The tone of Un Chien andalou is set shortly after it begins by the revolting sight of a girl having her eye sliced open with a razor blade: clearly Dalí and Buñuel wanted to test our sensibilities from the outset. Yet Dalí felt that Un Chien andalou was not nearly disgusting enough, and both he and his collaborator were disappointed by the public reception of the work, for they had intended it to be a major assault on bourgeois values. Instead, as Dalí stated, ‘the public who applauded Un Chien andalou is a public stupefied by the reviews and “disclosures” of the avant-garde, who applaud everything that seems new or bizarre to them because of snobbism. This public did not understand the moral depth of the film, which is aimed directly at them with total violence and cruelty’, while Buñuel saw in that selfsame public ‘an idiotic crowd which finds beautiful or poetic what is, after all, simply a desperate, impassioned call to murder’. Naturally, because of its calculated offensiveness Un Chien andalou created a sensation when it was premiered in October 1929 and it did much to further Dalí’s reputation as an enfant terrible. Although this was not the first time he had reaped the benefits of scandal, there was a slight difference between offending a few old professors in Madrid and taking the artistic capital of the world by storm, and the value of such scandal was certainly not lost on someone who would soon become the twentieth century’s greatest artistic self-publicist.
Equally, Un Chien andalou also exercised some vital influences upon Dalí’s development as a painter by sharpening his visual imagery and causing him to rely upon visual transformations to a greater degree. To take the first: the filmic conjunction of photographic reality and an irrational, inexplicable narrative demonstrated to Dalí a way forward in his painted imagery, for in the paintings he made in 1929 after returning to Figueres (such as The Lugubrious Game), the heads, bodies and all manner of objects became far more highly detailed than they had been previously. And although elements in the pictures of 1929 remained abstracted to a degree (as in the ‘soft’, polymorphic self-portraits that appear in works like The Great Masturbator and The Enigma of Desire), those forms are modelled and lit so as to suggest that they are real objects in the real world. Because of this more sharply focused imagery and greater degree of illusionism (especially in the representation of landscapes), the bizarre or inexplicable juxtapositions, dislocations of space and scale, and metamorphoses or emphases within the pictures seem even more unreal by contrast. Moreover, the photographic dissolves of cinema also influenced Dalí, for from now on he would transform sections of many of the people and objects he represented into other things (as in The Great Masturbator, where the head and shoulders of a woman suddenly well up from the side of Dalí’s polymorphic self-portrait). It is difficult to believe that such a new emphasis on realistic settings and greater use of visual transformation did not respectively derive from the sharper visual focus and photographic transformations that Dalí had encountered or created in Un Chien andalou.
The Parisian trip to assist with the making of Un Chien andalou had other beneficial side effects. Thus Dalí obtained an agreement with the art dealer Camille Goemans to accord him an exhibition in Paris later in 1929. More importantly, the painter first made the acquaintance of a woman who would soon transform his life: Gala Éluard.
In order to firm up their agreement over Dalí’s Paris debut, in the summer of 1929 Goemans visited the painter in Cadaqués. He was joined there by Buñuel, by Paul and Gala Éluard and their daughter Cécile, and by the Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte and his wife. Paul Éluard was a distinguished Surrealist poet who was very friendly with André Breton, and he and Gala had been married in 1917. By the early 1920s the Éluards had begun living in a menage à trois with Max Ernst, a relationship that understandably terminated Ernst’s marriage and that itself broke up by about 1925. Thereafter Éluard and Gala settled down together again, but their marriage was clearly doomed, and the visit to Cadaqués in the summer of 1929 dealt it the death blow. Gala Éluard was of Russian extraction – her original name was Elena Dimitrievna Diakonova – and she was born in 1895, the daughter of a failed Siberian gold prospector. She grew up in Kazan and as an adolescent suffered from a form of tuberculosis which had eventually necessitated treatment in Switzerland. Indeed, she had first met Éluard at a sanatorium in Switzerland where he too had been sent to receive treatment for the same disease. Later she followed him to France where they married.
At Cadaqués in the summer of 1929 Dalí appears to have been in a state of acute sexual hysteria. This received expression both in bouts of prolonged, uncontrollable laughter and, less directly, in the emphasis he gave to the subject of masturbation in the painting The Lugubrious Game, which he had begun upon returning from Paris. The visit of Gala Éluard to Cadaqués and Dalí’s attraction to her, which outwardly had to be suppressed because she was with her husband, obviously heightened the painter’s emotional and sexual frustration. But Gala was equally attracted to Dalí, perhaps because she sensed that here was a rising star to whom she could profitably hitch herself. This was not an unnatural thought for a woman with a failing marriage and no visible means of support. At any rate, Gala stayed on after Éluard returned to Paris in September, and soon afterwards she began an affair with Dalí. Clearly she was on the same unusual psychological wavelength as the painter, if the following anecdote told by Dalí of his first physical contact with her is to be believed:
I kissed her on the mouth, inside her mouth. It was the first time I did this. I had not suspected until then that one could kiss in this way. With a single leap all the Parsifals of my long bridled and tyrannized erotic desires rose, awakened by the shocks of the flesh. And this first kiss, mixed with tears and saliva, punctuated by the audible contact of our teeth and furiously working tongues, touched only the fringe of the libidinous famine that made us want to bite and eat everything to the last… I threw back Gala’s head, pulling it by the hair, and, trembling with complete hysteria, I commanded,
‘Now tell me what you want me to do to you! But tell me slowly, looking me in the eye, with the crudest, the most ferociously erotic words that can make both of us feel the greatest shame!’…
‘I want you to kill me!’ [she replied].
Fortunately, Dalí refrained from carrying out such a macabre request. The story may indicate the calculated side of Gala’s personality, for it is hard to take her demand seriously – obviously she was just trying to match Dalí in eccentricity. Right after their relationship began Dalí’s hysteria disappeared, which demonstrates its psycho-sexual origin, and his lovemaking with Gala was probably the first sexual relationship he had ever had with a woman (as his unfamiliarity with deep kissing attests). It may also have been his last, for thereafter the painter appears to have preferred masturbation to sexual intercourse with his wife. As a child he had come across a medical textbook illustrating the clinical effects of venereal diseases, and this appears to have put him off having direct sexual relations for life, although he did sample such contacts on occasion. But in time Gala would easily find numerous substitute men with whom to satisfy her healthy libido.
Dalí remained convinced ever afterwards that Gala had saved him from outright madness that summer. Following her return to Paris in late September 1929 he threw himself further into his work in preparation for the Paris exhibition. He produced some of his finest masterworks that autumn, pictures such as a portrait of Paul Éluard, which Dalí freely admitted was a means of salving his conscience over his affair with the poet’s wife; The Enigma of Desire, in which the painter dealt with his relationship with his mother; and The Great Masturbator, a work that he called ‘the expression of my heterosexual anxiety’. The show itself, held in the Camille Goemans Gallery between November and December, included eleven paintings and was a great success, finally consolidating Dalí’s reputation with both the critics and the public. Breton wrote an introductory essay for the catalogue (although even then he harboured doubts about whether Dalí would fulfil his promise as a Surrealist artist), and that put the seal upon the painter’s acceptance by the Surrealist movement, with which he had aligned himself fully on the earlier