Sex sells. The first documented use of the phrase ‘sex appeal’ dates from 1924 in America, which just happens to be the same year the first Surrealist manifesto was published. Apparently, Dalí was among the first to use a French version of the phrase in France. He knew which way the cultural wind was blowing.
‘People are hard wired to notice sexually relevant information, so ads with sexual content get noticed.’ (Magazine trends study finds increase in advertisements using sex)
Dalí the showman harnessed his own sexual obsessions and fears into his earliest fully surreal paintings. Later, this declined into a habit of including breasts as one of his random design elements in his post-war works. Nonetheless, in puritan America, the inclusion of highly realistic sexual elements guaranteed his work notice, attention and ‘controversy’, keeping his brand in the public view. And, in our time, modern curators and art critics obsessed with bodies, gender, desire and eroticism have found in Dalí’s paintings a goldmine of ‘issues’.
So a book about Dalí which focuses on his use of sexual imagery plays to everyone’s worst instincts.
Small but with photos
Like Edmund Swinglehurst’s book on Dalí, this one has about 120 pages, but is significantly smaller, at 17.8 cm x 25.4 cm. This means the colour reproductions of Dalí’s work make a lot less impact and some of the fine detail, which characterises so many of his paintings, is all-but-indecipherable. In other words, go elsewhere if you want big reproductions of the paintings.
Where this book scores is in the inclusion of lots of photographs from all periods of Dalí’s life, from childhood to senescence. Newspaper and publicity photos from the 1930s, 40s and 50s really bring out what a genius Dalí had for creating sensational pictures, objects, shop windows, opera sets and publicity stunts. You can either be sternly censorious about his ‘selling out’ (as the other Surrealists were) or relaxed, seeing him as a precursor to later artist-publicists like Warhol, Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, all of whom, like Dalí, made or are making fortunes from their ‘art’.
Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business. They’d say ‘money is bad’ and ‘working is bad’. But making money is art, and working is art – and good business is the best art. (Andy Warhol)
There’s nowhere to go after that. Warhol helped modern art disappear up its own fundament. Saying a work of art challenges anything is like saying the latest novel by x, y or z challenges language and revolutionises society. Quite obviously it doesn’t, it just adds itself to the already vast, huge, teeming overwhelming plethora of entertainments and distractions which swamp the modern world.
It’s for every individual to make their own way through this overcrowded emporium of art music videos photos movies plays books TV shows and so on.
If I am reading a book about Salvador Dalí it isn’t to find secret channels into my unconscious or to be scandalised by his sexual imagery or to have my view of rational society overthrown; it’s to be informed, entertained and amused, just like all the other comfortably-off, middle-class white people I joined at the Royal Academy’s Dalí/Duchamp exhibition a few days ago.
Key photos
As I mentioned, one of the pleasures of the book is the range of photos covering the old showman’s life and times.
- Dali and Gabrial Garcia Lorca (1927)
- With Many Ray, practicing the look (1934)
- At the 1936 Surrealism Exhibition, London (in the diving suit – he nearly asphyxiated, apparently)
- Dali and Gala with fencing kit in 1936
- Time cover with Dali, 1936 In 1936, Time magazine marked Dalí’s second trip to the States with a front cover – a massive honour for an artist, not repeated till Jackson Pollock had a front cover and big feature in Life in 1949.
- Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman and Salvador Dali in 1945
- The mature mad stare (1954)
Psychoanalysis
This book is translated from the German and occasionally shows it. Its weakest feature is its highly speculative use of Freudian psychoanalysis to interpret the pictures. It seems to be biographical fact that Dalí masturbated a lot, felt guilty about it, had a powerful castration complex, hated his father, especially after he a) married his mother’s sister, soon after his mother’s death in 1921 b) threw him out of the family home for consorting with Gala (still married to Paul Eluard). Only when he began the relationship with Gala did his anxiety and panic attacks cease as a result of the immense flood of relief, gratification and comfort he found with her.
Thus the early paintings give themselves up fairly easily to Freudian readings: there are soft sexual symbols aplenty in these earliest works: lots of boobs, but also fingers representing phalluses, men turned towards walls symbolising solitary masturbation, a bearded figure who ‘might be’ Freud in The first days of spring, the lion with a big red tongue which is a sexual symbol, and so on.
Schiebler interprets one of Dalí’s most explicitly sexual paintings (i.e. it contains an actual penis) William Tell and Gradiva (1931) in Freudian terms. Obviously a man is masturbating over the exaggerated naked female form, but the point of the William Tell legend is that Tell almost kills his son by firing an arrow at an apple on his head i.e. it is a deflected version of Freud’s Oedipus Complex (the unconscious rivalry between father and son for possession of the mother).
The man’s beard is the giveaway. This is not Dalí masturbating over Gala, it is his father. Schiebler is quick to speculate that Dalí’s aggression against his father wasn’t based just on the fact that he remarried so soon after his mother’s death (like Hamlet’s surviving parent does) and that his father banned him from the family home – but a Freudian reading that his father was angry at him for dating another man’s wife (Gala) because he – his father – wanted her, sexually.
This example shows how psychoanalytic literary and art criticism can stretch small elements of a work of art, especially if it is actual sexual in nature, into almost indefinite layers of complexity. Thus Schiebler spends three pages going into great detail about the case of Gradiva, the 1902 novella about an archaeologist who has dreams and visions which eventually turn out to conceal a hidden love, which Freud dedicated a long, pioneering work of psychoanalytic interpretation to in 1907.
Dalí immediately recognised the power of this story and projected it onto his love for Gala. He gave her the nickname Gradiva, which explains its presence of the name in so many paintings of this period – Freud and his true love intertwined.
Schiebler uses the sketch and explanation given in the book co-authored by Gala, La femme visible, to focus attention on the complex family group tucked away in the bottom right of The invisible man, bringing out how each figure is part of Dalí’s complex family romance – the two mothers, the dead older brother – and how the entire thing seems to depict the castration of the baby Dalí.
This is the tone of the book. It is most useful when covering psychoanalytic material directly invoked or quoted by Dalí himself, and also when it ties visual motifs in the paintings to Dalí’s complex life and personal obsessions, less useful the further it veers into psychoanalytic speculation.
Money
There’s a short (three pages) chapter about Dalí’s reputation for greed, for which the leader of the Surrealists, André Breton, famously satirised him, nicknaming Dalí ‘Avida Dollars’. Schiebler’s prose, or the translation, and the fatuous nonsensicality of the underlying thought, come to the fore.
Dalí’s ways with money were certainly chaotic and unfortunate. But the claims that he lusted after money are not convincing, particularly those made by people faring less well themselves and whose socialist options hold little hope for the future either. And in view of the current value of his works – estimated with increasing objectivity thanks to the number and expertise of those who judge these matters one would have to rate as modest the prices that Dalí charged when he created those works. (p.72)
Science
In one of his countless later interviews Dalí said the two men who influenced him most were Freud and Einstein. The two can be allotted to two halves of Dalí’s career which splits neatly down the middle with the dividing line being the detonation of the atom bomb at Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. As Schiebler’s book makes abundantly clear, the works from the mid-1920s till well into the second World War are redolent of sex, sexual obsession, phobias and a range of imagery deriving from or nodding at Freud’s psychoanalytical theories.
But the advent of the nuclear age really struck Dalí to the core, and almost all his post-war works reference nuclear physics with its vision of an atomised universe, of matter broken down into multitudes of sub-atomic particles, of the stunning discovery that almost all of the observed world is in fact empty space – though, as with Freud, this vision is filtered through a peculiarly Dalí-esque vision. Hence:
- Melancholic atom and uranium idyll (1945) Just when you thought the twentieth century couldn’t get any worse…
- The three sphinxes of Bikini (1947) being mushroom clouds
- The splitting of the atoms: dematerialisation near the nose of Nero (1947)
- Dali Atomicus (1948)
- The madonna of Port Lligat (1949)
- Raphaelesque head exploded (1951)
- Galatea of the spheres (1952) matter decomposed into atoms
Schiebler tells us that, as soon as he could really read English, Dalí took out a subscription to Scientific American and used the flood of post-war scientific discoveries as subject matter. Thus, DNA:
- Galacidalacidesoxyribonucleicacid (1963)
- Hallucinogenic toreador (1968 to 1970) Can you spot the Dalmatian dog hidden at the bottom centre of this painting?
Ambition
Dalí was keen for approval from boyhood. He was convinced he was destined for great things. He was invincibly ambitious. No surprise that his cubist self-portrait contains the word publicidad, publicity.
His first published writing (1919) was a series on the Great masters of painting. In 1944 he made a league table of painters based on criteria like originality and technique, leading to a table headed by Vermeer, Raphel, Velasquez, Leonardo da Vinci and… himself!
He was aware of his own staggering virtuosity at an early age. By 19, 20, 21 and still at art academy, he had mastered all existing styles. Besides cubism (see above) he could do:
- pointillist – Bathers of El Llaner (1923)
- sort-of Cezanne – Cadaqués (1923)
- neo-classical modernist – Port Alguer (1923)
- totally realistic – Young girl standing at a window (1923)
- Picasso – Large harlequin and small bottle of rum (1925)
- 19th century realist – Basket of bread (1926)
What a prodigy!
Grace notes
He had an older brother, also named Salvador, who died aged just 21 months before he was born. Later he made much of this, claiming his parents never loved him as much as the dead brother, and that he spent his whole life trying to live up to the ghostly dead.
His father was notary of Figueres, the head man of the town. His mother let the teenage Dalí take over the laundry ‘tower’ at the top of their house, overlooking the bay, to paint. King of the Tower, a sense he never lost, as he later proclaimed:
It is difficult to hold the world’s interest for more than half an hour at a time. I myself have done so successfully every day for twenty years.
Credit
Dalí: Genius, obsession and lust by Ralf Schiebler was published by Prestel as part of the Pegasus Art series in 1996.
Books & Boots 