Dalí E-Book

Eric Shanes

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 200

Beschreibung

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) is best known for his unique and striking style with an extraordinary repertoire reaching out across film, painting, photography, and sculpture. Whilst his name may be most commonly associated with Surrealism, Dalí consummately displayed mastery over such broad genres as classical, modernist, and Cubist styles. A crucial figure in art history, Dalí has inspired countless literary works and this edifying Best Of volume gives readers a fascinating insight into the life and career highlights of one of art’s most controversial and exciting pioneers.

Leseprobe

Author:

Eric Shanes

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No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers, artists, heirs or estates. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

Eric Shanes

Contents

Introduction

The Masterworks

Selected Bibliography

Chronology

A

The Angel of Port Lligat, 1952.

Angelus, c. 1932.

The Angelus, 1857-1859,Jean-François Millet.

The Anthropomorphic Cabinet,1936

The Apotheosis of Homer,1944-1945

Apparatus and Hand,1927

Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach,1938

The Architectonic Angelus of Millet,1933

Atavistic Vestiges after the Rain,1934

B

Bather,1928

Birth of Liquid Desires,1931-1932

The Burning Giraffe,1937

C

Christ of St John of the Cross,1951

The Colossus of Rhodes,1954

A Couple with their Heads Full of Clouds,1936

Cover Design for Minotaure No. 8, 1936.

Cubist Self-Portrait,1923

D

Dali Seen from the Back Painting Gala from theBack Eternalized by Six Virtual Corneas ProvisionallyReflected in Six Real Mirrors (unfinished), 1972-1973.

Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to aBlind Horse Biting a Telephone, 1938.

Dematerialization Near the Nose of Nero, 1947.

Design for the Interior Decoration of Stable-Library,1942

The Discovery of America byChristopher Columbus,1954

The Disintegration of Persistence of Memory,1952-1954

The Dream,1931

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around aPomegranate One Second Before Awakening,1944

E

Eggs on the Plate without the Plate, 1932.

The Enigma of Desire: My Mother,My Mother, My Mother,1929

The Enigma of Hitler,1939

The Enigma of William Tell,1933

Equestrian Portrait of Carmen Bordiu-Franco, 1974.

Exploding Raphaelesque Head, 1951

The Eye (design for Spellbound), 1945.

F

The Face of Mae West (Useable as aSurrealist Apartment),1934-1935

Fifty Abstract Paintings Which as Seen from TwoYards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen from Six Yards Appear asthe Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger,1963

Figure at a Window,1925

The First Days of Spring,1929

G

Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding theImminent Arrival of the Conic Anamorphoses,1933

Gala’s Castle at Púbol, 1973.

Geological Destiny, 1933.

The Girl of Figueres,1926

Gradiva, 1933.

The Great Masturbator,1929

The Great Paranoiac,1936

H

The Hallucinogenic Toreador,1969-1970

Hats Designed for Elsa Schiaparelli, 1936.

Helena Rubinstein’s HeadEmerging from a Rocky Cliff,1942-1943

Hercules Lifts the Skin of the Sea and StopsVenus for an Instant from waking Love,1963

Honey is Sweeter than Blood, 1941.

I

Impressions of Africa,1938

Invisible Sleeping Woman,Horse, Lion,1930

L

Landscape near Cadaqués, 1920-1921

Leda Atomica,1949

Lobster Telephone,1938

M

Mad Mad Mad Minerva, 1968.

The Madonna of Port Lligat,1950

The Maximum Speed of Raphael’s Madonna, 1954.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus,1937

Morphological Echo,1936

My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her OwnFlesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of aColumn, Sky and Architecture, 1945.

N

Napoleon’s Nose, Transformed into aPregnant Woman, Walking His Shadow withMelancholia Amongst Original Ruins, 1945.

Night and Day Clothes of the Body, 1936.

P

Partial Hallucination. Six Apparitions ofLenin on a Grand Piano,1931

Penya-Segats (Woman by the Cliffs), 1926.

The Perpignan Railway Station,1965

The Persistence of Memory,1931

The Pharmacist of Ampurdàn inSearch of Absolutely Nothing,1936

Poetry of America, 1943.

Port of Cadaqués at Night,c. 1918

Portrait of Gala,1935

Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb ChopsBalanced on Her Shoulder, 1933.

Portrait of Isabel Styler-Tas,1945

Portrait of Luis Buñuel,1924

Portrait of Maria Carbona, 1925.

Portrait of My Dead Brother,1963

Portrait of Paul Éluard,1929

Portrait of Picasso,1947

Portrait of Sir Laurence Olivierin the Role of King Richard III,1955

Portrait of the VicomtesseMarie-Laure de Noailles,1932

Premature Ossification of aRailway Station,1930

S

The Sacrament of the Last Supper,1955

The Sacred Heart (Sometimes I Spit withPleasure on the Portrait of My Mother),1929

Santiago El Grande,1957

Satirical Composition(‘The Dance’by Matisse),1923

Self-Portrait with the Neck of Raphael, 1921.

Shades of Night Descending,1931

The Sheep,1942

Singularities, 1937.

The Slave Market with theDisappearing Bust of Voltaire,1940

Sleep,1937

Sofa in the Form of Mae West’s Lips,1938

Soft Construction with BoiledBEANS – Premonition of Civil War,1936

Soft Self-Portrait with Grilled Bacon,1941

Soft Skulls with Fried Egg without the Plate, Angels,and Soft Watch in an Angelic Landscape, 1977.

Spain,1938

The Spectral Cow, 1928.

The Sublime Moment,1938

Surrealist Architecture,c. 1932

Surrealist Horse – Woman-Horse, 1933.

The Swallow’s Tail (Series on Catastrophes),1983

Swans Reflecting Elephants,1937

T

The Temptation of St Anthony,1946

Three Young Surrealist Women Holding inTheir Arms the Skin of an Orchestra, 1936.

Tristan and Isolde (design for theballet Mad Tristan), 1944.

Tuna Fishing, 1967.

U

Unsatisfied Desires,1928

Unstill Still Life,1956

V

Venus de Milo with Drawers,1936

Visage of War,1940

W

Weaning of Furniture Nutrition,1934

William Tell,1930

Wind Palace, 1972.

The Wounded Bird,1928

Wounded Soft Watch, 1974.

Y

Young Virgin Autosodomisedby Her Own Chastity,1954

Self-Portrait with the Neck of Raphael, 1921.

Oil on canvas, 41.5x53cm.

Introduction

It is perhaps unsurprising that Salvador Dalí has proven to be one of the most popular artists of the 20th century, for his finest works explore universal and timeless states of mind, and most of his pictures were painted with a mastery of traditional representation that has proven rare in our time. For many people, that acute realism alone would have sufficed to attract them to Dalí’s work, and it has certainly served to mask any gradual lessening of quality in his art. Moreover, Dalí was also probably the greatest artistic self-publicist in a century in which (as Igor Stravinsky commented in 1970) publicity gradually became “about all that is left of the arts”. In this respect he was in a class of his own for much of his lifetime, as was his brilliant wife and co-publicist, Gala.

Yet Dalí’s immense popularity is also rather ironic, for his work – in its finest phase, at least – constitutes an attack on the social, sexual, and cultural mores of the very society that feted him. The notion that an artist should be culturally subversive has proven central to modernist art practice, and it was certainly essential to Surrealism, which aimed to subvert the supposedly rational basis of society itself. In time, Dalí’s subversiveness softened, and by the mid-1940s André Breton, the leading spokesman for Surrealism, was perhaps justifiably dismissing the painter as a mere showman and betrayer of Surrealist intentions. But although there was a sea change in Dalí’s art after about 1940, his earlier work certainly retains its ability to bewilder, shock, and intrigue, whilst also dealing inventively with the nature of reality and appearances. Similarly, Dalí’s behaviour as an artist after about 1940 throws light on the basically superficial culture that sustained him, and this too seems worth touching upon, if only for that which it can tell us about the man behind the myths that Salvador Dalí projected about himself.

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on 11 May 1904 in Figueres, a small town in the Catalan province of Gerona in northern Spain, the son of Salvador Dalí i Cusi and Felipa Domènech. Dalí senior was the public notary of Figueres and, as such, an important and widely respected local official. He was a very forceful man, and it was rumoured that he had been responsible for the death of Dalí’s elder brother, also named Salvador, who had been born in 1901 and who died in 1903; officially the death was caused by catarrh and gastroenteritis but according to Dalí, his older brother died of meningitis that had possibly been brought on by a blow to the head. Certainly that death left Dalí’s parents with an inescapable sense of anguish, and the young Dalí was always aware of the demise because both parents constantly projected his lost brother onto him, every day making comparisons between the two boys, dressing the younger Salvador in his deceased brother’s clothes, giving him the same toys to play with, and generally treating him as the reincarnation of his departed brother, rather than as a person in his own right.

Faced with such a denial of self, Dalí understandably mutinied in an assertion of his own identity, whilst equally rebelling against the perfected image of the dead brother which his parents attempted to impose upon him. Thus the painter later recounted that, “Each day I looked for a new way of bringing my father to a paroxysm of rage or fear or humiliation and forcing him to consider me, his son, me Salvador, as an object of dislike and shame. I threw him off, I amazed him, I provoked him, defied him more and more.” If Dalí’s later claims are to be taken seriously, among other things his rebelliousness involved him in deliberate bed-wetting, simulated convulsions, prolonged screaming, feigned muteness, jumping from heights, and acts of random aggressiveness such as flinging another little boy off a suspension bridge or kicking his younger sister in the head for no apparent reason. Supposedly Dalí also frequently overcompensated for the suppression of his identity by indulging in exhibitionist behaviour, as when he placed a dying, ant-covered bat in his mouth and bit it almost in half. There is probably only a very limited amount of truth in these assertions, but eventually both Dalí’s innate rebelliousness and his exhibitionism would serve him in good stead artistically.

Jean-François Millet(1814-1875), The Angelus, 1857-1859.

oil on canvas, 55.5x66cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Dalí received his primary and secondary education in Figueres, first at a state school where he learned nothing, and then at a private school run by French Marist friars, where he gained a good working knowledge of spoken French and some helpful instruction in taking great artistic pains. The cypress trees visible from his classroom remained in his mind and later reappeared in many of his pictures, while Jean-François Millet’s painting The Angelus, which he saw in reproduction in the school, also came back to haunt him in a very fruitful way. But the main educational input of these years clearly derived from Dalí’s home life, for his father was a relatively cultured man, with an interest in literature and music, a well-stocked library that Dalí worked through even before he was ten years old, and with decidedly liberal opinions, being both an atheist and a Republican. This political non-conformism initially rubbed off on Dalí, who as a young man regarded himself as an Anarchist and who professed a lifelong contempt for bourgeois values.

More importantly, the young Dalí also received artistic stimulation from his father, who bought the boy several of the volumes in a popular series of artistic monographs. Dalí pored over the reproductions they contained, and those images helped form his long term attraction to 19th-century academic art, with its pronounced realism; among the painters who particularly impressed him were Manuel Benedito y Vives, Eugène Carrière, Modesto Urgell and Mariano Fortuny, one of whose works, The Battle of Tetuan, would inspire Dalí to paint a companion picture in 1962. And Dalí also received artistic encouragement from a friend of his father’s, the Figueres lawyer Pepito Pichot whose brother, Ramon, was a fluent impressionist painter who lived in Paris and was known to Picasso. It may have been in the Pichot summer residence in an old mill tower near Figueres that the young Dalí took his first steps as a painter, for when he was about nine years old he produced a still life of cherries on the back of an old, worm-eaten door, using merely vermilion and carmine for the fruits, and white for the highlights. (Dalí also later claimed that in this work he first blurred the dividing lines between differing realities, initially by gluing the stems of the real cherries to the bases of the painted ones, and then by transferring several worms from their holes in the door – and thus in his painted cherries – to the worm holes in the real cherries.)

Angelus, c. 1932.

Oil on wood, 16x21.7cm.

Private collection, courtesy of

Galerie Natalie Seroussi, Paris.

Quite naturally the young Dalí was influenced by the numerous impressionistic and pointillist canvasses of Ramon Pichot that hung in the old mill tower, and his precociousness was such that Pepito Pichot soon persuaded Dalí senior to allow his son to study drawing with Professor Juan Nuñez at the Municipal School of Drawing in Figueres, where the boy enrolled in 1917. Because Nuñez found Dalí unusually talented, he took great pains over his education. The student remained under his tuition for about two years and freely admitted that he learned much from his teacher. In December 1918 Dalí exhibited his first pictures publicly, in a show shared with two other painters that was mounted in the municipal theatre in Figueres, a building that would later become a museum devoted solely to his own works. A local art critic wrote:

The person who has inside him what the pictures at the Concerts Society reveal is already something big in the artistic sense... We have no right to talk of the boy Dalí because the said boy is already a man... We have no right to say that he shows promise. Rather, we should say that he is already giving... We salute the novel artist and are quite certain that in the future our words... will have the value of a prophecy: Salvador Dalí will be a great painter.

This was very heady praise for a boy of fourteen, and it was true: he was a great painter in the making.

Over the next couple of years the little genius continued to broaden his horizons. He helped bring out a local student magazine that appeared mostly in Spanish rather than Catalan so as to reach a wider readership. To this Dalí contributed illustrations and a series of articles on great painters, taking as his subjects Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, El Greco, Dürer, Velázquez, and Goya. He widened his reading and thereby assimilated advanced views on politics, culture, and society in 1921, even claiming to be a communist. Naturally he rebelled against paternal authority, but who does not? And he discovered the joys of masturbation, as well as the self-loathing that usually accompanied it in an age of anxiety about all things sexual. This was especially the case in Spain where sexual ignorance was endemic and sexual guilt was universally promulgated. In order to become aroused, the youth did not necessarily fantasise about women; towers and church belfries could just as easily help him rise to the occasion (which is surely why there are so many towers and belfries in his art). He worried intensely about the smallness of his sexual organ, and his sexual anxiety made him “the victim of inextinguishable attacks of laughter”. He also realised that, “you have to have a very strong erection to be able to penetrate. And my problem is that I’ve always been a premature ejaculator. So much so, that sometimes it’s enough for me just to look in order to have an orgasm.” It appears probable that never in the history of art has such an avid masturbator and voyeur become such a great painter, and certainly no artist has ever admitted to these predilections as openly as Dalí would do in 1929 and thereafter.

In February 1921 Dalí’s mother, Felipa Domènech, died suddenly of cancer of the uterus. She was just forty-seven years of age. Dalí was exceedingly pained by the loss, stating later:

With my teeth clenched with weeping, I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death and destiny with the swords of light that someday would savagely gleam around my glorious name.

In November 1922 Dalí’s father would remarry, although he had to obtain a papal dispensation in order to do so, as his new bride, Catalina Domènech, was the sister of his dead wife.

In September 1922 Dalí was accompanied by his father and sister to Madrid in order to apply for admittance to the leading art school in Spain, the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. The boy had long wanted to devote himself to art, and although his father harboured the usual reservations about such an uncertain career, clearly he was relieved that his unstable son had some set target in mind. The entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts involved spending six days drawing a cast of Jacopo Sansovino’s Bacchus, and although Dalí failed to make his drawing to the required size, his facility was such that the dimensions of his work were ignored and he was granted a place.

Dalí was not to prove happy with the tuition he would receive at the San Fernando Academy, mainly because Impressionism was still the prevailing artistic mode there and it was a style he had already worked through and exhausted. Instead, he took an interest in more advanced visual thinking, such as Cubism, while equally being attracted to traditional artistic techniques, which unfortunately were no longer being much taught at the Academy because of the prevailing taste for the loose, painterly techniques demanded by an impressionistic approach. But if the San Fernando Academy made only a passing contribution to Dalí’s artistic development, his choice of accommodation in Madrid gave him much more creative stimulation, for he stayed in the Residencia de Studia, or university hall of residence. This was not just a place to eat and sleep but was far more like a college in itself, with activities taking place on all kinds of intellectual levels. Dalí’s sojourn in the Residencia coincided with that of some of the most brilliant emergent minds in contemporary Spanish culture. These included Luis Buñuel, then a philosophy student and later to be an outstanding film director with whom he would collaborate, in addition to the finest modern Spanish poet and playwright (and arguably the greatest poet of the 20th century), Federico García Lorca. At first Dalí was somewhat distanced from his more advanced fellow students in the Residencia by his assumed, defensive haughtiness and bohemian way of dressing, but when his modernist sympathies were discovered he was readily admitted to the circle of Buñuel and Lorca, with whom he became firm friends by early 1923.

Portrait of Maria Carbona, 1925.

Oil on cardboard, 53x40cm.

Penya-Segats (Woman by the Cliffs), 1926.

Oil on wood, 26x40cm

The Spectral Cow, 1928.

Oil on plywood, 50x64.5cm.

Musée national d’Art moderne,

Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

Eggs on the Plate without the Plate, 1932.

Oil on canvas, 60.3x42cm.

Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg (Florida).

Dalí’s dissatisfaction with the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts moved onto a new plane in the autumn of 1923 when, along with five other students, he was rusticated for a year for supposed insubordination. He had supported the appointment of a progressive artist to the post of Professor of Open-Air Painting, and when his favourite failed to obtain the job, in protest he had walked out of the meeting at which the news of the failure was announced; this was followed by a vociferous student protest, for which it was assumed that Dalí’s walkout had been the starting signal. Dalí thereupon returned to Figueres. Soon afterwards, in May 1924, he unwittingly found himself in further trouble with authority because of the political leanings of other members of his family; as a consequence, Dalí was imprisoned without trial in Figueres and later transferred to the provincial capital of Gerona before being released.

By this time Dalí had experimented with various artistic styles. Picasso was one influence, Derain another, while in 1923 Dalí had painted pictures of groups of nudes in the open air that were heavily indebted to pointillism and to the flowing, linear style of Matisse. By the autumn of 1924, when Dalí returned to Madrid and his formal studies, he had also begun to assimilate more recent developments in Cubism and Purism. Yet simultaneously he started exploring a highly-detailed representationalism, and here too the influence of Picasso – in the form of the latter’s Neo-classicism of the late 1910s and early 1920s – is apparent. And Romantic painters of an earlier period such as Caspar David Friedrich also made their mark upon him. Clearly, the young man was searching for a style that could express his innermost self, without yet being able to find it.

Back in Madrid, Dalí resumed his friendship with Buñuel and Lorca. On the creative level the relationship between Dalí and Lorca would prove especially important, for it would strengthen their mutual attraction for Surrealism. However, the sympathy between them also led the homosexual Lorca to fall in love with Dalí. Being perhaps bisexual but more usually asexual, Dalí could not return his affections in the same way. However, on two occasions, probably in 1926 and surely in the spirit of sexual experimentation, Dalí did passively allow Lorca to try making love to him. The experiment was unsuccessful. Apparently Dalí had no regrets and later commented that, “I felt awfully flattered vis-a-vis the prestige. Deep down, I felt that he was a great poet and that I did owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí’s asshole.”

In early April 1925 Dalí and Lorca went to stay just outside Cadaqués, about twenty-five kilometres to the east of Figueres on the Mediterranean, where the Dalí family had use of a summer villa. There Dalí introduced his friend to the widow of a local fisherman, Lídia Noguér Sabà, who bordered on harmlessly lunacy but who had always thrilled Dalí with her freewheeling associationism, something that would soon become one of the cornerstones of not only his own art but also that of his friend. Lorca was delighted with the local landscapes, the food, the Greek and Roman ruins, and the enthusiasm with which he was received by Dalí’s father and sister.

In November 1925 Dalí held his first one-man exhibition, at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona, showing seventeen, mostly recent paintings that ranged stylistically across the visual spectrum from Cubist semi-abstraction, as in the Venus and Sailor, to a low-keyed realism, as in the Figure at a Window. The show was well received by the critics, although some of them were understandably puzzled by the stylistic diversity of the pictures.

Surrealist Horse – Woman-Horse, 1933.

Pencil and pen on paper, 52.6x25cm.

Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg (Florida).

Gradiva, 1933.

Pen and Indian ink on sandpaper.

Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

In April 1926 Dalí received an overwhelming testimonial to his talents through the publication of Lorca’s Ode to Salvador Dalí