Dali House

Francis Picabia’s “Monster”, from 1946.

The Chamba in Nigeria and Cameroon kept masks like this one well away from the village when not in use. The spirit depicted — and those who carried and wore the mask — were believed to lurk in the bush, ready to bring violence.

Modern art’s fascination early in the last century with so-called primitive art chagrined Salvador Dali to the tweezer-tips of his moustache. He was appalled that Picasso and the cubists and, worse, his fellow surrealists André Breton, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon, could derive inspiration from “savage” artisans.

But he must have recognised the parallel. In their anguished and grotesque imagery, the surrealists in particular were evoking the same monsters of the subconscious that tribal shaman recruited for their ends.

At any rate, it’s a shame he couldn’t at least appreciate the fundamental beauty of the traditional craftsmanship of Africa, Oceania and the aboriginal Americas, whose face masks are as expressive as anything in modern art, as Modigliani well knew, being able to improve on them only by cocking an eyebrow here and there.

The only problem in absorbing this influence, I think, is the matter of ownership.

A Bamileke helmet mask from Cameroon, today valued at about €15,000, represents a buffalo, an animal embodying power and courage and thus aligned with the tribe’s chief.

I’m not aware of any major controversy today over the sale of antique African carvings. The current debate seems more about the market for the “craft guns” that are used in Africa’s inter-tribal conflicts.

There are quite righteous grumblings from Southeast Asia about foreigners making off with venerable sculptures, but you don’t hear about Africans objecting to the resale of 18th-century masks at the big auction houses in Paris and New York. These masks were scooped up in the thousands by rampaging colonists who history continues to excuse en masse as “explorers”.

To be fair, of course there was an educational factor, with many of the masks and other artifacts finding their place in First World museums, the better to share the culture of faraway places. These were, however, the minority of the purloined items.

A Kanak mask on the left from New Caledonia (€50,000 to €80,000), usually used in rituals mourning the death of chiefs. Representing the chief himself, it has long hair, since it was forbidden to cut one’s hair during the period of transition from life to death.

At its side is a Lu bo bie elephant mask of the Kran tribe in Liberia (€18,000). with perforations in the resin at the ends of the eyes in which seeds were fixed. Villagers who broke the law or refused to pay a debt faced this visage with the threat that if restitution wasn’t forthcoming, the elephant would destroy his house.

I own a bronze Buddha head I picked up for a couple of dollars in Cambodia, and although it’s not remotely antique — they’re mass-cast in huge quantities for tourists — I can’t control some winces of guilt.

It was the same with a large face mask I bought in Jamaica. The carver probably lacquered it the week previous, ready for the local straw market, but you still feel like you’re absconding with a chunk of sovereign culture. See the rest.

Rik Pavlescak, the founder of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, came up with an interesting analogy toward the end of a lively recent discussion among the members about copyright. He cited a 2006 article by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam on the debate over Roy Lichtenstein’s use of comic-book panels in his pop art.

Beam in turn pointed to the website of David Barsalou, who was then teaching art at the High School of Commerce in Springfield, Massachusetts. On Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein, Barsalou stacks more than 100 paintings by the artist next to their original comic images. He also published a book with the same title.

Even better are Barsalou’s Flickr pages, which have a lot of well-sourced background information and biographies and photos of the original comic artists, placing credit where it duly belongs.

Barsalou’s efforts demolish the common belief that Lichtenstein created entirely new images based on the look of 1950s and ’60s comics. Even the cartoons’ balloon captions were often scalped intact.

“He tried to make it seem as though he was making major compositional changes in his work, but he wasn’t,” Beam quotes Barsalou as saying. “The critics are of one mind that he made major changes, but if you look at the work, he copied them almost verbatim. Only a few were original.”

Lichtenstein Foundation executive director Jack Cowart argued that “the panels were changed in scale, colour, treatment and in their implications” and Roy never made an “exact copy”.

Amusingly, the foundation’s website can’t be visited unless you first click to agree that you won’t violate the copyright within, and the warning is illustrated with Lichtenstein’s “Grrrrrrrrrrr!!”, a painting of an angry dog that came directly from a comic strip drawn by Joe Kubert. See the rest.

Dali’s “Seated Monk”, from 1925.

Sometime in the late 1970s photographer Robert Descharnes, Salvador Dali’s friend, secretary and archivist, snapped a picture of the maestro sitting with a man identified as a monk, who was evidently visiting him at his home in Port Lligat, Spain.

Though the monk’s attire didn’t seem particularly Tibetan, I got it in my head that this was supposed to be a Tibetan monk. He does at least look Asian.

The question is what was he doing there with Dali.

And the problem with trying to find out why through a Google search is that you cannot put the terms “dali” and “monk” (and certainly not “tibet”) together without coming immediately face to face with everyone in the world who misspells the title of Tibet’s religious leader, the Dalai Lama.

It’s a dirt-common mistake that even posh American newspapers make. You can’t blame Google for assuming, since there are a million webpages referring to “dali lama”, that that’s what you want to see. Tracking down the facts behind an obscure photo of Salvador Dali and a visiting monk thus becomes a mountain-climbing expedition.

In honour of the Year of the Bull-Headed, however, I tried again recently. There was a new entry I came across not long after I left base camp: a Tibetan monk who’s an artist, and has in fact been described as “the Salvador Dali of Tibetan art”.

You can imagine how confounding this was.

I had a cursory look at the 2006 article from the San Antonio Express-News about Rabkar Wangchuk, who wore cowboy boots and a flat-brim hat while spreading the word about the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in Dharamsala, India.

Wangchuk was in Texas building a stupa and explaining how to make sand mandalas. On a less traditional bent, he also made manipulated photos using images of the Dalai Lama and spiritual symbols.

At this point I gave up looking for Dali’s monk buddy. Maybe I’ll just phone Robert Descharnes in Paris.

On his first visit, in 1934, Salvador Dali was so happy to be in the United States (his fascist pals back in Europe were proving ruder than he’d expected) that he churned out all kinds of cheerful, delightful art.

It helped, of course, that the news media were nuts about him. He repaid their fascination by laying another of his celebrated eggs. (Yes, that’s really him in the beard and cap.)

In “Allegory of an American Christmas”, above, the egg makes a return appearance following “Illumined Pleasures”, and it’s hatching a new idea, as it would again in “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus”.

Dark clouds roil the suspense and figures gaze upward hopefully from a bleak landscape as an airplane emerges from the egg, from just about where New York sits. Dali was afraid of flying, so perhaps he had in mind Santa’s airborne arrival.

Eight years later he was back in the spirit. “Christmas” is much more traditional, possibly overly so. The trees are decked and baubles dangle from a classic Dalinean archway in an almost mirror image, accented with the shadow of an angel and a pair of buttressed columns with noses and lips that could almost by harps.

Ths was, after all, about the same time Dali was clowning around with Harpo Marx. Maybe this was the Christmas card Sal sent him.

The relentlessly meandering masses at Digg It managed to snag my attention with one of their group discoveries, the whimsical “re-paintings” of José Manuel Ballester. I usually avoid things like Digg It — far too much time wasted — but last month images originally posted at a Spanish site called Fogonazos (Flashes) were worth a chuckle.

He meticulously deletes all living creatures from familiar paintings. Below is Brueghel’s “Winter Landscape” alongside Ballester’s version, shorn of people, in a bid to “purge all human anecdotes from historical landscape painting and invert the hierarchy, giving priority to the background”. Dunno why. Must be an environmental thing.

He’s also “done” Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation”, Botticelli’s “The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti” and more. The originals are at the Prado in Madrid; his renditions are currently on view down the street at Galería Distrito Cu4tro. And his website is here, where his own original landscapes are brutally rough and sparse, and even more ghostly.

But far more interesting than all of that was another link on the Fogonazos page dated November 2006. This one tracks to a seemingly anonymous site, also Spanish, based at the University of Seville.

Here, someone’s gone to a lot of trouble unearthing the photographs on which several impressionists based some of their paintings. The idea of painting from a photograph makes “purists” wince, of course, but artists have been doing it ever since the first roll of film came back from the Fuji kiosk.

The Dutch masters painted from camera obscura projections, and dear old Dali was known to rely on photographic studies too.

At the top of the post are Paul Gauguin’s 1890 painting “Mother and Daughter”, and the snapshot he lifted it from, taken by one Henry LeMasson. Below is “Young with Fan”, from 1902, alongside a picture that Louis Grelet took in Gauguin’s studio in Hivaoa. See the rest.