Dali House

Dalí’s collaborator Philippe Halsman took a series of photos of Sal’s divine whiskers for the 1954 book “Dalí Moustache”, including the Mona Lisa embellishment above (a real moustache, apparently), which I’ve lined up against Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated “LHOOQ” from 1919.

At least one commentator has chastised Dalí for being far too late with this gag, regardless of whether this was intended as a mere pun or as a renewed declaration of war on old-school painting. But maybe Dalí knew something about Duchamp that still isn’t widely known.

“Parody” is the word most often used in describing “LHOOQ”. Others are hot bum, hot ass, hot arse and hot pants. Commentators do the jitterbug when they “translate” the title. Pronounce the letters aloud in French slowly, quickly, in a slurred fashion, with gusto, and you ought to hear Elle a chaud au cul, common street lingo for “She has a hot arse” or “She is hot in the bum / ass” or “She’s got hot pants” or, Duchamp once dubiously offered, “There is fire down below”, by which someone else presumed “She’s horny”.

Maybe “LHOOQ” is supposed to be read in English as “look”, said another, which is a good title for an artwork, after all. I suggest that, read in English when very, very drunk, the letters suggest, “Shhhe’s sooooo cute.” Any takers?

The most interesting thing about the postcard view of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa that Duchamp randomly defiled in 1919 is that it’s apparently not a randomly defiled postcard of the Mona Lisa. See the rest.

Paul Cézanne: “Leda with Swan”, from around 1881

Let’s go back to swanning Leda. She was, after all, was the mother of Helen of Troy, with whom we recently dallied (pun intended). More raunchy Greek mythology through the filter of the all-illuminating Catalan sunshine.

“Leda is lying between the swan’s wings,” wrote Ovid in “Metamorphoses”. He seemed to have no qualms about sex between consenting animals. But was Leda, wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus, a willing lover of the swan, who was in fact the supreme god Zeus in feathered form? Or was she the lusty old goat’s victim in another of the serial rapist’s assaults? Two juries have convened and two contradictory verdicts rendered.

Leda produced four eggs, from which hatched Castor, Clytemnestra, Polydeuces and the future Helen of Troy. The first pair may have been Zeus’ children, the latter her husband’s. (Helen is elsewhere the daughter of Nemesis, the goddess of disaster befalling the proud, but one suspects some wishful editing here.)

For the painters and sculptors of earlier times in particular, who lacked the psychological reference tools, portraying the story was no easy matter. By way of analysing WB Yeats’ 1928 poem on the subject, Belgian art lecturer Stefan Beyst offers an interesting physiological analysis of the way the human-avian coitus has been cast on his website. 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.

In 1967 Dali organised an “Homage to Meissonier” at the Meurice Hotel in Paris and unveiled his newest canvas “Tuna Fishing”, a tortured image rooted on L’Almadrava cove at Roses not far from Cadaques, a popular sunbathing spot but also, as documented in the painting, the scene of fishermen netting, spearing and gutting live tuna.

Dali was at once paying homage to the French classicist painter and sculptor Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-91) and lending tribute, in classic forms, to the Catalonians who struggle daily to harvest the sea. In the photo below left he stands before the Louvre’s statue of Meissonier, which had been promised to his Figueras museum. Below right he’s in his Meurice suite, with his rebuilt “Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket” in the background.

In the meantime Dali was having a lot of fun. He was starting to pop up regularly on television, mostly in America. He guested on the “Tonight Show”, bringing along a leather rhinoceros to sit on. In the ’70s he told Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” that “Dali is immortal and will not die”.

Then there were the TV commercials. Between 1967 and ‘74 he sold chocolates (”Lanvin chocolates drive me mad!” was his line) and Alka-Seltzer (spray-painting a model to illustrate her digestive distress), flogged Datsun station wagons, designed the logo for Chupa Chups lollipops and, in a bit filmed aboard a Braniff Airlines jet, told Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford, “If you got it, flaunt it.” Ford’s reply: “That’s telling ‘em, Dali baby!”

He also designed an ashtray for Air India, and was paid with a live elephant, which he donated to the Barcelona Zoo. Asked if he was perhaps getting too commercial, Dali pointed out that Leonardo da Vinci “designed the garters for the Pope’s Swiss Guards”. He did, to his credit, turn down a proposal to open a string of “Dalicatessens” across the USA.

Also in 1967, Edgar Froese, who would later that year form the rock band Tangerine Dream, was invited to perform at Dali’s “Happening Afternoons” in Port-Lligat, while ballet dancers pirouetted to the music of Debussy on enormous water-borne eggshells. For his part, Dali attempted to play Satie at the piano, waist-deep in seawater.

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.”