Dali House

A few days after Henri Matisse came teetering into Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris in that 1907 spring with the great lump of a sculpted African torso he’d just bought, making Picasso’s eyes bug out even more than usual, Pablo dragged his pal André Derain over to the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnology, as the Museum of Man at the Palais de Chaillot was then known. It had a 30-year-old collection of the African stuff. It still has (along with René Descartes’ brain, for some reason), but back then the knickknacks of colonialism were all mouldy and neglected, and the Spaniard was miffed in the must.

“I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately,” Picasso recalled, “but I forced myself to stay.” And stay he did, elevating the centuries-old tribal “objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose” into the most modern of all European art forms. Matisse, Braque and Modigliani kept pace with him, re-moulding the rough-hewn angularity into a new way of seeing the world … but what happened to Derain?

André Derain was 27 when Pablo pulled him into the dusty Trocadéro archives. He hailed from Chatou on the Île-de-France, and was going to be an engineer, but then veered into the less reasonable side of design. He took painting classes at the Académie Carrière and sketched up and down the Parisian Seine and at the Louvre, where in 1899 he met an old classmate, Georges Florentin Linaret, who was by then studying under Gustave Moreau, as was Matisse.

To their extraordinary experiments, Derain brought his admiration for Cézanne and, following the 1901 tribute exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune, of Van Gogh. At this show Derain introduced Matisse to Maurice de Vlaminck, with whom he was by then sharing a studio in Chatou in the western suburbs, where the impressionists once conspired at the Maison Fournaise (it’s on the same street as Dali House).

Derain was drafted for a three-year stint with the army, and painted little during that time. Only two of his works have been ascribed to 1903: “The Soldiers’ Ball of Suresnes” (detail here), done while he was on leave, and “Self-portrait in the Studio”, now at the National Gallery of Australia.

The latter was a fast look in the mirror between bugle calls, but thoughtfully composed around flashes of bright hue. Compare that with “Portrait of the Artist” (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) from about a decade later, on the right, and you’ll see where this post is heading.

When Derain was through with marching, Matisse — who found him delightfully open-minded and a solid, quick worker — was ready to talk his parents out of the engineering nonsense altogether and got him into the Académie Julian. Things proceeded apace, a career blossomed, and by 1905 Derain was able to sell everything in his studio to Ambroise Vollard, and he and Matisse spent the summer in Collioure on the overbright southern coast, where they went completely bonkers with the colours. See the rest.

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.

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.

The Art Club of Chicago, now in its own building on East Ontario Street, was renting space in the south tower of the Wrigley Building in 1941 when Julien Levy’s Dali exhibition came for a visit. The Art Club opened in 1916 and has also hosted shows by Picasso, Braque, Chagall, Rodin, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec. Shown here is “Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach” from 1938.

Meanwhile a small exhibition of surrealist painting at New York’s New School for Social Research had no work by Dali, but it did have a garbage can with his name on it. A Museum of Modern Art director even fumed about Dali’s “lack of dignity” in the catalogue for the show there.

Still, Dali proved irresistible, with his ballet “Labyrinth” opening in New York and his first jewellery collection being unveiled. One source has him designing the jewellery for the Duke de Verdura, another for US millionaire Cummins Catherwood, who sold them to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, which sold them in 1981 to a wealthy Saudi, who sold them to Japanese collectors, who sold them to the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, where they remain today. Shown here is a brooch called “The Eye of Time”.

Something like Sting and his Police did for punk, Amedeo Modigliani made modern art, if not cubism itself, safe for home consumption, sculpting faces into razor-edged African distortions without being scary about it. The classical elegance remained evident. He was standing at cubism’s door but refused to go inside. Gregarious, likeable, handsome and a flash dresser, he got distracted and dismantled. He was consumed, and in death from consumption, he was nearly consumed by myth.

Charges of decorum seem odd when applied to someone as wrecked on booze and dope as he was. When a worried neighbour broke into his squalid Paris flat on a freezing January morning in 1920, there lay the once brash Modigliani, all of 35, about to die from tuberculosis in a bed littered with empty liquor bottles.

His mistress Jeanne Hebuterne, clearing away the stack of sardine tins, admitted she hadn’t thought to call a doctor. Amedeo, who’d been scraped up reeking from a pavement, taken to hospital and then shipped home with a shrug, died on the 24th, as if according to script. (This isn’t Jeanne, it’s “Portrait of Madame Zborowska”, from 1917.)

Two days later Jeanne threw herself out a window, nine months pregnant with their second child. It was a while before his family let her be buried next to him in the posh grave his high-office brother bought for Modi at Pere Lachaise, where hundreds of friends and admirers had gathered to see him off. See the rest.