Dali House

In a 2005 essay published online by Britain’s Surrealism Centre (Issue 4 winter 2005), David Lomas does a tremendous job of putting Salvador Dalí’s version of science in perspective, and the focus is all through the prism of Leonardo Da Vinci’s world.

Sigmund Freud’s “psychoanalytic novel”, “Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of His Childhood”, was a must-read for the surrealists, not least because it delved into Leonardo’s dual career as an artist and a scientist. André Breton often urged artists to stay up to date on the latest scientific discoveries in biology and physics, the better to express reality, albeit surrealistically.

Both scientist and artist is how Dalí wished to be seen, especially later, in the wake of Hiroshima and its terrible revelations of power and ingenuity, when he actually turned his back on the speculative Freud and declared the exacting scientist Erwin Schrödinger his new mentor.

As Astrid Ruffa notes in another essay in the same issue of Papers of Surrealism, Henri Poincaré insisted that scientific truth appealed first to intuition, and then to reason, and Einstein deplored reliance on mere observation of the facts alone.

“Dalí, by associating surrealist activities and science,” Ruffa also wrly notes, “places himself in an ambiguous territory midway between the serious and the playful. He is out of step both with the scientific world (since his experiences are not very scientific due to the overestimation of what is anecdotal and subjective), and with the artistic world (since the imaginative Dalinian world is destined to be misunderstood by those unaware of the scientific issues involved). Dalí’s work is thus at all times met with a partial or complete lack of understanding.” See the rest.

The photos here are from The Nation, except that of the Puipia piece from Tonson.

Peggy Wauters cuts the heads off cute dolls and replaces them with hideous gargoyle bulbs that are supposed to represent orphans waiting in vain to be adopted. That’s a sour summary of the Belgian’s “Myths and Monstrosities” exhibition at Bangkok’s 100 Tonson Gallery until April 20, but of course it’s all quite interesting.

Wauters cares about society’s “others” — like the orphans and the disabled and prisoners too. Her Orphans series is a kick at the modern world’s continuing inability to find homes, let alone love, for all the outcast kids.

In her quest to promote a tolerance for imperfection, she also berates urban alienation and plastic surgery and turns tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” on their head, with the wolf cowering before a vicious-looking Riding Hood.

As Khetsirin Pholdhampalit reports in The Nation, Wauters grew up in Aalst, a town famous for its carnival, and we all know the bizarre creatures that carnivals lure in and then put on display.

The Tonson Gallery is getting quite well known outside Thailand and also counts Louise Bourgeois among its artist clients. A local talent represented there is Chatchai Puipia, whose sculpture “Dedicated to the one I love”, shown here, must feel quite at home in Peggy Wauters’ world.

Peggy Wauters’ website

We’ve seen how and why history’s first beauty pageant became an enduring theme for three millennia of artists. The smaller story bookending it is almost as intriguing.

Paris, for all his faux shyness in womanly things, had been around. Mostly around the place shown above — Mount Ida, from whose summit the gods watch and diddled with the horse race in Troy. There is snow in the heights in this Google Earth image, not quite the fine summer’s day seen in the Judgement paintings, but matching, by one tradition, the death of Paris and his first wife, Oenone.

Today Mount Ida is known as Kaz Dağı, the Goose Mountain, 1,800 metres tall and ringed with hiking trails that ramble past waterfalls. Those climbers who are wheezing are here for the oxygen cure. Şahin Deresi — Hawk Valley — is a canyon that funnels pine-scented air out to the gulf and breathes in the iodised sea breeze.

Troy today is called Troia, not to be confused with nearby Truva, a bit of a tourist trap cashing in on the war story, complete with a giant wooden horse on which the kids can play. The archaeological site itself has been dug up and looted so many times that it’s been described as “a ruin of a ruin”. Thank the gods Mount Ida still has her mysteries.

Mount Ida was once home of the Mother Goddess, Cybele, chockfull of sibyls and soothsayers, and a tremendous make-out spot for young couples in lust.

As a tot Paris was suckled here by a she-bear. It’s a long story but loads of fun.

When Paris was born, his mother, Hecuba, had a horrific (and accurate) premonition that he would one day be responsible for the destruction of Troy. She told her husband Prodarces, who everyone called Priam simply for confusion’s sake, and he called in Aesacus, the dream decipherer. Best get the boy the hell away from here then, said Aesacus. Get him out way in the countryside someplace. Paris’ big brother Hector wanted to go too, but they were still working out the movie script at this point and casting was causing problems.

Agelaus, a family servant, dumped Paris on Mount Ida, where a sympathetic bear loaned him a teat for five days. Agelaus came back, found that the toddler had done alright for himself, and decided to raise him as his own son on his nearby farm. A shepherd was born from a castaway prince. See the rest.

The 1600 version of “The Judgement of Paris” by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), which was based on Raphael’s. Rubens did at least three variations, but we’ll get to that.

And the Internet always tosses up three different renditions of Salvador Dali’s “Judgement of Paris”, and I’m not sure they’re all correct. He did his etching in the mid-1960s for a series called “Mythologie”. Have a look at this post for a bit more information on the subject.

Hacking into the legend of the Trojan War and all the paint that’s been poured into recording the event that started it.

The riveting soap opera played out in and around the myth that has for 3,000 years been known as “the Judgement of Paris” has for just as long had artists falling all over each other to get their versions down on canvas. Of course, all of Greek mythology has been painted as many times as Tom Sawyer’s picket fence, including the whole Trojan War ball of yarn back to front, but consider this particular episode:

* Three of history’s most beautiful women practically or altogether nude, and each aquiver with naked jealousy
* A guy — Joe Average — called upon to be the judge in their divine beauty pageant
* God the Father watching with keen interest
* And the fate of human civilisation teetering in the balance.

Who could resist subject matter like this? No one!

The Judgement in porcelain, from about 500 BCE, at Rome’s Capitoline Museums.

For centuries it was the ancient Greek and Roman scribes who had their way with the tale, complete with ribald humour, while the pot-painters of their time fumbled with the essentials. Finally, though, the more modern artists who knew how to depict lust properly got their chance and set up their easels on Mount Ida, where Paris was tending his sheep, an odd thing for him to be doing, since he was a prince of Troy.

Paris must have wondered why he was suddenly the designated model for an art class, but then he had had his moment of fame: He’d been the adjudicator in a bullfight — his own bull against a bovine who turned out to be Ares (not Taurus). Ares, to no one’s surprise, won.

Raphael’s “Judgement of Paris” is in fact the engraving made from it in 1515 by Marcantonio Raimondi. Somebody lost Raphael’s copy. Not to worry, Marcantonio (c1480-c1534) was one of the best in the printmaking business, influenced by Dürer and exceedingly clever at adding in his own backdrops.

In this detail, viewers take note of a character who’s taking note of them. This is where Édouard Manet found his tableau for “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” in 1863. Raphael or not, polite people at the Paris Salon freaked when they saw a naked female picnicking with a couple of swank “customers”. So Manet borrowed instead from Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” and painted “Olympia”, and you should have heard the howling then!

The reason for the impromptu painters’ salon in the Phrygian highlands began to dawn on Paris when Hermes, the messenger boy, turned up with three quite fetching ladies. The painter-paparazzi must have had advance notice of their coming, Paris thought.

Hermes was carrying an apple, never a good sign in these scenarios, Paris thought further, and then he stopped thinking because the women had shed their clothes and begun bathing in the Spring of Ida. Hermes would have explained to him, if he could have held his attention long enough, that he was holding the Apple of Discord, which Eris, the Goddess of Discord, had chucked onto the banquet table at a party that she’d crashed.

Girolamo Benvenuto (1470-1524), with all the gilded, not-quite-natural nature of the Sienese artisans in his day.

The banquet was another scene of which there are dozens of great paintings: a wedding party that Zeus had thrown for Peleus and Thetis, who would one day give birth to Achilles, who would one day be played by Brad Pitt in a blockbuster film that would be quickly forgotten because it didn’t have much going for it beyond a couple of pretty good swordfights.

Eris wasn’t invited because she was, well, the Goddess of Discord, and who wants discord at a party? Disco, maybe, in a pinch, but not discord. She showed up anyway and, staying in character, caused discord. The golden apple she added to the buffet, she said, without naming names, belonged to the best-looking woman in the universe.

“Why, that would be me!” said the goddess Hera, the Goddess of Marriage and also of Cuckolded Wives, who was wedded to (and cuckolded by) Zeus.

“No, me!” said the goddess Athena, who enjoyed a good hunt.

“In your dreams,” said the goddess Aphrodite, who was, after all, the Goddess of Beauty. “It’s me!”

All eyes turned to Zeus, the capo del tutti capo of Mount Olympus, who, like most chairmen of the board, was all bluff and bluster. He passed the buck and nominated Paris, the cattle judge, to decide which babe was the best looking. See the rest.

Vincent has come to Arles. He is living at the Hôtel Restaurant Carrel on rue de la Cavalerie, in view of the old Roman arena. The town, he says, is full of happy people – it’s as “formidably cheerful as Holland is sad” – but he complains that the citizens are lazy and irresponsible too.

The compensation is in the landscape, on windless, cloudless days, when the air itself is alive with biting colour, its vibration the only movement in vast vistas of serenity. He is wasting no time, the canvases filling with fever. All of it has to be painted, everything he sees.

Let us pray the mistral wind, when it comes, is not too severe. It carries madness in its arms.

A satellite image of France showing the relative positions of Paris and nearby Auvers-sur-Oise and, far to the south, Arles.

Van Gogh was in Arles from February 1888 to May 1890, though a full year of that time was spent at the asylum of St Paul-de-Mausolée in Saint-Rémy de Provence, 15 miles to the northeast. He lived in Auvers from the end of May 1890 until his death two months later. The photo shows Vincent when he was just 19. By the time he moved to Arles he was nearly 35 years old.