Dali House

What happens when a painting’s title forgets its place and crawls all over the canvas? Too ambitious to loiter meekly in the little sign card next to the frame, the words decide they’re just as important as the picture, and the next thing you know you have anarchy, graffiti run amok, images and text forming a labour union and subverting the millennia-old conventions governing visual representation.

A detail of Georges Braque’s “Pedestal Table” from 1913.

Pop art made words in paintings commonplace, but its grandfather, cubism, was a sucker for shards of text blowing through the scenery, and its crazy old great-uncle, surrealism, kept scrapbooks of every flitting message scrap, quite sure they would one day all make sense.

Andre Derain’s “Portrait of a Man with a Newspaper” from about 1912.

Pictures and words are natural enough collaborators, of course, both being central to the fine arts, but traditionally they never appeared onstage together. I really don’t want to dig too deeply into this, because there are websites that are quite happy to take you on very long and not particularly interesting strolls along Semiotics Street, returning by way of Semantics Boulevard. In the case of Rene Magritte the University of Washington has an especially heavy-breathing thesis online, but do watch out for words like “intersubstitutability” — you could injure yourself.

Then there’s David Scott’s 2005 essay for Image & Narrative, “the Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative” about the words found in Paul Delvaux’s art, which I found a bit more intesting since Delvaux is a bit more interesting, not least because he was forever painting naked women sleepwalking around train stations. (He also painted a fine “Leda” in 1948, a subject I’ve lately been rattling on about.)

Dali House has also joined the wool-minders pondering the meaning of “Et in Arcadia ego” in Nicolas Poussin’s “The Shepherds of Arcadia”, but that was hardly on the same level as Magritte’s patient experimenting with what exactly it is that words and pictures do, how they do it and how you can pull the rug out from under them.

“This is Not a Pipe”, from 1929, and it’s still not a pipe today. Magritte did a string of variations on this picture over the decades in a bid to expose “the Treachery of Imagery”, ultimately putting the words on a bolted-down plaque so it looked as though the affirmation could never be removed. I think of the image every time I hear David Byrne sing, “This is not my beautiful wife!”

What was Magritte on about? Michel Foucault found a litany of layered possible interpretations in a 1973 book about the pipe picture, one cancelling out another. This picture of a pipe doesn’t make the pipe a pipe, of course, but there’s much more. This painting is not a pipe? Art is not a pipe? If you focus on the words and realise this sentence is not a pipe, suddenly a picture reclaims its dominance over the written word. See the rest.

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.

“I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists — the Marx Brothers, Cecil B DeMille and Walt Disney,” Dali wrote to Andre Breton in Paris. Dali finally met the last of this triumvirate at a 1946 party at the home of Warner Brothers studio chief Jack Warner, who had commissioned the artist to do his portrait and one of his wife.

Dali approached Disney with the suggestion that Walt was the man who could make “the first motion picture of the Never Seen Before”. Disney saw the possiblities and assigned director John Hench to help Dali turn the Mexican ballad “Destino” into a six-minute animated film at the Disney studios.

The company hit a financial reef, however, and “Destino” the film was shelved, to be finally resurrected in 2002, freshened up with some computer-generated imagery.

Meanwhile, as happened on the “Spellbound” set, collectors absconded with much of Dali’s artwork for the cartoon, including storyboards. Some have occasionally shown up at auction.

Here’s Uncle Walt returning the visit, strolling in Cadaques with the maestro.

Above is a detail of “Portrait of Mrs Jack Warner”, which is in a private collection.

In May 2008, the study for this painting, seen below and with a detail here, came up for bidding at Bonham’s in New York, at an estimated price of between $40,000 and $60,000.

There were no takers.

On July 19, 1938, Dali finally sat down with Sigmund Freud at the 82-year-old psychoanalyst’s home on Elsworthy Road. Freud, who had just fled Austria, later offered a mixed reaction on their meeting.

As they talked, Dali began to sketch Freud, and the latter turned to author Stefan Zweig, who had arranged the get-together, and whispered, “That boy looks like a fanatic — small wonder that they have a civil war in Spain if they look like that.”

The remark delighted Dali when he was told afterward. To Dali, Freud fretted, “In the paintings of the Old Masters one immediately tends to look for the unconscious, whereas, when one looks at a surrealist painting, one immediately has the urge to look for the conscious.”

Freud thanked Zweig in a letter the next day, “for until now I have been inclined to regard the surrealists, who have apparently adopted me as their patron saint, as complete fools (let us say 95%, as with alcohol). That young Spaniard, with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery has changed my estimate.”

When Dali put his account of the meeting down on paper, in his 1942 autobiography-of-sorts “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali”, he added this sketch of Freud, which observers have noted owes much to Leonardo Da Vinci.

There are, for example, several alternative depictions, rough possibilities for a final portrait, compete with freehand swirling lines, and the ones down the left side are gnarled old-timers of the sort that Leonardo loved to draw. And Dali added a commentary, Leonardo-like, in which he recorded that he’s sketched Freud’s head based on the formation of the volute and of a snail.

In 2006 the film “The Death of Salvador Dali”, written and directed by Delaney Bishop and starring Salvador Benavides as Dali and other actors portraying Freud, Gala, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and Luis Bunuel, earned acclaim for its interpretation of the meeting in the psychoanalyst’s office.

This Dali-esque portrayal of Freud is in the archives of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, but the members are unsure of the source or whether it is actually a Dali original.

Added January 2008: Roy R Behrens, a graphic designer and professor of art at the University of Northern Iowa, has several fascinating articles online that he’s written for Bobolink Books. Among them is a lively look of Dali’s visit with Freud.

Dali perceived the meeting, Behrens reports, as “an utter failure. Freud was old and ill by then. Only a month earlier he had withstood a Nazi raid of his home in Vienna, had fled to England, and would soon die of cancer of the jaw. Under the circumstances, he could not have been greatly amused by a crank with billiard-ball eyes and a moustache as sharp as a scorpion’s tail.”

They had a comic joust over a magazine that Dali had brought along, which contained a commentary he’d written on paranoia. But the bottom line, Behrens says, was that Freud did in fact enjoy the get-together. “In other words, Dali really was paranoid.”

There’s much more detail in the article, which opens with Dali being asked to name his favourite animal. The answer: “Filet of sole.”

The Deux Magots cafe in Paris’ Montparnasse district was a favoured meeting spot for the surrealists, so it may have been there where they held a mock trial to consider Dali’s crimes against the movement in 1934. He was, after a brief reprieve, expelled from the group.

The members had taken offence at Dali’s “The Enigma of William Tell”, an unflattering portrait of Lenin, shown above, as well as his commercial flair, Andre Breton famously twisting his name into the anagram “Avida Dollars”. Breton called him a self-confessed racist who supported the fascists in Spain, Italy and Germany.

Breton had seen Dali’s arrival in Paris six years earlier as just what the surrealists needed. They were by then already running dry of ideas. But Breton and Aragon saw themselves as sophisticates in charge of a motley amalgam of foreign buffoons, including the original “Andalucian dogs”, Dali and Luis Bunuel. Dali in particular oozed warped pathologies, and his surrealism, it’s been noted, “was dangerously total”.

Dali, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret wrote in their biography, “enjoyed pomp and ritual, so he actually preferred monarchies to totalitarian regimes; the political Left was too drab and prosaic. To the surrealists he confessed, ‘Very rich people have always impressed me; very poor people, like the fishermen of Port Lligat, have likewise impressed me; average people, not at all.’ He regretted that the surrealists were attracting ‘a whole fauna of misfit and unwashed petty bourgeois’.”

As to the Fuhrer, they quoted him further: “Whenever I started to paint the leather strap that crossed from his belt to his shoulder, the softness of that Hitler flesh packed under his military tunic transported me into a sustaining and Wagnerian ecstasy that set my heart pounding, an extremely rare state of excitement that I did not even experience during the act of love.

“On the one hand,” Dali said another time with a completely straight face, “I had society, politely astonished that I was going somewhere that they could not go, and on the other hand, the surrealists. I was always off to where the rest couldn’t go. Snobbery consists in going to places that others are excluded from — which produces a feeling of inferiority in the others. In all human relations there is a way of achieving complete mastery of a situation. That was my policy where surrealism was concerned.”

At right is the cartoonish “Hitler Masturbating”. Dali challenged Breton to convene the group for an emergency meeting “at which the mystique of Hitler shall be debated”. Dali showed up with a thermometer in his mouth, claiming he felt ill.

While Breton reeled off his accusations, Dali kept checking his temperature. When it was his turn, he began to remove his clothing piece by piece, while reciting a prepared speech in which he explained that his obsession with Hitler was at heart apolitical, and that he could not be a Nazi “because if Hitler were ever to conquer Europe, he would do away with hysterics of my kind, as had already happened in Germany”.

On yet another occasion he admitted that he saw Hitler as a masochist determined to start a war and lose it in heroic style.

From Dali’s point of view, the surrealists’ leftist politics was dull and doomed. “Marxism is shit, the last of Christian shit,” he declared, and to be sure, communism served only to handcuff their imagination. Dali once made an armchair studded with glass vials containing milk — Aragon pointed out that there were too many starving children in the world to justify such a waste.