Dali House

If the downside of 1927 for Dali was spending much of the year in compulsory military service at the Castle of San Fernando (seen in the Google Earth image below), there was also the production of Lorca’s “Mariana Pineda” at the Teatro Goya in Barcelona, for which Dali painted the scenery and designed the costumes (Lorca joins him for the snapshot above), and the publication of his first major written work, “Saint Sebastian” in an arts journal and then in the newspaper El Gallo.

This was also the year that Dali executed what is regarded as his first surrealist painting, “Blood is Sweeter than Honey”, although he as yet had had formal contact with the Paris-based surrealist group. Meanwhile one gallery refused to show his “Dialogue on the Beach” because of its graphic depiction of genitalia. Rather than dangle a concealing cork over the offending part as suggested, Dali withdrew the work.

The painting here is “Senicitas” (Spanish for “little cinders”), also known as “Summer Forces” and “The Birth of Venus”. This is a detail; click on the image to see the complete work. Completed during his military stint, it too reflects the dawn of Dali’s surrealist imagery, in fact “all his phantasmagoric private images in a single picture”, according to his biographer Robert Descharnes. Among the flies, blood, intimated genitalia, donkey bones and headless female bodies, Lorca’s head lies on its side near the lower left, a reference to the poet’s prank of pretending to be dead for long periods of time.

An early Dali work, 1926’s “Neo-Cubist Academy (Composition with Three Figures)” is on view here at the Museu de Montserrat, one of the modern attractions competing for the attention of pilgrims visiting the 12th-century Shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat, home to the “miraculous” statue of the Black Madonna.

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