Dali House

A few days after Henri Matisse came teetering into Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris in that 1907 spring with the great lump of a sculpted African torso he’d just bought, making Picasso’s eyes bug out even more than usual, Pablo dragged his pal André Derain over to the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnology, as the Museum of Man at the Palais de Chaillot was then known. It had a 30-year-old collection of the African stuff. It still has (along with René Descartes’ brain, for some reason), but back then the knickknacks of colonialism were all mouldy and neglected, and the Spaniard was miffed in the must.

“I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately,” Picasso recalled, “but I forced myself to stay.” And stay he did, elevating the centuries-old tribal “objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose” into the most modern of all European art forms. Matisse, Braque and Modigliani kept pace with him, re-moulding the rough-hewn angularity into a new way of seeing the world … but what happened to Derain?

André Derain was 27 when Pablo pulled him into the dusty Trocadéro archives. He hailed from Chatou on the Île-de-France, and was going to be an engineer, but then veered into the less reasonable side of design. He took painting classes at the Académie Carrière and sketched up and down the Parisian Seine and at the Louvre, where in 1899 he met an old classmate, Georges Florentin Linaret, who was by then studying under Gustave Moreau, as was Matisse.

To their extraordinary experiments, Derain brought his admiration for Cézanne and, following the 1901 tribute exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune, of Van Gogh. At this show Derain introduced Matisse to Maurice de Vlaminck, with whom he was by then sharing a studio in Chatou in the western suburbs, where the impressionists once conspired at the Maison Fournaise (it’s on the same street as Dali House).

Derain was drafted for a three-year stint with the army, and painted little during that time. Only two of his works have been ascribed to 1903: “The Soldiers’ Ball of Suresnes” (detail here), done while he was on leave, and “Self-portrait in the Studio”, now at the National Gallery of Australia.

The latter was a fast look in the mirror between bugle calls, but thoughtfully composed around flashes of bright hue. Compare that with “Portrait of the Artist” (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) from about a decade later, on the right, and you’ll see where this post is heading.

When Derain was through with marching, Matisse — who found him delightfully open-minded and a solid, quick worker — was ready to talk his parents out of the engineering nonsense altogether and got him into the Académie Julian. Things proceeded apace, a career blossomed, and by 1905 Derain was able to sell everything in his studio to Ambroise Vollard, and he and Matisse spent the summer in Collioure on the overbright southern coast, where they went completely bonkers with the colours. 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.

Today the Perrot-Moore Art Centre on Carrer Vigilant in Cadaques has pieces by Dali, Picasso, Caravaggio, Goya and Matisse, but it was once home to the huge collection of Dali artwork amassed by Peter Moore.

The former British Navy and Secret Service officer was a close friend of Dali and Gala from 1960 to ‘75 and served as the artist’s personal secretary and business manager, travelling with him regularly to New York and Paris and doing more than anyone else to expand his creative repertoire and place his work on the market.

In a former incarnation this building was the Miramar Hotel, on whose terrace Dali first met Gala. Moore and his wife Catherine Perrot opened their museum here in 1978, with Gala and Dali in attendance, and lived here until his death in 2005.

Above is a postage stamp that Dali created for France in ‘78.

Moore’s relationship with Dali soured with the advent of the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, however, and then in 1999 police raided his home and Moore was charged in connection with forged Dali prints. At Moore’s suggestion, Dali had signed thousands of blank sheets of paper that were then printed with so-called “limited editions” of lithographs and sold. That, and the fact that Dali varied his signature regularly, produced a torrent of fakes that unhinged the art market and threatened to shrivel the value of his genuine pieces.

Little came of the charges, ostensibly because Moore was in his 80s, but when hundreds of the works from his collection were auctioned off in 2003, more trouble appeared.

The sale enabled him to reconcile with photographer and Dali authority Robert Descharnes, another intimate friend of the artist with whom Moore had feuded, but the following year Moore was accused of reducing the size of Dali’s 1969 painting “The Double Image of Gala” — stolen from New York’s Knoedler Gallery in 1974 and rediscovered here at his home-gallery in 1999 — and showing it publicly under a different name. A court ordered him and his wife to pay the Dali foundation more than $1 million in compensation.

“Jamaica” George Bailey of Florida, who has a terrific Dalí tribute site, is looking for any information about this crucifixion, which I haven’t seen anywhere else on the Net. But it’s not the Dalí crucifixion that this post is about. (UPDATE: Issue resolved in embarrassing fashion. See the Dorseyland comment below.)

Somewhere … there’s a place for us, a time and place for us. Hold my hand and I’ll take you there, somehow, someday, somewhere. I imagine it will be a large, creepy, wind-rattled mansion in the forested hills overlooking a famous city.

The fireplace illuminates a sizeable, bookcased room and a comfy old chair that’s waiting for the homeowner to finish supper elsewhere, an old man lonely but for his millions and his minions. On the walls in the flickering gloom hang masterpieces that only he will see. In his absence the paintings mull their destiny.

Who’s been in my drawers? Dalí’s as-yet-unstolen “Kneeling Figure: Decomposition” from 1951.

Salvador Dalí’s 1965 sketch “Crucifixion” is alone able to be cheerful. It owns a better fate, a better frame and, even unseen by all but one man, considerably more fame than it had before, when it hung for 40 years in a prison canteen.

Less given to mirth are Picasso’s “The Dance”, Monet’s “Marine” and Matisse’s “Garden of Luxembourg”. They were together for Carnival in Rio in February 2006, enjoying the festive spillover into the Chacara do Ceu Museum. Then four men with guns and a hand grenade, taking a moment between sambas, burst in, yanked them from the wall and stuffed them in a bag with another Dalí work, “Two Balconies”. The thieves still had time to beat up five tourists and a couple of guards before rejoining the teeming mamboing masses outside. See the rest.

I’ve done some damage to my right shoulder and, pending a visit to a doctor, envision myself in some sort of cast and unable to type with my right hand. Could I manage with my left? Then I found this line in the basic, one-size-fits-all, self-replicating online biography of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919): “In 1880 Renoir broke his right arm and for some time painted with his left hand.”

For me it raises two questions: How did he break his arm, and what did his southpaw paintings look like?

It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1880 paintings, even with one website that’s still under construction being quite off-handed (pardon the pun) about jumbling the dates of his works. Then I discovered that the self-replicating biography itself had the wrong year for his skeleton-rearranging accident — it was in 1897.

There was a lesson to be learned here, but I like to make the same mistakes twice, just to be sure I wasn’t right the first time.

It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1897 paintings, and put the ones from 1880 back in the museums when no one was looking. The broken-arm paintings, displayed throughout this post (shown here is “Young Woman in Profile”), are fine, nothing bizarro or skewed about them that I can see, nothing you can spot and say, “Oh, that’s so gauche!” (get it?). But more on that later.

How did he break his arm? I kept searching and found the “official” reason: He fell off his bicycle. See the rest.