Dali House

Police are on the lookout for this man, seen wandering around by the River Limmat wearing a cardboard tube and a dunce cap and gesticulating like a madman. He’s wanted for disturbing the peace and trying to destroy Art As We Know It.

The year was 1916. The man was Hugo Ball, a German poet and theatrical producer who’d been tagged a traitor for quitting the army because “men have been confused with machines”. His anarchist streak was a mile wide, but it wasn’t militant, merely revolutionary.

The costume was something he’d dreamed up with the Romanian painter Marcel Janco, his legs and torso swallowed by bright blue cardboard cylinders so that he’d “look like an obelisk”, a cape of gold cardboard lined with scarlet paper that he could flap, along with his grotesque mittens, like a pair of wings, and a tall, blue-and-white striped magician’s hat.

The place was the Spiegelgasse, a little street in Zurich where Lenin, ensconsed at No 14, was among the neighbours complaining about the din coming from No 1, the Cabaret Voltaire, at all hours of the night. He could barely hear himself think about killing the Tsar, and that was some noisy thinking! (James Joyce was also in Zurich at the time, writing “Ulysses”, though he appears to have been unharassed by the commotion, and may even have found additional inspiration in it.)

Below, Google Earth images of the scene of the crime. in the lower shot, the cabaret is in the centre with what looks like a rainbow carpet outside — just light through a prism, I’m sure, but fitting enough.

Lenin and Joyce had their own plans. Hugo Ball’s destructive scheme was dada.

Ball (1886-1927) had founded the Cabaret Voltaire with fellow poets — his future wife Emily Hennings (1885-1948), Tristan Tzara from Romania and Richard Huelsenbeck from Germany — the painters Janco and Arthur Segal from Romania, the Germans Hans Richter and Christian Schad, Dutchmen Otto and Adya van Rees, Alsatian Hans Arp and the Swiss painter and dancer Sophie Taeuber.

Most of them were expressionists for whom expressionism was no longer expressive enough. Some would soon follow Kandinsky toward pure abstraction. All had come to neutral Switzerland to stay clear of a blood-soaked world war.

Something had to be done about man’s habit of fighting, they felt. It was getting out of hand. But the only answer, they decided, was to shred the whole of civilisation and start all over again. They would issue a declaration, said Ball, “to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals”.

Since they were artists, society’s demolition would begin with art, and the wrecking ball would be “anti-art”. They would pull pomp from its pedestal and level the Louvre. Art would return to the innocence of its youth. It would grow anew in random acts of creation, straight from the subconscious, rid of self-consciousness. In a fever, Ball embraced the “total work of art” — gesamtkunstwerk: “A fusion, not merely of all art, but of all regenerative ideas. The background of colours, words and sounds must be brought out from the subconcious and given life, so that it engulfs everyday life and all its misery.”

The movement needed a name, and anti-intellectually, Tzara poked a paper knife into a French-German dictionary, so one story goes, and it came to rest on dada, the French word for “hobby horse”, the German for “goodbye” or “get off my back”, the Romanian for “absolutely right”. On this vehicle of affirmative farewells they would ride into man’s better future. See the rest.

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.

“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.

Snopes.com, that trusted spoiler of urban myths, once tackled the (apparently) widespread belief that the face of the ubiquitous CPR training mannequin was based on that of its grieving designer’s dead daughter. Poignant! But the fact, now widely dispersed on the Net, is that the face belongs to “the girl who drowned in the Seine”.

It’s an even more poignant story, actually, and one that’s fairly well known, but it’s worth a return visit and a modicum of meditation. It certainly was for at least two generations of writers, though not always good writers.

The spiritually sublime visage of “the Inconnue de la Seine”, as the unfortunate young women came to be known in the absence of her true identity, was reproduced countless times at the beginning of the last century. Once, her wisp of a smile held the same fascination for tens of thousands of admirers that the Mona Lisa’s evokes.

The details of the case and its literary ramifications are ably recounted by Anja Zeidler on Steven Moore’s excellent tribute site to the American writer William Gaddis (1922-98), whose first novel, “The Recognitions” left book critics gasping for air at 900-odd words and a daunting array of allusions, including to the Iconnue.

Gaddis was following a long tradition of writers composing wreaths of words to mourn the mysterious woman whose body was carried into Paris Morgue sometime around 1900, or a decade or two earlier according to one onlooker who read in her hairstyle an earlier era as well as “a peasant girl, a poor shop girl, or that of a beggar or vagrant”.

The morgue at the time was at the eastern end of the Ile de la Cité next to Notre-Dame Cathedral, a spot I once visited to watch a chained-up Harry Houdini leap from the roof of the death house into the Seine. The morgue was a bona fide tourist attraction then, the big draw being the daily panoply of a dozen unidentified and unclaimed corpses on black marble slabs displayed hopefully in the window.

Among these cadavers was placed the young woman, so the story goes, and her haunting beauty so struck one of the morgue’s upcutters that he made a death mask. Copies of it were soon on sale, not just to medical students but the general public, and these were placed on view in many fine homes across the continent. The owners and their guests would gaze into the face and wonder who she was, how she ended up in the river, whether she was really smiling and, if so, why. (See a previous Dali House post about death masks here.)

Death in the Seine’s bosom has always been commonplace. Great rivers beckon the living. In the 18th century people ritually loosed little rafts of wood into Paris’ eternally romantic waterway for its victims, each bearing sanctified bread and a candle. In 2006, the Guardian has noted, 50 corpses were pulled from the Seine, another 146 rescued alive.

In his 1988 film “Death in the Seine”, Peter Greenaway shared the stories of 23 of the hundreds of people plucked from the river in six years spanning 1800. Most were women, it was noted, and most had drowned in April. The speculation was that male suicides preferred hanging, and that April was the direst month for the French capital’s females because it came nine months after summer, when so many unwanted pregnancies took root.

Here, one of the mementoes of a loved one that were common in the United States in the 1800s, snapshots of the just-deceased, the better to remember them. Another is elsewhere in this post.

On Sedulia Scott’s remarkable website Consolatio, a balm to the grieving, I found the touching story of Victor Hugo’s 19-year-old daughter, who drowned in the Seine in a boating accident in 1844. Hugo wrote several poems about her as he struggled to come to terms with his loss, including “At Villequier”, which begins: “Now that I am coming out, pale but victorious, from the mourning that darkened my soul …”

The poem, an appeal to God written four years after the tragedy, continues:

We never see but a single side of things;
the other plunges into the night of frightening mystery.
Man bears the yoke without knowing why.
All he sees is short, useless and fleeting … See the rest.

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.