Friday, November 26, 2004

This painting can be considered as a companion piece to another work that Dalí had done many years before, namely The Persistence of Memory in which Dalí initially created the scene on which this painting is based.
The ochre colored plain of the ground, has been divided up into cubic shaped blocks, and the addition of the rhinoceros horns in the upper left-hand portion of the painting also refers to Dalí's fascination with the molecular world. The melting watches and landscape of Cadaqués make another appearance herein, and the addition of the fish serves as a witness to the event.
Dalí created this painting as a continuation of his themes of Nuclear Mysticism by applying a perspective of Divisionism to the original painting. Dalí painted this work to explore the effects of nuclear weaponry, asserting that the invention of such weaponry had a profound effect upon everyone on the planet, even those in the small fishing villages along the coastline of Spain.

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Dalí painted the portrait of his genial compatriot in California. It is interesting to compare it with his own Soft Self-Portrait with Grilled Bacon, painted six years earlier in the same place.
This portrait might be entitled Official Paranoiac Portrait of Pablo Picasso, because Dalí has assembled here all the folkloric elements that anecdotally depict the origins of the Andalusian painter. His renown is affirmed by his bust mounted on a pedestal, symbol of official consecration; the breasts depict Picasso's nutritious aspect while he carries on his head the heavy rock of the responsibility for the influence of his work on contemporary painting. The face itself is a mixture of a goat hoof and the headdress of the Greco-Iberian marble bust, the Lady of Elche, which brings to mind Andalusian and Malagan origins of Picasso. The Iberian folklore is finished off with a carnation, a jasmine flower, and the guitar. Speaking about the work of this Titan shortly after his death, Dalí said: "I believe that the magic in Picasso's work is romantic, in other words, the root of its upheaval, while mine can only be done by building on tradition. I am totally different from Picasso since he was not interested in beauty, but in ugliness and I, more and more, in beauty; but ugly beauty and beautiful beauty, in extreme cases of geniuses like Picasso and me, can be of an angelic type."

Friday, November 19, 2004

Jour de la Vierge (Day of the Virgin) was painted in 1947, while Dalí and Gala were still living in the USA. Although the Second World War had been over for two years, they did not return to Spain or France until the following year. Under the dedication, Dalí has signed the painting as Salvador Dalí of Figueras.
In keeping with his religious subjects of the Forties and Fifties, this painting is of the Virgin Mary, this time in a traditional pose and holding baby Jesus in her arms. The Virgin Mary's face has also been painted in a traditional manner, with a calm, peaceful expression on her face, her eyes closed, smiling down at the baby Jesus. The traditional techniques and pose employed in Jour de la Vierge contrast with the later painting of The Sistine Madonna (1958).
The background of the painting is drawn in brown ink, a medium that Dalí often used. The landscape is that of Port Lligat, Dalí's home for many years. The Virgin Mary is painted in watercolor, her face, which reflects the colors of the stones that she stands upon, contrasts with the vivid blue of her dress, while this is mirrored in the one childlike cloud above her.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Intra-Atomic Balance of a Swan's Feather, painted in 1947, like the painting Dematerialization Near the Nose of Nero, also painted in 1947, marks Dalí's interest in the emerging field of nuclear science and physics. This new interest was combined with his reawakened religious beliefs to produce what he termed "nuclear mysticism". The atomic bombings of Japan at the end of the Second World War had catalysed his conversion to this "nuclear mysticism". Since then, Dalí had been subscribing to scientific journals to ensure that he was aware of new developments within the scientific community. He wrote that since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, "the atom was my favorite food for thought".
Intra-Atomic Balance of a Swan's Feather is Dalí's interpretation of the splitting of the particles within atoms, and the forces of attraction and repulsion. In the painting, ten objects, some related some not, appear frozen, suspended in the air in front of a stone background. The swan's feather of the title floats down the painting, while above is the swans' head and to the left, its foot. The central image of the hand is painted realistically, the fingers reaching toward an inkwell beneath it.

Monday, November 15, 2004

Dematerialization Near the Nose of Nero, while a good example of Dalí's "nuclear mystical" period, also evinces a more Classical style. With typical irony, Dalí wrote that "the two worst things that can happen to an ex-Surrealist today are, firstly, to become a mystic and secondly, to know how to draw. Both these forms of vigour have lately befallen me at one and the same time".
Against an Ampordan plain, a huge pomegranate has been spliced, like an atom, into two parts. Seeds spill out from the pomegranate, floating in the air between the two halves. A bust of Nero hovers above the dissected cube that houses the pomegranate. The bust itself has split into four parts, (or alternatively, the four parts are coming together to form a whole). Dalí's use of a Classical theme such as Nero is emphasized by the Classical architecture that hangs over Nero's head. However, it is not just the content that marks this painting's Classical style; the brushwork is meticulous, the depiction realistic and the balance within it also evokes the Classical style, while being at the same time Dalí's interpretation of atomic force.

Sunday, November 14, 2004

In this picture temptation appears to Saint Anthony successively in the form of a horse in the foreground representing strength, sometimes also the symbol of voluptuousness, and in the form of the elephant which follows it, carrying on its back the golden cup of lust in which a nude woman is standing precariously balanced on the fragile pedestal, a figure which emphasizes the erotic character of the composition. The other elephants are carrying buildings on their backs; the first of these is an obelisk inspired by that of Bernini in Rome, the second and third are burdened with Venetian edifices in the style of Palladio. In the background another elephant carries a tall tower which is not without phallic overtones, and in the clouds one can glimpse a few fragments of Escorial, symbol of temporal and spiritual order. The elephant theme appears several times in Dalí's works of this period: for example, in Atomica Melancholica of 1945 and Triumph of Dionysus of 1953.
This picture was painted in the studio that the artist occupied for a few days next to the Colony Restaurant in New York. It is the first and only time that he participated in a contest. It was an invitational artistic competition for a painting on the theme of the temptation of Saint Anthony, organized in 1946 by the Loew Lewin Company, a movie-producing firm. The winning picture was to figure in a film taken from the story "Bel Ami" by Maupassant. Eleven painters took part in the competition, among them Leonora Carrington, Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning. The prize was given to Max Ernst by a jury composed of Alfred Barr, Marcel Duchamp, and Sidney Janis. All these works were shown at an exhibition in Brussels and in Rome during 1947.


Saturday, November 13, 2004

This painting is dedicated to the Marquis de Cuevas, who was a patron of Dalí's for many years. The marquis was married to a Rockerfeller millionairess, so had plenty of available funds to back Dalí's projects. Saint George and the Dragon is painted in oil on ivory. This rather expensive form of canvas could be the reason for the diminutive size of the work, measuring only 3" x 4" (7.5 x 10 cm).
The frame is made from gold encrusted with seed pearls, and the corners are decorated with baguette-cut diamonds. Dalí regularly used precious jewels and metals in his work. He also liked to find unusual frames for his paintings, such as the gilt frame of Messenger in a Palladian Landscape.
A naked St. Georges is gripping on to the haunches of his horse while he is thrusting his lance into the open mouth of the dragon. The horse is lying on top of the dragon so that only the head of the beast can be seen. Around the horses neck is the dragon's tail, its claws digging into the side of the horse. The horse looks fierce, taking on some of the dragon's features as it grimaces in pain.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

"The two most energetic motors that make the artistic and superfine brain of Salvador Dalí function are, first, libido, or the sexual instinct, and, second, the anguish of death," affirms the painter; "not a single minute of my like passes without the sublime Catholic, apostolic, and Roman specter of death accompanying me even in the least important of my most subtle and capricious fantasies."
This painting was done in California at the end of the year 1940; the horrible face of war, its eyes filled with infinite death, was much more a reminiscence of the Spanish Civil Was than of the Second World War, which, at the time, had not yet provided a cortege of frightful images capable of impressing Dalí. He himself wrote in The Secret Life: "I was entering a period of rigor and asceticism which was going to dominate my style, my thoughts, and my tormented life. Spain in fire would light up this drama of the renaissance of aesthetics. Spain would serve as a holocaust to that post-war Europe tortured by ideological dramas, by moral and artistic anxieties... At one fell swoop, from the middle of the Spanish cadaver, springs up, half-devoured by vermin and ideological worms, the Iberian penis in erection, huge like a cathedral filled with the white dynamite of hatred. Bury and Unbury! Disinter and Inter! In order to unbury again! Such was the charnel desire of the Civil War in that impatient Spain. One would see how she was capable of suffering; of making others suffer, of burying and unburying, of killing and resurrecting. It was necessary to scratch the earth to exhume tradition and to profane everything in order to be dazzled anew by all the treasures that the land was hiding in its entrails." The horror of this picture is further increased by the brown tonalities which dominate its atmosphere. On the anecdotal sire, Dalí has stressed that it was the only work where one could see the true imprint of his hand on the canvas (at the lower right).

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

This beautiful still life, depicting three slices of bread, a few crumbs, and a chess pawn, is a remarkable example of the way in which Dalí succeeds in adding an epic dimension to the most ordinary of everyday things. This picture was painted in Arcachon in the spring of 1940. Dalí has said about the "intervention, from an anecdotal point of view," of Marcel Duchamp in this oil: "Gala and I used to play chess every afternoon, at the same time that I was in the process of painting the slices of bread. I was trying to make the surface on which the rough crumbs of bread were placed very smooth. Often there were things scattered about on the floor for instance, the pawns. One day, instead of putting them all back in the box, one of them remained placed in the middle of the model of my still life. Afterwards we had to find another chess set in order to continue our games, because I was using this one and would not allow anyone to remove it." Pictures of bread occupy an important place in Dalí's work, not only in painting but also in objects, such as Retrospective Bust of a Woman. He himself has explained the presence of bread in his works when writing about one of his paintings of 1945, Basket of Bread, in the catalogue of an exhibition at the Bignou Gallery in New York: "My aim was to retrieve the lost technique of the painters of the past, to succeed in depicting the immobility of the pre-explosive object. Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject nineteen years ago, The Basket of Bread. By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism."

Monday, November 08, 2004

The concept of a still life placed in front of an architectural structure through which one glimpses a fragment of the landscape is one that Dalí has made use of frequently to show to advantage the bust of Voltaire by the sculptor Houdon, which disappears to give place to a group of people. This work was done in the United States at Arcachon in 1940, in which we find again the compotier of The Endless Enigma and Gala, who "by her patient love protected me from the ironic world crawling with slaves." Dalí means by this that he attributes to Gala's gaze the magic power of annihilating the image of Voltaire in order to protect him from any vestige of the skeptical French philosophy of the eighteen century and its consequences. Scientific American magazine in the December 1971 issue used a detail from the Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire to demonstrate the physical structure of the perception system of sight in which the optical neurons reverse the images. While painting this picture, Dalí related in Dalí de Gala: "I kept reciting without ever stopping the poem of Joan Salvat Papasseit, 'Love and War, the Salt of the Earth.'" Salvat Papasseit was a Catalonian anarchist whom Dalí greatly admired. In Barcelona he was accused of having become an extreme rightist because the only thing he did was to apologize for the war at a time when everybody else had become pacifists.
This work exemplifies the caliber of paintings that Dalí was creating during this period. It is a perfect example of an instantaneous paranoiac-critical transformation. Dalí had long been experimenting with the idea of double imagery, and this work so perfectly exemplifies it that it was used by the cover of Scientific American in 1971 to illustrate the concept.
This work lets us experience Dalí's paranoiac-critical transformations in a unique and personal way. Any change in head position, or time itself, is expressed as a switch between the shifting images of the Dutch traders or the bust of French philosopher Voltaire.
The shirtless slave girl in the foreground is surmised to be Gala herself, overseeing the transaction. The faces, collars, and midriffs of the two Dutch merchants become the eyes, nose, and chin of the bust of Voltaire. Although the brain is unable to focus on both images simultaneously, they are blended together perfectly, and in such a way as to suggest a more subtle level of interaction.
The landscape of Catalonia makes another appearance here, and parts of it are made into a more subtle double image on the left side of the painting. Notice the gently downward sloping hill, nearest the building on the right, and how it also becomes a pear sitting in a fruit dish propped up on the table at which Gala is sitting. This is particularly interesting, since like many other double images, it incorporates parts of both background and foreground. Additionally, a plum sitting to the left of the pear also becomes the buttocks of one of the men who is standing there watching the scene.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Another work which stands on the edge between Dalí's periods of Surrealism and Classicism. This painting is also very important for several other reasons, namely that it was the very first work to be purchased by Mr. and Mrs. A. Reynolds Morse, the renowned collectors of Dalí's art who founded the Salvador Dalí Museum, in St. Petersburg, Florida. When the Morses saw the painting at auction, they decided to purchase it, and felt that they had gotten quite a bargain. However, when they went to purchase the painting, they found that Dalí refused to sell the work without the original frame along with it. Apparently, Mr. Morse had only purchased the work itself, and actually had to pay more for the frame than for the painting! This anecdote is a good example of the way Dalí had matured, with Gala's help, into a shrewd businessman who was keenly aware of his value.
However, rather than being sour about the experience, which would have been understandable, the Morses instead started buying more and more works, and eventually became lifelong traveling companions and friends of the Dalí's. It was their efforts that gathered together nearly 100 oil paintings, hundreds of watercolors and drawings, and a vast archival library that now comprise the museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Each of the objects in the work itself is done in stunning detail. The scene is set upon an apocalyptic plain, and one immediately seems to get a feeling of dread or misgiving. Because Dalí intended this work to be an examination of the horrors of World War II that had now begun in earnest, Dalí fills the scene with allegorical references to that event.
In the upper left hand corner of the painting stands a cannon, propped up by a crutch which here symbolizes death and war. Out of the mouth of the cannon spill two distinct objects, the lower being a 'soft' or somewhat fluid biplane, and the other a white horse, galloping at a mad pace, its muscles and facial contortions suggesting power, speed and control.
The horse may symbolize one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the events of 1940 in Europe could have certainly appeared Apocalyptical, especially to one as sensitive as Dalí. The soft airplane, and another nearby object, the winged victory figure, are symbolic of "victory born of a broken wing" as Dalí described it. Salvador felt that the use of air power would be the decisive element of the war, the very key to victory itself. History has shown that this is at least partially true.
Nearer the center of the painting is another soft figure, what Dalí calls a 'soft self-portrait', an image from other works long since past. Its decaying body is drooped over a dead tree, it has two inkwells propped on it, and it's holding a violin. The ink wells are symbolic of the signing of treaties, although Dalí also occasionally used them to express sexuality as well. There are ants quickly devouring the soft head, and though we have not seen very many Dalínian ants to this point, they are another common symbol for Dalí. In general they represent decay and decomposition, as it is they (and many other insects as Dalí might point out) who eventually devour everything in the ground, and return it to its chemical components. For this reason Dalí often included ants as symbols of death, decay, and purification, all of which he was obsessed with.
In the lower left hand corner, a cupid figure looks on the scene, holding its face in one hand, and reaching out the other towards the destruction he sees before him. This agonized cupid almost seems to verbalize its horror in overlooking the terrible scene being played out before it. Remember that Dada, and eventually Surrealism were born out of the rebellion against the mindless destruction of World War I. In reality, none of the issues that caused that war were ever rectified, and this led to World War II, which shocked and outraged Dalí and many others, prompting these sorts of works that seem to say "Dear God not again!"
However, in the midst of such pain and terror, there is always hope, and this is symbolized by the daddy longlegs spider resting in almost the exact center of the painting, near the ants on the soft self portrait. The daddy longlegs, when seen in the evening, is a French symbol for hope. Thus, Dalí is offering us solace, even in the middle of such terrible devastation. This dualistic nature of his is slowly starting to shift more and more towards the positive, and towards themes and subjects that are more in the conscious realm of things. This predates his entering his Classical period in 1941, but shows the same tendencies nonetheless.

Saturday, November 06, 2004

The figure of the woman leaning her elbow on a night stand symbolizes the Spanish Civil War. Dalí wrote in his Secret Life: "Throughout all martyrized Spain rose an odor of incense, of the burning flesh of priests, of spiritual quartered flesh, mixed with the powerful scent of the sweat of mobs fornicating among themselves and with Death." The torso and the face of the female figure are made up of groups of Renaissance warriors, of condottieri, inspired by a combat of horsemen done by Leonardo da Vinci. Although signed in 1938, this picture was probably started sooner. The other very remarkable works of this series are The Great Paranoiac, Paranoia, Perspectives, and Head of a Woman Having the Form of a Battle. Dalí exhibited nearly all these paintings together in a one-man show that he, aided by Gala, organized in February 1939 in the studio where the couple was living on the rue de la Tombe-Issoire in Paris. Friends and society people came to see this exhibition of paranoiac-critical activity, and Dalí remembers that the first to arrive and the last to leave was Picasso, who asked especially to see Spain.


Friday, November 05, 2004

This composition is probably the best example of paranoiac-critical activity in operation in the paintings done by Dalí. He is not satisfied with pursuing a double image but succeeds in accumulating and making rise simultaneously, or one after another according to the particular capacity of the viewer, six different subjects, thus justifying the title The Endless Enigma which he gave to this picture.
The subjects are in succession: a reclining philosopher; a greyhound lying down; a mythological beast; the face of the great Cyclopean, Cretin; a mandolin; a compotier of fruits and figs on a table; and finally a woman seen from the back mending a sail. One can perceive here, besides, appearing in the corner at the right, the upper part of Gala's face with a turban on her head and at the bottom left, balanced on a stick, the skeletal remains of a grilled sardine. Several times during the same period Dalí depicted grilled sardines, placed in dishes, together with telephones, such as : Beach with Telephone, The Sublime Moment, Imperial Violets, or The Enigma of Hitler, in all of which this instrument symbolizes the period of great political tension in Europe which preceded World War II, particularly at the time of Munich, when the telephone played such an important role in the negotiations between the Allies and Hitler. Most of these pictures, including The Endless Enigma, were started - indeed, almost all were painted - at the estate of Coco Chanel, "La Paula," at Roquebrune on the Cote d'Azur.


Thursday, November 04, 2004

Mountain Lake, also called Beach with Telephone, was painted using oil on canvas. The telephone was a key image for Dalí during the late Thirties, as seen in his famous Lobster Telephone in 1936. Dalí believed this painting was a premonition of the Second World War. In Mountain Lake, as with The Enigma of Hitler (1936), the telephone can be interpreted as referring to the telephone negotiations between Chamberlain and Hitler to seal the Munich Agreement made in 1938.
The telephone handle is hanging by a crutch, signifying the fragility of the peace that the telephone negotiations have created. To stress this point further, there are snails crawling up the crutch and on to the handle of the phone; Dalí was fascinated with all creatures that have their own shell, with their protected softness and their hidden vulnerability.
The mountains in the background are reflected in the lake beneath the phone to give a double image: the lake can also be seen as a fish with the ripples on it forming the scales and the jagged rock to the left forming a tail. Some have seen the image as phallic, with the solitary rock to the right suggesting a female counterpart.


Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Sleep was painted for Edward James, a British millionaire who was Dalí's patron from 1936 to 1939. Sleep deals with a subject that fascinated the Surrealists: the world of dreams. They believed that the freedom of the subconscious within sleep could be tapped into and then used creatively.
Sleep is a visual rendering of the body's collapse into sleep, as if into a separate state of being. Against a deep blue summer sky, a huge disembodied head with eyes dissolved in sleep, hangs suspended over an almost empty landscape. The head is "soft", appearing both vulnerable and distorted; what should be a neck tapers away to drop limply over a crutch. A dog appears, its head in a crutch, as if half asleep itself.
The head is propped above the land by a series of wooden crutches. The mouth, nose and also the eyes are all held in place by the crutches, suggesting that the head might disintegrate if they were removed. Crutches were a familiar sight in Dalí's work. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the artist wrote that he had imagined sleep as a heavy monster that was "held up by the crutches of reality".


Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Dalí believed that both The Burning Giraffe and The Invention of Monsters were premonitions of war. Both of these paintings contain the image of a giraffe with its back ablaze, an image which Dalí interpreted as "the masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster". He first used this image of the giraffe in flames in his film L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age) in 1930.
The Burning Giraffe appears as very much a dreamscape, not simply because of the subject but also because of the supernatural aquamarine color of the background. Against this vivid blue color, the flames on the giraffe stand out to great effect.
In the foreground, a woman stands with her arms outstretched. Her forearms and face are blood red, having been stripped to show the muscle beneath the flesh. The woman's face is featureless now, indicating a nightmarish helplessness and a loss of individuality. Behind her, a second woman holds aloft a strip of meat, representing death, entrophy, and the human races capacity to devour and destroy. The women both have elongated phallic shapes growing out from their backs, and these are propped up with crutches Dalí repeatedly uses this symbolism for a weak and flawed society.

Monday, November 01, 2004

The Invention of the Monsters was painted by Dalí between 1935 and 1940. This painting reflects the troubled times before World War II. In The Invention of the Monsters, Dalí has painted his premonition of World War II. Dalí began the picture in 1937, in Paris, in his studio on rue de la Tombe-Issoire and resumed work on it at the winter-sports resort of Semmering, south of Vienna. When Dalí learned that the Art Institute of Chicago had acquired this work, he sent a telegram with the following explanation: "Am happy and honored by your acquisition. According to Nostradamus, the apparition of monsters is a presage of war. This canvas was painted in the mountains of Semmering a few months before the Anschluss and it has a prophetic character. The women-horses represent the maternal river-monsters, the flaming giraffe the male cosmic apocalyptic monster. The angel-cat is the divine heterosexual monster, the hour-glass the metaphysical monster. Gala and Dalí together the sentimental monster. The little lonely blue dog is not a true monster." The theme of the women-horses that one sees here in a herd bathing in a pond is the same as in Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion. Here the shapes have changed completely: three years later they will give birth to a series of pictures entitled The Marsupial Centaurs. About the double figure seen in the foreground, holding a butterfly and an hourglass in his hands, the painter has stated precisely that it was the Pre-Raphaelite result of the double portrait of Dalí and Gala painted right behind it.