Dali Planet #133: Palacio Tinell
The centuries-old Hall of Tinell at Barcelona’s Real Palace was the setting in October 1962 for an exhibition of Dali’s “The Battle of Tetuan”, right beside Mariano Fortuny’s venerable canvas on the same subject. Dali saw this as the start of “a war of pictures”. In both works, Robert Descharnes wrote, “virtuosity was a function of carefully quantified patchwork and dabs, from which substance the images emerged suddenly”. Dali had seen his image of the battle in the patterns of print in a newspaper:
“I have always been in the habit of looking at papers upside down. Instead of reading the news, I look at it and I see it … Today, holding the papers upside down, I see divine things moving at such a pace that I decide, in a sublime inspiration of Dalinian pop art, to have pieces of newspapers repainted which contain aesthetic treasures … This idea occurs to me when I notice the beauty of certain newspaper collages, yellowed and a bit flyspecked, by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.”
That same year Dali was commissioned by publisher Pierre Argillet to produce illustrations for various classical books (Argillet produced “The Mythology” in 1963, a collection of Dali engravings and etchings) and released his own book “The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus”. The “Angelus”, once a hugely popular image in Europe, had been cited in his 1934 painting “Meditation on the Harp”, depicting peasants in prayer.
Fascinated yet repelled by sex, Dali reinterpreted Jean-Francois Millet with a pitchfork supporting a phallus and the man’s hat held as if to cover an erection. Others see a picture of castration, the woman as praying mantis about to devour a man emasculated, as Dali had no doubt felt early on in his relationship with the volatile Gala.
