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.”