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Feb. 29th, 2008 09:11 amDali, Salvador
DALI, SALVADOR (DOMENECH FELIPE JACINTO) (March 11, 1904- ), Spanish painter, has been one of the most famous and controversial of 20th-century artists. Although synonymous in the public mind with surrealism, Dali was excommunicated from the movement by Andre Breton, the "pope" of surrealism, in the late 1930s. Moreover, in the last four-and-a-half decades his work, though technically as accomplished as ever and containing various surrealist devices, has had none of the hallucinatory impact, obsessive fantasy, and power to shock of his early paintings. Over the years, showmanship, commercialism, and a genius for public relations have replaced imagination in Dali's art.
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali was born in Figueras, in the Gerona province of Upper Catalonia in northeastern Spain, the son of Salvador and Felipa Dome (Domenech) Dali. His talent for drawing, apparent at an early age, was encouraged by his father, a notary, who gave him reproductions of classical art. Dali claims in his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942), that from earliest childhood his behavior was marked by fits of violent hysteria.
Before he was ten, Salvador had completed two ambitious oil paintings, Joseph Greeting his Brothers and Portrait of Helen of Troy. After receiving his elementary education at the Colegio de los Hermanos de la Doctrina Cristiana, Figueras, he attended the Colegio de los Hermanos Maristas, and completed his six years of baccalaureate studies at the Instituto in Figueras.
In adolescence Dali received instruction from Juan Nunez at the Figueras municipal school of drawing. He admired the 19th-century Spanish painters of genre scenes for their precise and detailed realism, and later was impressed by Ernest Meissonnier, the leading French practitioner of this type of painting. "Dali had the courage," Dali wrote, "to paint like Meissonnier in the midst of the 'modern' epoch and his success at painting like Dali has not suffered because of it."
The young Dali was also interested in the English Pre-Raphaelites, and he greatly admired Vermeer and Velazquez. About 1918 he experimented with impressionism and pointillism. Several small, brightly colored pictures in this style were painted in the Spanish fishing village of Cadaques. A Self-Portrait of the Artist at his Easel, Cadaques (ca. 1918-19) is owned by A. Reynolds Morse, a Cleveland industrialist whose collection of Dali's work of all periods is extensive.
By 1920 Dali had been influenced by Italian futurism, and he painted for a time in that manner. Assured of his son's artistic promise, Dali's father finally agreed to his making a career of painting. In 1921 Dali entered the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, where he rapidly absorbed the academic instruction of his teacher, Moreno Carbonero, and won several prizes. Among his fellow students were Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Bunuel. At this time he abandoned bright colors and, influenced by the Cubist Juan Gris, began to paint in subdued tones. A more important influence, however, was that of the Italian metaphysical painters, Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra, whom he discovered in 1923, their work being well known in avant-garde circles in Spain.
The poetic and philosophical vision of de Chirico, combined with his reading of Freud, was crucial to Dali's development. These new inspirations led him far from the teachings of the academy and he began to paint mysterious still lifes after the manner of de Chirico and Carra. His relations with school authorities grew increasingly stormy, and in 1924, charged with inciting the students to insurrection, he was suspended for a year. In May 1924 Dali was briefly imprisoned in Figueras and in the town of Gerona for alleged subversive political activities. He returned to the Madrid school in 1925 but was permanently expelled "for extravagant personal behavior" a year later. According to Dali, the expulsion stemmed from his refusal to submit to an art history examination administered by teachers he regarded as intellectual inferiors.
Meanwhile, Dali had taken part in group exhibitions in Madrid and Barcelona, and in November 1925 his first solo show was held at the Galeria Dalmau, Barcelona. His paintings of 1925-27 were in a variety of styles--meticulous realism, as in Basket of Bread (1926), Picassoesque cubism in several "Harlequin" pictures, and neoclassicism (Venus and Cupid and Neo-Cubist Academy). In 1926 he exhibited in a group show with the Sociedad de Artistas Ibericos (Society of Iberian Artists) in Madrid. The same year, having seen reproductions of early works by Yves Tanguy in the magazine Revolution Surrealiste, he began to practice automatistic drawing methods and to build up his store of forms and images. One of his 1927 canvases, Blood is Sweeter than Honey, is considered a forerunner of his hallucinatory art of psychological obsessions.
In 1928, traveling by taxi, Dali visited Paris for the first time. His aim was to see Picasso, Versailles, and the Musee Grevin, Paris's famous wax museum. On this trip he met Picasso and on a second visit that year met Joan Miro, who introduced him to the Surrealists. (In his autobiography Dali said that, after meeting Breton, he began referring to him as "my new father, Andre Breton.") Returning to Barcelona, Dali published a manifesto, Groc, and invited the Surrealist group to Cadaques, where he had been living since 1925. Back in Paris in 1929, he signed a contract for an exhibition at the Galerie Goemans and returned home to prepare for it.
For several months the influence of Miro prevailed, but by the summer of 1929 Dali had abandoned abstraction and was painting in his mature style. He set out to depict, in the meticulous technique of a miniaturist, exact, Meissonnier-like transcriptions of the images of his dreams and hallucinations; he later called this method, derived from the surrealist principle of automatism, "paranoiac-critical." Dali's "critical paranoia" was the process by which he claimed to loosen the moorings of rationality and unleash the visions of his subconscious--while remaining aware that reason had been deliberately suspended. In The Shock of the New Robert Hughes defined Dali's "paranoiac-critical" method as simply "looking at one thing and seeing another." The method's results can be seen in such Dali paintings of 1929 as The Lugubrious Game, with his allusions to the "shame" of onanism; Accommodations of Desire, with its multiple lion heads in various stages of incompletion; Profanation of Host; and Illumined Pleasures.
Dali moved to Paris in the fall of 1929, and his paintings caused a sensation. "Dali had a brilliant sense of provocation," Hughes noted, "and if his images are to be rightly seen they must be set, in retrospect, into the context of a less sexually frank time. Today, the art world is less easily alarmed by images of sex, blood, excrement, and putrefaction, but fifty years ago it was still quite shockable. . . ." He was at once designated an official Surrealist by Breton, who wrote the catalog introduction to Dali's first Parisian solo show, which was held at the Galerie Goemans in November.
As James Thrall Soby pointed out in Salvador Dali (1946), the young Spaniard brought "a new objectivity" to surrealist painting by depicting "the unreal world with such extreme realism that its truth and validity could no longer be questioned." Dali called his technique the "handmade photography of concrete irrationality." In 1930 Dali, whose verbal gifts were to prove almost as useful in constructing the "Dali myth" as his striking visual imagery, expounded his ideas in the book La Femme visible. He wrote that his aim was "to systematize confusion and assist in discrediting completely the world of reality."
In 1928 Dali collaborated with the director Luis Bunuel on Un Chien andalou and in 1930 on L'Age d'or; both films have become classics of surrealist cinema. About 1930 Dali became involved with Gala (born Elena Diaranoff), the ex-wife of Surrealist poet Paul Eluard. They were married in 1942 in a civil ceremony in New York City. She modeled for many Dali paintings.
Dali applied his "paranoiac-critical" method in a group of paintings dealing with the legend of William Tell (1930-34), and in 1932-35 with the figures from the French painter Jean Francois Millet's Angelus. Dali's Freudian interpretation of these themes prompted critics to wonder if they were out of admiration or derision--or in a spirit of derision masking an underlying admiration. In his typically provocative manner of overstatement, Dali praised "the genius of Francois Millet [noted for his realistic depiction of 19th-century French peasantry] whose erotic cannibalism shows through the tragic myth of 'The Angelus.'"
In 1931 Dali painted The Persistence of Memory (Museum of Modern Art, New York City), which is thought to be his masterpiece and has been called "the most widely celebrated surrealist canvas ever painted." (The melting watches are Dali trademarks and Philippe Halsman, in his 1954 photograph of the painting, substituted Dali's face for the flaccid timepiece in the foreground.) In Persistence of Memory, time itself, here represented by the limp metal watches, seems to have passed away, as has the mustachioed biomorphic blob in the foreground. Only the landscape, based, as many of Dali's backgrounds are, on the rocky coast of his native Catalonia, is immune to the ravages of time; yet even the cliffs seem suspended in space, defying the laws of gravity and the solidity of matter.
In his paintings of the 1930s, Dali frequently made use of the disturbing double or multiple image, as in The Invisible Man, Diurnal Fantasies, and Memory of the Child-Woman, all of 1932, and Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938). The first New York City solo show of Dali's paintings was in November 1933 at the Julien Levy Gallery; a year later he traveled to America for the first time. A number of paintings of 1933-34 evince Dali's obsession with cephalic deformations, as in Myself at the age of ten when I was the Grasshopper Child (1933), and Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano (1934). In 1933 Dali illustrated Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror, the advanced 19th-century prose poem which influenced the Surrealists.
On vacation in Rosas on the Catalan coast in 1934-36, Dali painted a comparatively lyrical series of beach scenes and became interested in the paintings of Arnold Bocklin and the music of Wagner. From 1934 to '37 Dali helped to popularize surrealism in the United States. Dali's essay, "The Conquest of the Irrational," appeared in 1935 and from 1936 to '38 he participated in the major Surrealist group shows held in London, Paris, New York City, Mexico City, Tokyo, and other world capitals.
Dali's notoriety and growing commercial success earned Breton's stern disapproval. Breton felt that surrealism had liberated Dali from the extreme academic realism of Meissonier, and he deeply admired the artist's ability to reveal the nonrationality of objects and "to implement all the possibilities of the innately savage mind and eye," as Anna Balakian wrote in Andre Breton (1971). To Breton, however, exploitation of surrealism for personal gain was a cardinal sin, and in 1938 he concluded that Dali's art had become commercialized, that the flamboyant artist had "sold out." Expelling Dali from the Surrealist ranks, he branded him "Avida Dollars," an anagram of the artist's name. (The incident became a part of surrealist lore, and in later years Dali humorously embraced the derogatory appellation.)
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Dali avoided taking a stand. Nevertheless, it became obvious over the years that his sympathies, quite unlike Picasso's, were unreservedly with the totalitarian Franco regime. Just six months before the Civil War commenced, Dali completed what was possibly his last truly powerful picture: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans; Premonition of Civil War (1936). Its imagery, recalling the nightmarish visions of Hieronymous Bosch, was intended to portray a people torn apart. Dali wrote, with characteristic bombast, "I showed a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of auto-strangulation." He explained the boiled beans in the title by reference to his obsession with the imagery of edible objects, his need to introduce "some mealy and melancholy vegetable" into the painting.
From 1937 to '39 Dali traveled extensively in Europe. In London, in 1938, he visited Sigmund Freud, who remarked, "What interests me is not your unconscious but your conscious." In The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (1981), the artist modestly described the encounter: "Two geniuses had met without making sparks. His ideas spoke for him. To me, they were useful crutches that reinforced my confidence in my genius and the authenticity of my freedom, and I had more to teach him than I could get from him." Several trips to Italy deepened Dali's appreciation of the Renaissance masters, especially the mannerist and baroque painters of the 16th and 17th centuries, whose influence is reflected in the attenuated figures and exaggerated perspective of such works as Palladio's Corridor of Dramatic Surprises (1938). The Surrealists, however, regarded Dali's apparent return to academism as a further "betrayal" of the movement. In 1939 he briefly visited New York City to execute The Dream of Venus for the World's Fair.
With the start of World War II in September 1939, Dali moved from Paris to the region of Bordeaux and Arcachon in southwest France, and when Germany invaded he fled via Spain and Portugal to the US, arriving in August 1940. He lived for a time at his friend Caresse Crosby's home in Virginia, where he wrote his autobiography, and later settled in Pebble Beach, California. The "Dali legend" had already been fostered by such exhibitionist antics as delivering a lecture in London in a deep-sea diving suit and by crashing through Bonwit Teller's Fifth Avenue window after one of his displays had been altered, and in the US Dali's outrageous self-promotion continued. His American success was confirmed by the retrospective MOMA gave him in 1941; the show toured the US for two years. In 1942 The Secret Life of Salvador Dali was described by New York Times reviewers as "shocking, too intimate, sadistic," and "a wild jungle of fantasy." Dali also designed the sets and costumes and composed the libretti for the ballets Bacchanale (1939), Labyrinth (1941), and Mad Tristan (1944). His novel Hidden Faces (1944) was, according to Edmund Wilson, "a potpourri of the properties, the figures and the attitudes of the later and gamier phases of French romantic writing."
Dali's return to academism in 1937-39 led in the late 1940s to an interest in religious subject matter. About this time he introduced what he called his "atomic," or "nuclear mystic," technique, meaning the explosion of forms so as to dramatize their impact. In 1948, after the publication of his Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, Dali returned to Spain, thus making no secret of his support of the dictator Francisco Franco. "Our invincible Caudillo Generalissimo Francisco Franco," he said, as quoted in The New York Times Magazine, "is the genius of our people, without a doubt. Bueno, there are two: Velazquez and the Generalissimo." He settled in Port Lligat, which was declared a national scenic preserve by the government, and with great fanfare proclaimed his allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. Of Dali's large religious paintings Jacques Busse wrote in the Dictionnaire de peintres, sculpteurs, et graveurs (1976): "Their forced originality does not compensate for the stiffness of a technique which aims at being classical." These paintings include The Madonna of Port Lligat (1950), for which Gala modeled and which Dali gave to the Pope; Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951); and the large, ambitious Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). In A Concise History of Modern Painting Herbert Read savaged this phase of Dali's career: "Salvador Dali's work has sunk lower still, cynically exploiting a sentimental and sensational religiosity. . . .The theatricality, which was always a characteristic of his behavior, is now at the service of those reactionary forces in Spain whose triumph has been the greatest affront to the humanism which, in spite of its extravagance, has been the consistent concern of the Surrealist movement."
In 1952 Dali completed a series of illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. Two years later he visited Pope John XXIII in Rome, and in 1961 he designed scenery and costumes for the Ballet de Gala. By this time Dali had had retrospectives in Tokyo (1964) and New York City (1966). In the 1960s and '70s he experimented with holography and introduced stereoscopic images into his paintings. A Salvador Dali museum, the Teatro Museo Dali, was established in Figueras in 1970, and on March 7 1971 a Dali Museum in Cleveland was inaugurated, putting the A. Reynolds Morse Collection on permanent exhibition.
Reviewing a 1980 Dali retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Beaubourg), Paris, Hilton Kramer of The New York Times (January 20, 1980) commented on the artist's later work: "His loss of artistic power, the absence in his work of any real imagery, coincided with the intensified effort on Dali's part to make himself into a Dali creation. . . .[But] in his best paintings of the '30s Dali was a magician." The consensus among critics is that "almost all the works of art on which Dali's fame as a serious artist rest were painted before his thirty-fifth birthday, between 1929 and 1939," to quote Robert Hughes.
According to Peter Conrad of the New Statesman (June 25, 1976), "Dali's career has depended on his public flagrancy." Conrad added that Dali derived from the romantic dandyism of Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde "his horror of nature, and his desire to exterminate it by making himself over into art, armoring himself with affectation. . . .Dali's loathsome gastronomic tastes and the morphological comedy of his art both derive from this vengeful attitude to nature."
Dali continues to live in the mansion he built near Cadaques, in Port Lligat. On his regular visits to New York City, Dali installs himself in the plush St. Regis Hotel. With his dark hair and the handlebar moustache waxed to rapier sharpness that has become his trademark, his flowing cape and silver-headed cane, Dali flamboyantly attends art and theater openings and other high-profile social events. In 1981 he was awarded Spain's highest decoration, the Gran Cruz de la Orden de Carlos III. Gala, Dali's Russian-born wife and muse, died in June 1982. The following year the Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid, mounted a major Dali retrospective which featured many of the paintings he executed before embracing surrealism in 1929.
"The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad," the witty Dali said in a much-quoted remark that could stand as a definition of his concept of "critical paranoia."
Dali's work is in museums throughout the world. A comprehensive guide to public collections of his work was published by the Cleveland Art Museum in 1974.
Suggested Reading: Current Biography, 1951; Dali, S. La Femme visible, 1930, L'Amour et la memoire, 1931, The Conquest of the Irrational, 1935, Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and Rights to His Own Madness, 1938, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, 1942, Hidden Faces, 1944, Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, 1948, Mystical Manifesto, 1951, The Cuckolds of Old Modern Art, 1956, The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus, 1963, Diary of a Genius, 1964, Dali by Dali, 1970; Gerard, M. Dali, 1968; Hughes, R. The Shock of the New, 1981; Lassaigne, J. La Peinture espagnola, 1952; Levy, J. Surrealism, 1936; Morse, A. R. A New Introduction to Salvador Dali, 1960; Nadeau, M. A History of Surrealism, 1973; Oriol, A. A. Mentira y Verdad de Salvador Dali, 1948; Orwell, G. Dickens, Dali and Others: Studies in Popular Culture, 1946; Parinaud, A. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, 1981; Raynal, M. (ed.) Histoire de la peinture moderne: De Picasso au Surrealisme, 1953; Read, H. A Concise History of Modern Painting, 1959; Soby, J. T. Salvador Dali, 1946; Tapie, M. Dali, 1957; Walton, P. Dali: Miro, 1967. Periodicals: Life February 19, 1945, April 23, 1951; New Statesman June 25, 1976; New York Times March 22, 1970, January 20, 1980, April 19, 1983; New York Times Magazine November 22, 1981; Time February 26, 1940.
Selected exhibitions: Gal. Dalmau, Barcelona, Spain 1922; Gal. Goemans, Paris 1929; Gal. Pierre Colle, Paris 1931, '33; Gal. d'Arte Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain 1933, '34; Julien Levy Gal., NYC 1933-41; Zwemmer Gal., London 1934; MOMA, NYC 1941-42; M. Knoedler and Co., NYC from 1943; Bignou Gal., NYC 1945, '47, '48; Carstairs Gal., NYC 1950-'60; Santa Barbara Mus. of Art, Calif. 1953; Philadelphia Mus. of Art 1955; Casino Communal, Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium 1956; Prince Hotel Gal., Tokyo 1964; Gal. of Modern Art, NYC 1965-66; Boymans-Van Beuningen Mus., Rotterdam 1970-71; Mus. de l'Athenee, Geneva 1970; Whitechapel Art Gal., London 1971; Boymans-Van Beuningen Mus., Rotterdam 1972; Stadtisches Gal., Frankfurt, W. Ger. 1974; Tate Gal., London 1980; Mus. of Contemporary Art, Madrid 1983. GROUP EXHIBITIONS: Dalmau Gal., Barcelona, Spain 1921, '22; Pittsburgh International, Carnegie Inst. 1928; "New Super-Realism," Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn. 1931; "Exposition Surrealiste," Gal. Pierre Colle, Paris 1933; "International Exhibition of Cubism and Surrealism," Copenhagen 1935; "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism," MOMA, NYC 1936; "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme," Gal. des Beaux-Arts, Paris 1938; "Exposicion Internacional del Surrealismo," Gal. de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City 1940; "Four Spaniards," Modern Inst. of Art, Boston 1946; "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme," Gal. Maeght, Paris 1947; "Surrealisme en Abstractie," Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam 1951; "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme," Mus. Nat. d'Art Moderne, Paris 1959; "Masters of Surrealism from Ernst to Matta," Obelisk Gal., London 1961; "Six peintres surrealistes," Gal. Andre Francois Petit, Paris 1963; Sao Paulo Bienal 1965; "Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage," MOMA, NYC 1968; "Surrealism," Moderna Mus., Stockholm 1970.
Selected collections: Salvador Dali Mus. Figueras, Spain; MOMA, and Guggenheim Mus., NYC; Nat. Gal. of Art, and Hirshhorn Mus. and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Mus. Art: Cleveland Mus. of Art, and Dali Mus., Cleveland; Denver Art Museum; Santa Barbara Mus. of Art, Calif.; Tate Gal., London; Glasgow Art Gal., Scotland; Mus. Nat. d'Art Moderne, Paris; Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam; Boymans-Van Beuningen Mus., Rotterdam; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Neue Natl. Gal., Berlin.
Biography from Biography Reference Bank (1984)
Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author.
DALI, SALVADOR (DOMENECH FELIPE JACINTO) (March 11, 1904- ), Spanish painter, has been one of the most famous and controversial of 20th-century artists. Although synonymous in the public mind with surrealism, Dali was excommunicated from the movement by Andre Breton, the "pope" of surrealism, in the late 1930s. Moreover, in the last four-and-a-half decades his work, though technically as accomplished as ever and containing various surrealist devices, has had none of the hallucinatory impact, obsessive fantasy, and power to shock of his early paintings. Over the years, showmanship, commercialism, and a genius for public relations have replaced imagination in Dali's art.
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali was born in Figueras, in the Gerona province of Upper Catalonia in northeastern Spain, the son of Salvador and Felipa Dome (Domenech) Dali. His talent for drawing, apparent at an early age, was encouraged by his father, a notary, who gave him reproductions of classical art. Dali claims in his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942), that from earliest childhood his behavior was marked by fits of violent hysteria.
Before he was ten, Salvador had completed two ambitious oil paintings, Joseph Greeting his Brothers and Portrait of Helen of Troy. After receiving his elementary education at the Colegio de los Hermanos de la Doctrina Cristiana, Figueras, he attended the Colegio de los Hermanos Maristas, and completed his six years of baccalaureate studies at the Instituto in Figueras.
In adolescence Dali received instruction from Juan Nunez at the Figueras municipal school of drawing. He admired the 19th-century Spanish painters of genre scenes for their precise and detailed realism, and later was impressed by Ernest Meissonnier, the leading French practitioner of this type of painting. "Dali had the courage," Dali wrote, "to paint like Meissonnier in the midst of the 'modern' epoch and his success at painting like Dali has not suffered because of it."
The young Dali was also interested in the English Pre-Raphaelites, and he greatly admired Vermeer and Velazquez. About 1918 he experimented with impressionism and pointillism. Several small, brightly colored pictures in this style were painted in the Spanish fishing village of Cadaques. A Self-Portrait of the Artist at his Easel, Cadaques (ca. 1918-19) is owned by A. Reynolds Morse, a Cleveland industrialist whose collection of Dali's work of all periods is extensive.
By 1920 Dali had been influenced by Italian futurism, and he painted for a time in that manner. Assured of his son's artistic promise, Dali's father finally agreed to his making a career of painting. In 1921 Dali entered the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, where he rapidly absorbed the academic instruction of his teacher, Moreno Carbonero, and won several prizes. Among his fellow students were Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Bunuel. At this time he abandoned bright colors and, influenced by the Cubist Juan Gris, began to paint in subdued tones. A more important influence, however, was that of the Italian metaphysical painters, Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra, whom he discovered in 1923, their work being well known in avant-garde circles in Spain.
The poetic and philosophical vision of de Chirico, combined with his reading of Freud, was crucial to Dali's development. These new inspirations led him far from the teachings of the academy and he began to paint mysterious still lifes after the manner of de Chirico and Carra. His relations with school authorities grew increasingly stormy, and in 1924, charged with inciting the students to insurrection, he was suspended for a year. In May 1924 Dali was briefly imprisoned in Figueras and in the town of Gerona for alleged subversive political activities. He returned to the Madrid school in 1925 but was permanently expelled "for extravagant personal behavior" a year later. According to Dali, the expulsion stemmed from his refusal to submit to an art history examination administered by teachers he regarded as intellectual inferiors.
Meanwhile, Dali had taken part in group exhibitions in Madrid and Barcelona, and in November 1925 his first solo show was held at the Galeria Dalmau, Barcelona. His paintings of 1925-27 were in a variety of styles--meticulous realism, as in Basket of Bread (1926), Picassoesque cubism in several "Harlequin" pictures, and neoclassicism (Venus and Cupid and Neo-Cubist Academy). In 1926 he exhibited in a group show with the Sociedad de Artistas Ibericos (Society of Iberian Artists) in Madrid. The same year, having seen reproductions of early works by Yves Tanguy in the magazine Revolution Surrealiste, he began to practice automatistic drawing methods and to build up his store of forms and images. One of his 1927 canvases, Blood is Sweeter than Honey, is considered a forerunner of his hallucinatory art of psychological obsessions.
In 1928, traveling by taxi, Dali visited Paris for the first time. His aim was to see Picasso, Versailles, and the Musee Grevin, Paris's famous wax museum. On this trip he met Picasso and on a second visit that year met Joan Miro, who introduced him to the Surrealists. (In his autobiography Dali said that, after meeting Breton, he began referring to him as "my new father, Andre Breton.") Returning to Barcelona, Dali published a manifesto, Groc, and invited the Surrealist group to Cadaques, where he had been living since 1925. Back in Paris in 1929, he signed a contract for an exhibition at the Galerie Goemans and returned home to prepare for it.
For several months the influence of Miro prevailed, but by the summer of 1929 Dali had abandoned abstraction and was painting in his mature style. He set out to depict, in the meticulous technique of a miniaturist, exact, Meissonnier-like transcriptions of the images of his dreams and hallucinations; he later called this method, derived from the surrealist principle of automatism, "paranoiac-critical." Dali's "critical paranoia" was the process by which he claimed to loosen the moorings of rationality and unleash the visions of his subconscious--while remaining aware that reason had been deliberately suspended. In The Shock of the New Robert Hughes defined Dali's "paranoiac-critical" method as simply "looking at one thing and seeing another." The method's results can be seen in such Dali paintings of 1929 as The Lugubrious Game, with his allusions to the "shame" of onanism; Accommodations of Desire, with its multiple lion heads in various stages of incompletion; Profanation of Host; and Illumined Pleasures.
Dali moved to Paris in the fall of 1929, and his paintings caused a sensation. "Dali had a brilliant sense of provocation," Hughes noted, "and if his images are to be rightly seen they must be set, in retrospect, into the context of a less sexually frank time. Today, the art world is less easily alarmed by images of sex, blood, excrement, and putrefaction, but fifty years ago it was still quite shockable. . . ." He was at once designated an official Surrealist by Breton, who wrote the catalog introduction to Dali's first Parisian solo show, which was held at the Galerie Goemans in November.
As James Thrall Soby pointed out in Salvador Dali (1946), the young Spaniard brought "a new objectivity" to surrealist painting by depicting "the unreal world with such extreme realism that its truth and validity could no longer be questioned." Dali called his technique the "handmade photography of concrete irrationality." In 1930 Dali, whose verbal gifts were to prove almost as useful in constructing the "Dali myth" as his striking visual imagery, expounded his ideas in the book La Femme visible. He wrote that his aim was "to systematize confusion and assist in discrediting completely the world of reality."
In 1928 Dali collaborated with the director Luis Bunuel on Un Chien andalou and in 1930 on L'Age d'or; both films have become classics of surrealist cinema. About 1930 Dali became involved with Gala (born Elena Diaranoff), the ex-wife of Surrealist poet Paul Eluard. They were married in 1942 in a civil ceremony in New York City. She modeled for many Dali paintings.
Dali applied his "paranoiac-critical" method in a group of paintings dealing with the legend of William Tell (1930-34), and in 1932-35 with the figures from the French painter Jean Francois Millet's Angelus. Dali's Freudian interpretation of these themes prompted critics to wonder if they were out of admiration or derision--or in a spirit of derision masking an underlying admiration. In his typically provocative manner of overstatement, Dali praised "the genius of Francois Millet [noted for his realistic depiction of 19th-century French peasantry] whose erotic cannibalism shows through the tragic myth of 'The Angelus.'"
In 1931 Dali painted The Persistence of Memory (Museum of Modern Art, New York City), which is thought to be his masterpiece and has been called "the most widely celebrated surrealist canvas ever painted." (The melting watches are Dali trademarks and Philippe Halsman, in his 1954 photograph of the painting, substituted Dali's face for the flaccid timepiece in the foreground.) In Persistence of Memory, time itself, here represented by the limp metal watches, seems to have passed away, as has the mustachioed biomorphic blob in the foreground. Only the landscape, based, as many of Dali's backgrounds are, on the rocky coast of his native Catalonia, is immune to the ravages of time; yet even the cliffs seem suspended in space, defying the laws of gravity and the solidity of matter.
In his paintings of the 1930s, Dali frequently made use of the disturbing double or multiple image, as in The Invisible Man, Diurnal Fantasies, and Memory of the Child-Woman, all of 1932, and Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938). The first New York City solo show of Dali's paintings was in November 1933 at the Julien Levy Gallery; a year later he traveled to America for the first time. A number of paintings of 1933-34 evince Dali's obsession with cephalic deformations, as in Myself at the age of ten when I was the Grasshopper Child (1933), and Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano (1934). In 1933 Dali illustrated Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror, the advanced 19th-century prose poem which influenced the Surrealists.
On vacation in Rosas on the Catalan coast in 1934-36, Dali painted a comparatively lyrical series of beach scenes and became interested in the paintings of Arnold Bocklin and the music of Wagner. From 1934 to '37 Dali helped to popularize surrealism in the United States. Dali's essay, "The Conquest of the Irrational," appeared in 1935 and from 1936 to '38 he participated in the major Surrealist group shows held in London, Paris, New York City, Mexico City, Tokyo, and other world capitals.
Dali's notoriety and growing commercial success earned Breton's stern disapproval. Breton felt that surrealism had liberated Dali from the extreme academic realism of Meissonier, and he deeply admired the artist's ability to reveal the nonrationality of objects and "to implement all the possibilities of the innately savage mind and eye," as Anna Balakian wrote in Andre Breton (1971). To Breton, however, exploitation of surrealism for personal gain was a cardinal sin, and in 1938 he concluded that Dali's art had become commercialized, that the flamboyant artist had "sold out." Expelling Dali from the Surrealist ranks, he branded him "Avida Dollars," an anagram of the artist's name. (The incident became a part of surrealist lore, and in later years Dali humorously embraced the derogatory appellation.)
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Dali avoided taking a stand. Nevertheless, it became obvious over the years that his sympathies, quite unlike Picasso's, were unreservedly with the totalitarian Franco regime. Just six months before the Civil War commenced, Dali completed what was possibly his last truly powerful picture: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans; Premonition of Civil War (1936). Its imagery, recalling the nightmarish visions of Hieronymous Bosch, was intended to portray a people torn apart. Dali wrote, with characteristic bombast, "I showed a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of auto-strangulation." He explained the boiled beans in the title by reference to his obsession with the imagery of edible objects, his need to introduce "some mealy and melancholy vegetable" into the painting.
From 1937 to '39 Dali traveled extensively in Europe. In London, in 1938, he visited Sigmund Freud, who remarked, "What interests me is not your unconscious but your conscious." In The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (1981), the artist modestly described the encounter: "Two geniuses had met without making sparks. His ideas spoke for him. To me, they were useful crutches that reinforced my confidence in my genius and the authenticity of my freedom, and I had more to teach him than I could get from him." Several trips to Italy deepened Dali's appreciation of the Renaissance masters, especially the mannerist and baroque painters of the 16th and 17th centuries, whose influence is reflected in the attenuated figures and exaggerated perspective of such works as Palladio's Corridor of Dramatic Surprises (1938). The Surrealists, however, regarded Dali's apparent return to academism as a further "betrayal" of the movement. In 1939 he briefly visited New York City to execute The Dream of Venus for the World's Fair.
With the start of World War II in September 1939, Dali moved from Paris to the region of Bordeaux and Arcachon in southwest France, and when Germany invaded he fled via Spain and Portugal to the US, arriving in August 1940. He lived for a time at his friend Caresse Crosby's home in Virginia, where he wrote his autobiography, and later settled in Pebble Beach, California. The "Dali legend" had already been fostered by such exhibitionist antics as delivering a lecture in London in a deep-sea diving suit and by crashing through Bonwit Teller's Fifth Avenue window after one of his displays had been altered, and in the US Dali's outrageous self-promotion continued. His American success was confirmed by the retrospective MOMA gave him in 1941; the show toured the US for two years. In 1942 The Secret Life of Salvador Dali was described by New York Times reviewers as "shocking, too intimate, sadistic," and "a wild jungle of fantasy." Dali also designed the sets and costumes and composed the libretti for the ballets Bacchanale (1939), Labyrinth (1941), and Mad Tristan (1944). His novel Hidden Faces (1944) was, according to Edmund Wilson, "a potpourri of the properties, the figures and the attitudes of the later and gamier phases of French romantic writing."
Dali's return to academism in 1937-39 led in the late 1940s to an interest in religious subject matter. About this time he introduced what he called his "atomic," or "nuclear mystic," technique, meaning the explosion of forms so as to dramatize their impact. In 1948, after the publication of his Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, Dali returned to Spain, thus making no secret of his support of the dictator Francisco Franco. "Our invincible Caudillo Generalissimo Francisco Franco," he said, as quoted in The New York Times Magazine, "is the genius of our people, without a doubt. Bueno, there are two: Velazquez and the Generalissimo." He settled in Port Lligat, which was declared a national scenic preserve by the government, and with great fanfare proclaimed his allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. Of Dali's large religious paintings Jacques Busse wrote in the Dictionnaire de peintres, sculpteurs, et graveurs (1976): "Their forced originality does not compensate for the stiffness of a technique which aims at being classical." These paintings include The Madonna of Port Lligat (1950), for which Gala modeled and which Dali gave to the Pope; Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951); and the large, ambitious Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). In A Concise History of Modern Painting Herbert Read savaged this phase of Dali's career: "Salvador Dali's work has sunk lower still, cynically exploiting a sentimental and sensational religiosity. . . .The theatricality, which was always a characteristic of his behavior, is now at the service of those reactionary forces in Spain whose triumph has been the greatest affront to the humanism which, in spite of its extravagance, has been the consistent concern of the Surrealist movement."
In 1952 Dali completed a series of illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. Two years later he visited Pope John XXIII in Rome, and in 1961 he designed scenery and costumes for the Ballet de Gala. By this time Dali had had retrospectives in Tokyo (1964) and New York City (1966). In the 1960s and '70s he experimented with holography and introduced stereoscopic images into his paintings. A Salvador Dali museum, the Teatro Museo Dali, was established in Figueras in 1970, and on March 7 1971 a Dali Museum in Cleveland was inaugurated, putting the A. Reynolds Morse Collection on permanent exhibition.
Reviewing a 1980 Dali retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Beaubourg), Paris, Hilton Kramer of The New York Times (January 20, 1980) commented on the artist's later work: "His loss of artistic power, the absence in his work of any real imagery, coincided with the intensified effort on Dali's part to make himself into a Dali creation. . . .[But] in his best paintings of the '30s Dali was a magician." The consensus among critics is that "almost all the works of art on which Dali's fame as a serious artist rest were painted before his thirty-fifth birthday, between 1929 and 1939," to quote Robert Hughes.
According to Peter Conrad of the New Statesman (June 25, 1976), "Dali's career has depended on his public flagrancy." Conrad added that Dali derived from the romantic dandyism of Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde "his horror of nature, and his desire to exterminate it by making himself over into art, armoring himself with affectation. . . .Dali's loathsome gastronomic tastes and the morphological comedy of his art both derive from this vengeful attitude to nature."
Dali continues to live in the mansion he built near Cadaques, in Port Lligat. On his regular visits to New York City, Dali installs himself in the plush St. Regis Hotel. With his dark hair and the handlebar moustache waxed to rapier sharpness that has become his trademark, his flowing cape and silver-headed cane, Dali flamboyantly attends art and theater openings and other high-profile social events. In 1981 he was awarded Spain's highest decoration, the Gran Cruz de la Orden de Carlos III. Gala, Dali's Russian-born wife and muse, died in June 1982. The following year the Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid, mounted a major Dali retrospective which featured many of the paintings he executed before embracing surrealism in 1929.
"The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad," the witty Dali said in a much-quoted remark that could stand as a definition of his concept of "critical paranoia."
Dali's work is in museums throughout the world. A comprehensive guide to public collections of his work was published by the Cleveland Art Museum in 1974.
Suggested Reading: Current Biography, 1951; Dali, S. La Femme visible, 1930, L'Amour et la memoire, 1931, The Conquest of the Irrational, 1935, Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and Rights to His Own Madness, 1938, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, 1942, Hidden Faces, 1944, Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, 1948, Mystical Manifesto, 1951, The Cuckolds of Old Modern Art, 1956, The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus, 1963, Diary of a Genius, 1964, Dali by Dali, 1970; Gerard, M. Dali, 1968; Hughes, R. The Shock of the New, 1981; Lassaigne, J. La Peinture espagnola, 1952; Levy, J. Surrealism, 1936; Morse, A. R. A New Introduction to Salvador Dali, 1960; Nadeau, M. A History of Surrealism, 1973; Oriol, A. A. Mentira y Verdad de Salvador Dali, 1948; Orwell, G. Dickens, Dali and Others: Studies in Popular Culture, 1946; Parinaud, A. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, 1981; Raynal, M. (ed.) Histoire de la peinture moderne: De Picasso au Surrealisme, 1953; Read, H. A Concise History of Modern Painting, 1959; Soby, J. T. Salvador Dali, 1946; Tapie, M. Dali, 1957; Walton, P. Dali: Miro, 1967. Periodicals: Life February 19, 1945, April 23, 1951; New Statesman June 25, 1976; New York Times March 22, 1970, January 20, 1980, April 19, 1983; New York Times Magazine November 22, 1981; Time February 26, 1940.
Selected exhibitions: Gal. Dalmau, Barcelona, Spain 1922; Gal. Goemans, Paris 1929; Gal. Pierre Colle, Paris 1931, '33; Gal. d'Arte Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain 1933, '34; Julien Levy Gal., NYC 1933-41; Zwemmer Gal., London 1934; MOMA, NYC 1941-42; M. Knoedler and Co., NYC from 1943; Bignou Gal., NYC 1945, '47, '48; Carstairs Gal., NYC 1950-'60; Santa Barbara Mus. of Art, Calif. 1953; Philadelphia Mus. of Art 1955; Casino Communal, Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium 1956; Prince Hotel Gal., Tokyo 1964; Gal. of Modern Art, NYC 1965-66; Boymans-Van Beuningen Mus., Rotterdam 1970-71; Mus. de l'Athenee, Geneva 1970; Whitechapel Art Gal., London 1971; Boymans-Van Beuningen Mus., Rotterdam 1972; Stadtisches Gal., Frankfurt, W. Ger. 1974; Tate Gal., London 1980; Mus. of Contemporary Art, Madrid 1983. GROUP EXHIBITIONS: Dalmau Gal., Barcelona, Spain 1921, '22; Pittsburgh International, Carnegie Inst. 1928; "New Super-Realism," Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn. 1931; "Exposition Surrealiste," Gal. Pierre Colle, Paris 1933; "International Exhibition of Cubism and Surrealism," Copenhagen 1935; "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism," MOMA, NYC 1936; "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme," Gal. des Beaux-Arts, Paris 1938; "Exposicion Internacional del Surrealismo," Gal. de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City 1940; "Four Spaniards," Modern Inst. of Art, Boston 1946; "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme," Gal. Maeght, Paris 1947; "Surrealisme en Abstractie," Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam 1951; "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme," Mus. Nat. d'Art Moderne, Paris 1959; "Masters of Surrealism from Ernst to Matta," Obelisk Gal., London 1961; "Six peintres surrealistes," Gal. Andre Francois Petit, Paris 1963; Sao Paulo Bienal 1965; "Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage," MOMA, NYC 1968; "Surrealism," Moderna Mus., Stockholm 1970.
Selected collections: Salvador Dali Mus. Figueras, Spain; MOMA, and Guggenheim Mus., NYC; Nat. Gal. of Art, and Hirshhorn Mus. and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Mus. Art: Cleveland Mus. of Art, and Dali Mus., Cleveland; Denver Art Museum; Santa Barbara Mus. of Art, Calif.; Tate Gal., London; Glasgow Art Gal., Scotland; Mus. Nat. d'Art Moderne, Paris; Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam; Boymans-Van Beuningen Mus., Rotterdam; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Neue Natl. Gal., Berlin.
Biography from Biography Reference Bank (1984)
Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author.
