The Life and Masterworks of Salvador Dalí - Eric Shanes Temporis

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

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

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

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

      Honey is Sweeter than Blood, 1941.

      Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 60 cm.

      Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California.

      Poetry of America, the Cosmic Athletes, 1943.

      Oil on canvas, 116.8 × 78.7 cm.

      Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres.

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

      Early in 1935 Dalí lectured in Hartford and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it was during these talks that he made the much quoted claim that ‘the only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad’. And before the Dalís sailed back to Europe, Caresse Crosby organised a farewell fancy-dress party, the ‘Dream Betrayal Ball’ or ‘Bal Onirique’, at a fashionable New York restaurant. Dalí wore a pair of spotlit breasts supported by a brassière for this event, but for once the other participants appear to have outdone him in the surreality of their costumes. Indeed, Gala nearly caused a scandal because her headdress sported the effigy of a baby’s corpse, possibly in an allusion to the kidnapped Lindbergh baby that had been murdered a few months earlier. Confronted with this act of calculated offensiveness by a reporter, the Dalís denied it, although later they privately confessed their intention.

      In the summer of 1935 Dalí published an important essay, ‘The Conquest of the Irrational’, in which he outlined his aesthetic, stating that

      My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialise the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision. – In order that the world of imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident, of the same consistency, of the same durability, of the same persuasive, cognitive and communicable thickness as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality. – The important thing is what one wishes to communicate: the concrete irrational subject. – The means of pictorial expression are placed at the service of this subject. – The illusionism of the most abjectly arriviste and irresistible imitative art, the usual paralysing tricks of trompe-l’oeil, the most analytically narrative and discredited academicism, can all become sublime hierarchies of thought, and the means of approach to new exactitudes of concrete irrationality.

      Unfortunately, what Dalí excluded from this cogent statement of aims was the possibility that the visual academicism would take over from any need to find something new to say.

      In September 1935 Dalí had his last meeting with Lorca when the poet passed through Barcelona. The painter had written to Lorca suggesting that they should collaborate on an opera which would bring together King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Leopold Sacher-Masoch, but the poet was evidently unresponsive. And although Lorca was overjoyed to see Dalí again – they had not met since 1927 – he was puzzled by the painter’s marriage, for as he later told a friend, Dalí could never be sexually satisfied by any woman when he hated breasts and vulvas, was terrified of venereal disease, and was sexually impotent and anally obsessive.

      Tristan and Isolde

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