Dali House

“A Reunion of Friends” by Max Ernst.

I have no idea why it’s called a “reunion”. Tristan Tzara, Yves Tanguy and Man Ray are nowhere in sight (not to forget André Masson, Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud), Ernst (pictured here) had just arrived on the scene in Paris, and Dalí, to name another prominent member, wouldn’t be joining for another six years. But I’ve also seen the painting referred to as “At the Rendezvous of Friends”, which is a somewhat more meaningful place to drop anchor in surrealism’s tossing shoals.

“At that time we used to meet in the evenings like hunters, comparing what we’d bagged that day, the tally of beasts we’d invented, the fantastic plants, the images we’d shot down,” Louis Aragon wrote in his 1924 essay “A Wave of Dreams”, as translated by Susan de Muth.

“In the grip of a tremendous momentum, we spent more and more time on the practices which led us into our strange inner lands. We delighted in observing the curve of our own exhaustion, and the derangement which followed. For then the marvellous would appear. At first each one of us thought himself subject to some peculiar mental disorder and struggled against it. Then it revealed its true nature. It was as if the mind, having reached a turning point in the subconscious, lost all control over where it was drifting. Images which existed in the mind took physical forms, became tangible reality.

“Once we were in touch with them they expressed themselves in a perceptible form, taking on the characteristics of visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations. We experienced the full force of these images. We could no longer control them. We had become their domain, a setting for them. In bed, at the moment of falling asleep, in the street with eyes wide open, with the full apparatus of dread, we held out our hands to phantoms.

“Rest, abstention from surrealism made these phenomena disappear, gave us space to comprehend how close they were to the phenomena induced by chemical preparations, and at first we suspended our experiments through fear, but they gradually reclaimed their rights over our curiosity.”

The scene of hunters tallying their day’s kill is a curious assemblage even for surrealists, pictorially a counterpoint to Max Ernst’s glue-free collages that hung in Dali House the other day. He must have been anal-retentive because he was always amassing bits and bolts and marshalling them into assigned spaces.

So, who is reuniting/rendezvousing? According to the always informative Olga’s Gallery, Ernst is in the front row on the left, sitting on Dostoyevsky’s knee for purely aesthetic reasons. Then down the row to the right, making Masonic-Star Trek hand signals, are Theodor Fraenkel, Jean Paulhan and Benjamin Péret, followed by Johannes Th Baargeld and Robert Desnos.

In the back row, standing, you can see Philippe Soupault, Hans Arp, Max Morise, a shady character in the background who cannot be identified because he works for the CIA, and, looking a lot like Columbus, Raffaele Sanzio, known to posterity as Raphael, against whose prying eyes Morise is trying to hide his heart.

Raphael would have been the evening’s guest of honour because by then he’d been dead 400 years. Clearly there was some warmth in the surrealists’ hearts for the old boy. Certainly Dalí would much later find his way to God with Raffa’s help, leaning heavily on “The Transfiguration” and “La Fornarina”.

Next come Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, André Breton, the statuesque Giorgio de Chirico and finally Mrs Paul Éluard, Gala, who still hasn’t met and run off with Dalí. (The gossip on that is here.)

The surrealists seem to be holding their annual convention at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, if not on the moon. Refreshments are meagre: That looks like a cubist snack tray that Ernst is keeping Doestoyevsky away from. Bit of cheese and an apple. The knife could be trouble in this mob, though.

And what about the mystery figure on the left with his back turned, playing with a doll house? Arp is trying to get him to pay attention. Hmm — doll house … Dali House … it’s not …? No, it couldn’t be. And it’s not, it’s supposedly René Crevel. We’ll meet all these folks personally in a moment.

Soon after painting this police line-up Ernst got busy turning his twee collages into large-scale paintings like “The Teetering Woman”, aka “The Equivocal Woman”, seen here, dreamed up frottage and grattage and, in 1924, enjoyed a trip to the French colonies in Southeast Asia with the Éluards. It was a pleasant decade all round, but things do have a way of changing.

The surrealists all turned out to be communists, for starters, so in 1938 Ernst withdrew stealthily to the balmy south of France, where first the French authorities arrested him as a “hostile alien” and then the Gestapo came to see him and compare notes on communism.

Despite sharing a loathing for it, the Nazis threw him in prison, but he managed to escape with the help of Loplop (pictured) and good old Peggy Guggenheim got him on a boat to New York. The rest is modern American art history.

Louis Aragon’s take on Ernst in his essay “A Wave of Dreams”: “Earthquakes are where Max Ernst, painter of cataclysms as others of battles, feels most at ease and contented. He finds it strange that the earth isn’t constantly quaking. René Crevel has never noticed that this planet is solidly fixed with help from meridians and latitudes: he is more of a sleepwalker than anyone.”

Meanwhile, back at the reunion, dada was being called awful names and much fresh manifesto’ing was about to commence. Surrealism was a newborn babe, a snobs’ club of rebellious dandies seducing one another with every meaning-laden tick of the clock and every coincidental bark of an Andalusian dog, and then turning to the next person, launching intrigues against glimpsed realities.

Here are Max’s models … See the rest.

A Welsh-born “Mr H” had an interesting blog called Giornale Nuovo that he’s abandoned now, but five years’ worth of entries remain in place — so far at least. There are two great pages on Max Ernst’s 1929 collage-laden novel “The Hundred-Headless Woman”, which includes both the artwork and quotations from a monograph about the proto-surrealist that came out in 1977.

The images shown here — “Spiritual Repose” above and “The Hundred-Headless Woman Loosens Her Majestic Sleeve” on the left — are on this page, along with a visit from Ernst’s pet chicken Loplop and an amusing anecdote.

Ernst recalls being approached by a fellow artist who asked what he was up to. Ernst said he was working on collages, which in French can be understood as “gluing”, from the word colle, meaning “glue”.

“Then he whispered in my ear: ‘And what sort of glue do you use?’

“If it is the plumes that make the plumage,” Ernst explains to his reader, “it is not la colle that makes the le collage.”

Surrealist humour.

Or, if you don’t understand it at all, dadaist humour.

This all segues nicely into a biographical piece coming up in a few days based on “A Reunion of Friends”, Ernst’s group portrait of the early surrealists.

There must have been plenty of laughs (and vacant looks) at the first surrealist meetings in Paris, amid rounds of automatic writing and exquisite corpse. Ernst, disliking the aroma of his native Cologne, was persuaded to come to the big city and join the gang, which he did in 1922, promptly committing the whole group to canvas in one fell swoop.

Under the watchful eye of the Dali monument on Es Passeig in Cadaques are Es Maritim bar, the Can Rafa restaurant and the popular disco L’Hostal. Dali used to hang out here at the 1901-vintage Hostal, chatting with rock stars and Nobel prize winners, and even designed its logo. This photo of the entrance is by Xavier Cortina from PBase.com.

He may also have partaken in some lusty scenes in the upstairs rooms in the 1960s, which would account for letting his enthusiasm get away with him when he called it “the most beautiful place on earth”. Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Umberto Eco have also been among the customers.

The Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels has in its collection Dali’s 1946 painting “The Temptation of St Anthony” (detail here), a stunning work that was nevertheless among the losing entries in an art competition.

Loew-Lewin Productions wanted a painting of the temptation of St Anthony the Great, known as “the Father of All Monks”, for its planned movie “The Private Affairs of Bel Ami”, starring a very young Angela Lansbury alongside George Sanders. (It was Sanders’ third movie about artists with director Alan Lewin, the others being 1942’s “The Moon and Sixpence” and “The Picture Of Dorian Gray” two years later — all three films are in black and white except for one scene each in which a painting is shown in full colour.)

Eleven top artists were invited to try for the colour shot, and a jury that included Marcel Duchamp picked the piece submitted by Dali’s former co-surrealist Max Ernst. All the entries were later shown together here in Brussels. For his effort, Ernst is immortalised in the film credits on the International Movie Data Base as “Art Department”.

Dali’s version of “The Temptation” has been called the point in his creative life when he decided to be an intermediate between heaven and earth. The elephants on spindly legs describe levitation. The temptation itself is in the power of the rearing horse, the Fountain of Desire on its back, ridden by a naked woman, Bernini’s obelisk, the phallic tower and, in the distant clouds, El Escorial, signifying spiritual and temporal order.

New York dealer Julien Levy bought “The Persistence of Memory” at the 1931 Paris show for $250, calling it “10x14 inches of Dali dynamite”, and loaned it to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, for its year-ending “Newer Super Realism”. Dali’s work was the star of a show that also included Ernst, Miro, de Chirico, Duchamp and Man Ray, and grabbed national headlines.

Levy offered to sell the painting to Atheneum director Chick Austin for $350, but Austin opted instead to buy “La Solitude” (detail here) for $300, making that piece the first Dali painting to enter any museum’s collection. Levy took “The Persistence of Memory” back to his own gallery for a show in January 1932. It still had a busy touring schedule ahead of it over the next few years. During its 1934 exhibition here at the Museum of Modern Art, which bought the painting, one critic urged his readers to “page Dr Freud” if they wanted to decipher its meaning.

Dali himself would come to the Wadsworth — America’s oldest public art museum — in 1934, accompanying another show and giving a lecture on art as well.