Dali Planet #27: America takes note
The first time Dali’s work was seen in the United States it was at the 27th Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928. Three of his paintings were on view at Andrew Carnegie’s museum (pictured in the aerial shot below), though not “Female Nude” or “Unsatisfied Desires” (detail here), which had caused a scandal earlier in the year when they were shown at the Maragall Gallery in Barcelona.
Dali responded during a lecture by insulting “all the painters who were doing twisted trees”. He was proud of causing an uproar. A few years later at Barcelona’s Atheneo he called the founder of an event’s host organisation “the pederast and the great hairy putrified man”. “Everyone threw chairs and broke up everything,” he scoffed. “The police had to protect me.”
In Paris, meanwhile, Dali signed his first contract, with art dealer Camille Goemans, met again with Picasso and Miro, made his first direct contact with surrealist ringleader Andre Breton (seen here in a photo by Man Ray) — and made another tour of the brothels.
In Figueras in the autumn, Dali and Luis Bunuel wrote the screenplay for “Un Chien Andalou”, which would end up as a conceptually incoherent yet graphically riveting 17-minute milestone in cinema history, best remembered for its scenes of a straight razor slicing across a woman’s eyeball (actually a cow’s eye) and ants devouring a rotting hand.
