that the final exam topic would be about Raphael, Dalí exclaimed that he knew much more about the subject than did his examiners, and thus he refused to take the test. His expulsion adds an interesting twist to his story in that the most influential Surrealist painter of our time never actually obtained a formal art degree.
Over the next few years, Dalí traveled extensively, visiting Paris in 1928. Dalí actually met with Picasso in his own studio, and event which profoundly influenced him. During the year 1928, Dalí also experimented heavily with the artistic materials he had available to him. Several paintings include both sand and pebbles from Dalí's beloved beaches glued directly to the canvases. Dalí's interest in the surreal, and the bizarre was about to blossom as he entered the next phase of his lifetime.
It was also in 1928 that Dalí first obtained true international exposure, when his oil painting Basket of Bread was shown at the Carnegie International Exposition in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. This photo realistic work is a fine example of Dalí's mastery over yet another artistic style. Painting in the beautiful and so real style of the Dutch masters, works like the paintings of Jan Vermeer heavily influenced Dalí as he was maturing.
As Dalí turned the corner into the year 1929, two very important events were about to take place in his life. Both would forever alter the destiny of Salvador Dalí, who was determined to become one of the greatest painters of all time. He had always been aware of his own greatness, and now was standing at the door of a new era. An era in which HE would come to reign supreme, and be elevated to the status of a Master, the very standard against which great works of art are to be judged.
The Classical Years
(1941 - 1989)
When Dalí scholars speak of Dalí "becoming classic" what they mean is that he was following his professed goal to embrace more traditional and universal themes in his work. In early 1941, Gala managed to convince Dalí that all of his Surrealist glory was nothing, and that even greater heights were his for the taking. It turned out that she was right, but it needs to be mentioned that one of the main reasons for Dalí's success was Gala herself. She constantly advised him on how to act and interact with the art community, especially while they were in America for most of the 1940's.
In the early 1950's Dalí developed his principles of Nuclear Mysticism. This was basically an eclectic combination of all of his artistic, and philosophical influences, especially the seemingly contradictory poles of science and religion. For some time, since childhood actually, he had been interested in science and the way the world worked. During the 1940's and 50's he more fully developed his ideas into the concept of Nuclear Mysticism. He surmised that the nature of reality would be fully explained by science soon enough, and that the very basis of life would prove to be a spiral. Indeed, when Crick and Watson discovered the double helix strand nature of the DNA molecule in 1953, Dalí was somewhat vindicated in his theories. One painting in particular, Nature Morte Vivante (Still Life- Fast Moving) illustrates this concept directly.
In 1929, two things happened to Salvador Dalí that hastened him down the path to greatness. First, and most far reaching, was his chance meeting with Gala Eluard in 1929 in Cadaqués. She was at that point the wife of the famous French poet, Paul Eluard, but as soon as she and Dalí met, the became inseparable. The other important event was that Dalí decided to formally join the Paris Surrealists in this same year. In January, he met with Luis Bunuel in Figueras to work on a script for the film which would eventually be known as Un Chien andalou [An Andalusian Dog]. He also had his first one man show in Paris at Goeman's Gallery, and was soon on his way to the top. However, there was a price to pay for all this success. Disapproving of his relationship with Gala, Dalí's father threw him out of the house, starting an estrangement that would last almost 30 years before being healed. Additionally, being part of a formal art movement meant producing prodigious amounts of art, and taking place in a variety of events.
With no income to support them, Gala and Dalí moved into a small shack in a small village called Port Ligat, to the north. There they spent many secluded hours together, as Dalí churned out paintings which could be sold to support them. As he exhibited these works, and became more and more involved with the Surrealist, his paintings began to change rapidly, even from the more abstract works he had completed in the early 1920's. Now Dalí's works more and more embraced the ideas of the Surrealists, but in a uniquely Dalíanian way that was his alone. The rift with his father was to become a subject for many works, and a small 'father and son icon' can be seen in many of his earlier Surrealist paintings.
It was in 1934 that Salvador Dalí was formally expelled from the Surrealist Group of Paris. In a mock 'trial' they convicted him of being contrary to the aims set forth for the group, and summarily removed him from their company. Apparently, Dalí had become too fascinated by Hitler, and his telephone calls from Lord Chamberlain. There are a number of paintings in which Dalí depicts Hitler, some directly, some less so. One of the more enigmatic symbols that Dalí used to represent his fascination with the two world leaders, and their telephone conversations is called Beach Scene with Telephone, which corresponded in time to the short lived Munich Agreement of September 1938.
Dalí once dressed a young woman in clothing, complete with a head full of flowers, to promote a showing of Dalí's works at the National Gallery. Although Surrealism never caught on in England, one particular British subject, Edward James, became an important collector and patron of Salvador Dalí. He was an original member of the Zodiac Group, which had been put together by Gala exclusively for the purpose of subsidizing the artistic couple through rough times by the sale of Dalí's art.
In 1938, Dalí actually got to meet the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, while visiting London. He is involved with a Surrealist Exposition, as part of his ongoing, but informal association with the Surrealist movement. In paintings such as Beach Scene with Telephone Dalí had long predicted the advent of the second World War, though his experiences in the Spanish Civil War certainly must have influenced that vision. In 1940 Dalí and Gala fled from Acheron, France, only weeks before the Nazi invasion, on a transatlantic passage booked and paid for by Picasso. Dalí brought a number of paintings with him when they fled, and created many many more upon his arrival here. It is surmised that most of Dalí's paintings that were distributed throughout Europe were destroyed by the advancing Nazi forces, although a few may have survived and may surface in the future.
Indeed, the fact that Dalí used his Paranoid Critical Method to enter alternate levels of reality, in which his perceptions were markedly different from everyday reality. His Surreal training had served him well, but paintings like Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire 1940, showed that he was quickly outgrowing even their influence. He was developing a style totally unique that would become a watershed event in art, that of integrating the surreal with the everyday, so as to offer it to everyone.
The Dalí's were to remain in the United States until 1948, when they returned to postwar Europe. By the time they had returned, Dalí and Gala had pulled off a variety of publicity stunts, and Dalí had become internationally famous. They spent most of their time in America either in New York City, or in a studio in California. It was also during this time, that Dalí professed his desire to become 'classic.' Soon, he would shift his painting style yet again, and in such a way that would make him the undisputed Master that he had always known he'd become.
The Paranoid Critical Transformation Method
An Introduction
Of all the Surrealists and their achievements, there is one that stands out above all the others. The Paranoiac Critical method was a sensibility, or way of perceiving reality that was developed by Salvador Dalí. It was defined by Dalí himself as "irrational knowledge" based on a "delirium of interpretation". More simply put, it was a process by which the artist found new and unique ways to view the world around him. It is the ability of the artist or the viewer to perceive multiple images within the same configuration. The concept can be compared to Max Ernst's frottage or Leonardo da Vinci's scribbling and drawings. As a matter of fact, all of us have practiced the Paranoid Critical Method when gazing at stucco on a wall, or clouds in the sky, and seeing different shapes and visages therein. Dalí elevated this uniquely human characteristic into his own artform.
Dalí, though not a true paranoid, was able to simulate a paranoid state, without the use of drugs, and upon his return to 'normal perspective' he would paint what he saw and envisioned therein.
Dalí was able to create what he called "hand painted dream photographs" which were physical, painted representations of the hallucinations and images he would see while in his paranoid state. Although he certainly had his own load of mental problems to bear, it can be said that Dalí's delusions and paranoid hallucinations did not totally dominate his mind, as he was able to convey them to canvas.
Being a painter of miraculous skill, he was capable of reproducing his myriad fantasies and hallucinations as visual illusions on canvas.
It is in this context that one of Dalí's most famous statements takes on a whole new meaning and understanding.
In Dalí's own words, taken from his Conquest of the Irrational, published in 1935:
"My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of my concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision..."
He then goes on to say:
"Paranoiac-critical activity organizes and objectivizes in an exclusivist manner the limitless and unknown possibilities of the systematic association of subjective and objective 'significance' in the irrational..."
"..it makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality"
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
Dickens, Dalí & Others: Studies in Popular Culture
Reynal & Hitchcock; New York, 1946
“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí”
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. However, even the most flagrantly dishonest book (Frank Harris's autobiographical writings are an example) can without intending it give a true picture of its author. Dalí's recently published Life [ The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (The Dial Press, 1942)] comes under this heading. Some of the incidents in it are flatly incredible, others have been rearranged and romanticised, and not merely the humiliation but the persistent ordinariness of everyday life has been cut out. Dalí is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight. But as a record of fantasy, of the perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine age, it has great value.
Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dalí's life, from his earliest years onward. Which of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dalí would have liked to do.
When he is six years old there is some excitement over the appearance of Halley's comet:
Suddenly one of my father's office clerks appeared in the drawing-room doorway and announced that the comet could be seen from the terrace.... While crossing the hall I caught sight of my little three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively 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 in to his office, where I remained as a punishment till dinner-time.” |
A year earlier than this Dalí had “suddenly, as most of my ideas occur,” flung another little boy off a suspension bridge. Several other incidents of the same kind are recorded, including (this was when he was twenty-nine years old) knocking down and trampling on a girl “until they had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach.”
When he is about five he gets hold of a wounded bat which he puts into a tin pail. Next morning he finds that the bat is almost dead and is covered with ants which are devouring it. He puts it in his mouth, ants and all, and bites it almost in half.
When he is an adolescent a girl falls desperately in love with him. He kisses and caresses her so as to excite her as much as possible, but refuses to go further. He resolves to keep this up for five years (he calls it his “five-year plan”), enjoying her humiliation and the sense of power it gives him. He frequently tells her that at the end of the five years he will desert her, and when the time comes he does so.
Till well into adult life he keeps up the practice of masturbation, and likes to do this, apparently, in front of a looking-glass. For ordinary purposes he is impotent, it appears, till the age of thirty or so. When he first meets his future wife, Gala, he is greatly tempted to push her off a precipice. He is aware that there is something that she wants him to do to her, and after their first kiss the confession is made:
I threw back Gala's head, pulling it by the hair, and trembling with complete hysteria, I commanded: “Now tell me what you want me to do with you! But tell me slowly, looking me in the eye, with the crudest, the most ferociously erotic words that can make both of us feel the greatest shame!” Then Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expression of pleasure into the hard light of her own tyranny, answered: “I want you to kill me!” |
He is somewhat disappointed by this demand, since it is merely what he wanted to do already. He contemplates throwing her off the bell-tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, but refrains from doing so.
During the Spanish Civil War he astutely avoids taking sides, and makes a trip to Italy. He feels himself more and more drawn towards the aristocracy, frequents smart salons , finds himself wealthy patrons, and is photographed with the plump Vicomte de Noailles, whom he describes as his “Maecenas.” 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. He fixes on Bordeaux, and duly flees to Spain during the Battle of France. He stays in Spain long enough to pick up a few anti-red atrocity stories, then makes for America. The story ends in a blaze of respectability. Dalí, at thirty-seven, has become a devoted husband, is cured of his aberrations, or some of them, and is completely reconciled to the Catholic Church. He is also, one gathers, making a good deal of money.
However, he has by no means ceased to take pride in the pictures of his Surrealist period, with titles like “The Great Masturbator,” “Sodomy of a Skull with a Grand Piano,” etc. There are reproductions of these all the way through the book. Many of Dalí's drawings are simply representational and have a characteristic to be noted later. But from his Surrealist paintings and photographs the two things that stand out are sexual perversity and necrophilia. Sexual objects and symbols - some of them well known, like our old friend the high-heeled slipper, others, like the crutch and the cup of warm milk, patented by Dalí himself - recur over and over again, and there is a fairly well-marked excretory motif as well. In his painting, Le Jeu Lugubre , he says, “the drawers bespattered with excrement were painted with such minute and realistic complacency that the whole little Surrealist group was anguished by the question: Is he coprophagic or not?” Dalí adds firmly that he is not , and that he regards this aberration as “repulsive,” but it seems to be only at that point that his interest in excrement stops. Even when he recounts the experience of watching a woman urinate standing up, he has to add the detail that she misses her aim and dirties her shoes. It is not given to any one person to have all the vices, and Dalí also boasts that he is not homosexual, but otherwise he seems to have as good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for.
However, his most notable characteristic is his necrophilia. He himself freely admits to this, and claims to have been cured of it. Dead faces, skulls, corpses of animals occur fairly frequently in his pictures, and the ants which devoured the dying bat make countless reappearances. One photograph shows an exhumed corpse, far gone in decomposition. Another shows the dead donkeys putrefying on top of grand pianos which formed part of the Surrealist film, Le Chien Andalou . Dalí still looks back on these donkeys with great enthusiasm.
I ‘made up' the putrefaction of the donkeys with great pots of sticky glue which I poured over them. Also I emptied their eye-sockets and made them larger by hacking them out with scissors. In the same way I furiously cut their mouths open to make the rows of their teeth show to better advantage, and I added several jaws to each mouth, so that it would appear that although the donkeys were already rotting they were vomiting up a little more their own death, above those other rows of teeth formed by the keys of the black pianos. |
And finally there is the picture - apparently some kind of faked photograph - of “Mannequin rotting in a taxicab.” Over the already somewhat bloated face and breast of the apparently dead girl, huge snails were crawling. In the caption below the picture Dalí notes that these are Burgundy snails - that is, the edible kind.
Of course, in this long book of 400 quarto pages there is more than I have indicated, but I do not think that I have given an unfair account of his moral atmosphere and mental scenery. It is a book that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would - a thought that might please Dalí, who before wooing his future wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat's dung boiled up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact that Dalí is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion.
The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even - since some of Dalí's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard - on life itself. What Dalí has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.
Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes, to The Times leader writers who exult over the “eclipse of the highbrow” - in fact, to any “sensible” art-hating English person - it is easy to imagine what kind of response you would get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit in Dalí whatever. Such people are not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be æsthetically right, but their real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought is unnecessary. And they can be especially dangerous at a time like the present, when the Ministry of Information and the British Council put power into their hands. For their impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well. Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America, with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot.
But if you talk to the kind of person who can see Dalí's merits, the response that you get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dalí, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don't like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the æsthetic sense. Since “Mannequin rotting in a taxicab” is a good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position, but we seldom hear much about it. On the one side Kulturbolschewismus : on the other (though the phrase itself is out of fashion) “Art for Art's sake.” Obscenity is a very difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals.
It will be seen that what the defenders of Dalí are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy . The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K.: kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K. [Dalí mentions L'Age d'Or and adds that its first public showing was broken up by hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller's account of it, it showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman defecating.] It is also O.K. that Dalí should batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.
One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear . And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, “This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.” Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.
Not, of course, that Dalí's autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be suppressed. Short of the dirty postcards that used to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful policy to suppress anything, and Dalí's fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay of capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly needs is diagnosis. The question is not so much what he is as why he is like that. It ought not to be in doubt that his is a diseased intelligence, probably not much altered by his alleged conversion, since genuine penitents, or people who have returned to sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that complacent way. He is a symptom of the world's illness. The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations.
The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those I myself am not competent to examine. But I can point to one clue which perhaps takes one part of the distance. This is the old-fashioned, over-ornate Edwardian style of drawing to which Dalí tends to revert when he is not being Surrealist. Some of Dalí's drawings are reminiscent of Dürer, one (p. 113) seems to show the influence of Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems to borrow something from Blake. But the most persistent strain is the Edwardian one. When I opened the book for the first time and looked at its innumerable marginal illustrations, I was haunted by a resemblance which I could not immediately pin down. I fetched up at the ornamental candlestick at the beginning of Part I (p. 7). What did this remind me of? Finally I tracked it down. It reminded me of a large vulgar, expensively got-up edition of Anatole France (in translation) which must have been published about 1914. That had ornamental chapter headings and tailpieces after this style. Dalí's candlestick displays at one end a curly fish-like creature that looks curiously familiar (it seems to be based on the conventional dolphin), and at the other is the burning candle. This candle, which recurs in one picture after another, is a very old friend. You will find it, with the same picturesque gouts of wax arranged on its sides, in those phoney electric lights done up as candlesticks which are popular in sham-Tudor country hotels. This candle, and the design beneath it, convey at once an intense feeling of sentimentality. As though to counteract this, Dalí has spattered a quill-ful of ink all over the page, but without avail. The same impression keeps popping up on page after page. The sign at the bottom of page 62, for instance, would nearly go into Peter Pan . The figure on page 224, in spite of having her cranium elongated in to an immense sausage-like shape, is the witch of the fairy-tale books. The horse on page 234 and the unicorn on page 218 might be illustrations to James Branch Cabell. The rather pansified drawings of youths on pages 97, 100 and elsewhere convey the same impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking in. Take away the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other paraphernalia, and every now and again you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and Where the Rainbow Ends .
Curiously, enough, some of the naughty-naughty touches in Dalí's autobiography tie up with the same period. When I read the passage I quoted at the beginning, about the kicking of the little sister's head, I was aware of another phantom resemblance. What was it? Of course! Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes , by Harry Graham. Such rhymes were very popular round about 1912, and one that ran:
| Poor little Willy is crying so sore, A sad little boy is he, For he's broken his little sister's neck And he'll have no jam for tea, |
might almost have been founded on Dalí's anecdote. Dalí, of course, is aware of his Edwardian leanings, and makes capital out of them, more or less in a spirit of pastiche. He professes an especial affection for the year 1900, and claims that every ornamental object of 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism, madness, perversity, et. Pastiche, however, usually implies a real affection for the thing parodied. It seems to be, if not the rule, at any rate distinctly common for an intellectual bent to be accompanied by a non-rational, even childish urge in the same direction. A sculptor, for instance, is interested in planes and curves, but he is also a person who enjoys the physical act of mucking about with clay or stone. An engineer is a person who enjoys the feel of tools, the noise of dynamos and smell of oil. A psychiatrist usually has a leaning toward some sexual aberration himself. Darwin became a biologist partly because he was a country gentleman and fond of animals. It may be therefore, that Dalí's seemingly perverse cult of Edwardian things (for example, his “discovery” of the 1900 subway entrances) is merely the symptom of a much deeper, less conscious affection. The innumerable, beautifully executed copies of textbook illustrations, solemnly labelled le rossignol, une montre and so on, which he scatters all over his margins, may be meant partly as a joke. The little boy in knickerbockers playing with a diabolo on page 103 is a perfect period piece. But perhaps these things are also there because Dalí can't help drawing that kind of thing because it is to that period and that style of drawing that he really belongs.
If so, his aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dalí unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism. “At seven,” he says in the first paragraph of his book, “I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such feelings are common enough. “I knew I was a genius,” somebody once said to me, “long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about .” And suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real métier to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?
There is always one escape: into wickedness . Always do the thing that will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break his spectacles - or, at any rate, dream about doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! It is much less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in Dalí's autobiography, it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would have done in an earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties, when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed with aristocrats and rentiers who had given up sport and politics and taken to patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back. A phobia for grasshoppers - which a few decades back would merely have provoked a snigger - was now an interesting “complex” which could be profitably exploited. And when that particular world collapsed before the German Army, America was waiting. You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of repentance from the fashionable salons of Paris to Abraham's bosom.
That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dalí's history. But why his aberrations should be the particular ones they were, and why it should be so easy to “sell” such horrors as rotting corpses to a sophisticated public - those are questions for the psychologist and the sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism. They are “bourgeois decadence” (much play is made with the phrases “corpse poisons” and “decaying rentiers class”), and that is that. But though this probably states a fact, it does not establish a connection. One would still like to know why Dalí's leaning was towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality), and why the rentiers and the aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting and making love like their grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval does not get one any further. But neither ought one to pretend, in the name of “detachment,” that such pictures as “Mannequin rotting in a taxicab” are morally neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to start out from that fact.
•Biography•Early Years•Classical Years•Surreal Years•Paranoid Critical Method•Essey(G.Orwell)•