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Surrealism and Salvador Dali

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?A: Two. One to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored bicycles.

Sometimes one might wonder if Congressman George A. Dondero was onto something when he stated in 1949 that Surrealism seeks to destroy by denial of reason.

By far the most prominent Surrealist artist was Salvador Dali’s(1904 -1989). Dali was to social convention what Lady Gaga is to fashion. Both his actions and artwork seemed to embody a denial of reason. While they still retaining recognizable aspects of this world, they were freed from all conventions and contexts. Dali gave a famous London lecture on surrealistic art in a deep sea diver’s suit. He had arrived carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. Dali’s paintings, such as The Great Masturbator were at the same time bizarre, shocking but with hype realistic components.

Salvador Dali began his life under somewhat strained circumstances. His mother’s devout Catholicism that with conflicted with his father’s staunch atheism. In a somewhat bizarre and morbid ritual, Salvador, at age five, was taken to the grave of his elder brother also named Salvador who had died before he was born. Salvador was told he was a reincarnation of his brother and he came to believe in this strongly. When he was 16, Salvador Dali’s mother died which wounded him deeply. Later he said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul." At age 17 Dali studied art in Madrid and gained a reputation as an eccentric dandy, wearing a period costume from the late 1800’s plus long hair and sideburns. Although he completed his four years at the academy, he never graduated because of outlandish and anti-authoritarian behavior. During an oral examination is claimed that none of the examiners were qualified to examine him because he

knew so much more than they did.

In 1928 Dali moved to Paris. While Dali was undeniably skilled at a painter in the traditions of the great masters, he was pulled by the many avante guard philosophies and ideas of the time, amalgamations of atheism and conversing with spirits, theoretical communism and occult, nihilism and theosophy, psychoanalysis and the idea of the noble savage. Thirty years later, Salvador Dali would ask a monk to perform on him an exorcism to remove the relics of previous demonic involvements. His early painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus entitled Sometimes I Spit for Pleasure on the Portrait of my Mother, while more Dadaistic than Surreal

in style, shows that Dali had learned his father’s atheism and the metaphysical rebellion of the avante guard only too well. The Dali senior, already distressed with his son’s radical lifestyle demanded that Salvador renounce the painting, perhaps because the elder Dali had begun to worship Christ or perhaps simply because he worshipped the status quo. Two earlier issues for the Dali Dad was his perception that his son’s association with the Surrealist movement was leading to the loss of his morals and Salvador’s new mistress, Gala.

Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, was eleven years older than Salvador and the wife of the surrealist poet, Paul Eluard. Salvador Dali spied her sitting next to her husband on the balcony of a hotel, and fell in love. The boy meets girl story shows something of how surrealism plays out in romance. They met the following morning, on the beach. Dalí decided to prepare himself for the encounter in a totally symbolic way. The clothes rolled up to emphasize the bronzed body. He wore necklace of pearls and put a red geranium behind the ear. He hurt himself while shaving his armpit and he smeared his body with his own blood, to which he added a mixture of fish glue, dung of goat and oil. Few months later, deeply in love, they went away to live together. From that moment, Gala started to be for Dalí his lover, friend, muse and model (she appeared for the first time in profile, in “The Great Masturbator” in 1929).http://biography.free-people.net/paintings-salvador-dali.php

In a passionate, no-holds-barred fight ended with Dali Senior disinheriting his son and saying he never wanted to see him again. Dali responded in kind but via a surrealistic gesture.

What was surrealism? What was there method to the madness? Surrealism intrigued because there was a faint outline of bizarre logic and a playfulness in what was insane and illogical. Surrealism was influenced by Freudian ideas of psychoanalysis with its aims of freeing the unconscious mind, ideas that were just coming to the fore at that time. Salvador revered and met with Sigmund Freud. Basically, psychoanalytical theory believed that if subconscious truths could be released a person could be released from psychological baggage, angst and repression and be reborn. Methods included the psychiatrist’s couch (relax, take a deep breath, now tell me why you hate your mother) or free association (quick say the first word that comes to mind when I say “waffle”) or altered states of consciousness (hence Salvador Dali statement “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs”). Dreams could be analyzed for the symbolic truths and secrets they contained. It could be said that all artists search for truth but the surrealist artist was engaging in a search for truth in the subconscious mind. As a result, the rules of logic of the conscious mind were suspended although still remained present in the background to provide some physic tension. Some quotes that show his mindset follow. “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” “I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear on my canvas.” “I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the subject grow to look like his portrait.”

It is fair to say while there is perhaps some truth in Freudian psychoanalysis there is some tom-foolery and charlatanism there too. A few quick points: it has now come to light that Freud fudged his patient records to dramatically exaggerate his success rate in curing patients through psychoanalysis. While its central ideas are impossible to prove or disprove, quite frankly some

of them outlandish and insulting. If any male was going up to a group of other males and assert that they loved their mothers, only in an inappropriate way, he would be risking life and limb. Yet Freud basically claims all males, at least in the psychological sense, are what is one of the ultimate school yard insults. Freud also airily disclaimed the existence of God, maintaining the concept of God was simply a relic of the trauma of infancy helplessness. Suffice to say, there is

in Freudian psychoanalysis, some degree of the blind leading the blind and in Dali’s surrealistic work there may be some psychological truth. Some of that truth may be accessible to us, some that was so personal that it remain with the artist and some may be the folksy truth that poop happens. Salvador Dali’s work had repeated images locusts, of which he had an irrational fear, flaccid watches, dried bones, ants , crutches and eggs, each with their complex

psychoanalytical meaning. In Bacchanale, 1939 Dali seems to pictorially wrestle with his fear of death.

Dali stole Gala from her husband, Paul Eluard, and they became soul mates. Wife stealing, even when you steal the wife of from founding member, did not jeopardize Salvador Dali’s stature in the surrealist group. But as the Dali politics or more accurately, lack of politics, did. Dali’s 1933 work, The Enigma of William Tell, almost got him expelled from the Surrealist group because it shows the face of Vladimir Lenin as the father figure who looks greedily at

the pork chop balance on the head of the baby in his arms. An insult to Christ was tolerated or even championed but anything negative towards Communism was blasphemy.

The particularly bloody Spanish civil war broke out in 1936. Spaniard fought Spaniard. The communists executed 8000 nuns and priests. The Enigma of William Tell, 1933General Franco became the leader of the anti-communist forces with troops from Spanish Morocco giving him a toe hold. Communist sympathizers from all over Europe and North America found on the Spanish Loyalist (Communist) side. By 1939, Franco had one, and many suspected he would make Spain and ally to Hitler, but Franco never did. Dali tolerance of Franco ruffled the feathers of the French surrealists and led to the final rift. Although Dali was officially turfed, he prophetically said, “ Surrealism ? I am surrealism.” and” The only difference between me and surrealists is that I am a surrealist.” Today he is remembered as the foremost surrealists and his critics have been largely forgotten

Although he once blamed Catholicism for his profound sense of guilt about sex, Dalí’s attitude began to soften. He once said that he “knew there was a God because of the mathematic beauty of the universe but he didn’t believe in it.” In 1949 Dalí attended a private audience with Pope

Pius XII. He announced himself a Catholic the next year, or (as he  put  it) a ‘Catholic without faith’. Dalí spent many of his later years reconciling Catholic dogma with science in ever-larger paintings. Dalí also had a keen interest in natural science and mathematics. This is manifested in several of his paintings, notably in the 1950s, in which he painted his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns. According to Dalí, the rhinoceros horn signifies divine geometry because it grows in a logarithmic spiral. He also linked the rhinoceros to themes of chastity and to the Virgin Mary. Afraid of death, Dalí hoped to avoid it altogether. Failing this he died with last rites in 1989.

The Sacrament of The last Supper, 1955

Madonna of Port Lligat, 1950

Crucifixion 1954 Christ of St. John of the Cross, 1951