Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skin of an Orchestra, 1936.
Oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm.
Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida.
Night and Day Clothes of the Body, 1936.
Gouache on paper, 30 × 40 cm.
Private collection.
In addition to buying pictures, the Vicomte de Noialles was to be important to Dalí in other ways. Subsequently he introduced Dalí to his next Parisian dealer, Pierre Colle, and he gave Buñuel and Dalí the money to make a further film, although Dalí was far less happy with Buñuel’s efforts this time round. The film, L’Age d’or, was even more violent and subversive than its predecessor, but Buñuel fashioned it into a specific attack upon clericalism, a narrowing of meaning that led Dalí to feel betrayed by his collaborator. Shortly after the premiere of L’Age d’or in 1930, right-wing thugs smashed up the cinema in which it was being shown and destroyed works of art that were hanging in the foyer, including a painting by Dalí.
Singularities, 1937.
Oil on canvas, 165 × 195 cm.
Estrada Museum, Barcelona.
After returning to Paris in 1929, Gala Éluard briefly returned to her husband. However, by the following year she had moved in with Dalí. The painter’s father took a very dim view of his son’s liaison with a married woman and mother who was, moreover, almost ten years older than his son. Additionally, Dalí senior was enraged by a print made by his son which depicted the Sacred Heart and bore the legend ‘Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of my Mother’. Understandably, Dalí’s father interpreted this as a gross insult to his dead wife. The ensuing rows culminated in Dalí senior disowning his son completely. Soon afterwards Dalí began using the story of William Tell’s shooting of an apple from his son’s head as a means of dealing with his strained love-hate relationship with his own father (see the William Tell of 1930, The Old Age of William Tell of 1931, and The Enigma of William Tell of 1933). In such comparatively direct treatments of the painter’s most deep-seated anxieties and preoccupations it is possible to detect a newfound psychological focusing of his art.
Dalí had long been familiar with the writings of Sigmund Freud, having read The Interpretation of Dreams when still a student in Madrid. The book made a profound impression on him, for as he recorded:
This book presented itself to me as one of the capital discoveries in my life, and I was seized with a real vice of – self-interpretation, not only of my dreams but of everything that happened to me, however accidental it might seem at first glance.
Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone, 1938.
Oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm.
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.
By the end of the 1920s Dalí had also read Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, with its exploration of sado-masochistic tendencies. Such writings were to prove fruitful for the painter not as subjects to be directly illustrated but as means of exploring his own fantasies pictorially. Within such a process the association of ideas and images became central, even if Dalí purposely employed those associations in a loose way so as not to imply specific meanings (it is the very ambiguity of meaning in his works that gives them their unusual imaginative potency). Moreover, in 1930 Dalí also began to build upon his immensely imaginative propensity for associating images through visual simile, the acute likeness that can exist between very different types of objects. Visual punning, whereby one thing stands for another, was also a favourite associative tool for an artist who could equally create images by bringing together objects that collectively constitute a very different kind of form. Then there are his double or treble images. Thus in the Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach of 1938, we can see numerous visual similes, as well as composite imaging, whereby different components serve to make up a head of Lorca and of an ‘Andalusian dog’, while in Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire of 1940 we can perceive in the centre either two people dressed in antique costumes or a bust of Voltaire – the image switches from one to another when we gaze hard.
According to Dalí himself, this faculty for perceiving dual or more images within a single image derived from his schooldays; as he stated in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí:
The great vaulted ceiling which sheltered the four sordid walls of the class was discoloured by large brown moisture stains, whose irregular contours for some time constituted my whole consolation. In the course of my interminable and exhausting reveries, my eyes would untiringly follow the vague irregularities of these mouldy silhouettes and I saw rising from this chaos, which was as formless as clouds, progressively concrete images which by degrees became endowed with an increasingly precise, detailed and realistic personality.
From day to day, after a certain effort, I succeeded in recovering each of the images which I had seen the day before and I would then continue to perfect my hallucinatory work; when, by dint of habit, one of the discovered images became too familiar, it would gradually lose its emotive interest and would instantaneously become metamorphosed into ‘something else’, so that the same formal pretext would lend itself just as readily to being interpreted successively by the most diverse and contradictory configurations, and this would go on to infinity.
The astonishing thing about this phenomenon (which was to become the keystone of my future aesthetic) was that, having once seen one of these images, I could always thereafter see it again at the mere dictate of my will, and not only in its original form but almost always further corrected and augmented in such a manner that its improvement was instantaneous and automatic.
In time such an ability was augmented by other experiences, such as the discovery of a postcard view of an African village which, when looked at sideways, resembled the face of Picasso (in 1935 Dalí would turn that image into a painting that was later sadly destroyed). Undoubtedly a major influence upon Dalí as the creator of composite images was Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593), an Italian painter of fantastic human heads made out of pieces of meat, fish, fruit, vegetables and other foods, flowers, cereals and the like. Eventually Dalí’s employment of visual simile, punning, composite, double and multiple imaging would become one of the mainstays of his art, but it was certainly not based on anything as passive as dreaming. Dalí may occasionally have used dreams as the starting points for pictures, but more usually it was his highly developed and profoundly imaginative wakeful ‘inner-eye’ that provided him with his imagery. Such an ability to connect the appearances of things would prove integral to the ‘Paranoid-Critical Method’ that Dalí began to evolve after about 1930, whereby associationism, when taken to an extreme, could generate wildly imaginative and hallucinatory (or ‘paranoid’) states of mind.
In June 1931 Pierre Colle gave Dalí his second Paris exhibition and introduced the painter to a New York dealer, Julien Levy, who in 1933 would mount his first one-man show in America. The 1931 Pierre Colle Gallery exhibition comprised twenty-one works, including the painting that would undoubtedly become Dalí’s most popular picture, The Persistence of Memory (which Colle later sold to Levy at the trade price of $250). The latter work was again exhibited in a group show of Surrealist paintings, drawings and photographs held early in 1932 by Levy in New York, and on that occasion it was bought by the New York Museum of Modern Art in a particularly shrewd and far-sighted piece of collecting.
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