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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shanes, Eric.

The life and masterworks of Salvador Dalí / author, Eric Shanes. -- Rev. and updated 2nd ed.

Rev. ed. of a book first published by Studio Editions, London in 1994.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84484-818-8

1. Dalí, Salvador, 1904-1989--Criticism and interpretation.

2. Dalí, Salvador, 1904-1989.

3. Artists--Spain--Biography. I. Dalí, Salvador, 1904-1989. II. Shanes, Eric. Dalí. III. Title.

N7113.D3S52 2010

709.2--dc22

[B]

2010013560

No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-78310-782-7

Eric Shanes

The Life and Masterworks of

Salvador Dalí

For Ruth Ornadel Tomkins,

who has always relished the surreal

My ambition is to give the world of the imagination the same degree of objectivity and reality as the everyday world. What Surrealism revolutionises above all is art’s themes, and to express these I use the same means as always. It’s the themes, derived from Freudianism, that are new.

Salvador Dalí, 1934

Self-Portrait with the Neck of Raphael, 1921.

Oil on canvas, 41.5 x 53 cm.

Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres.

Contents

Introduction

The Masterworks

Selected Bibliography

Chronology

List of Illustrations

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), Saturn devouring one of his sons, 1821-1823.

mural transferred to canvas, 143.5 x 81.4 cm.

Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Introduction

It is perhaps unsurprising that Salvador Dalí has proven to be one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century, for his finest works explore universal and timeless states of mind, and most of his pictures were painted with a mastery of traditional representation that has proven rare in our time. For many people, that acute realism alone would have sufficed to attract them to Dalí’s work, and it has certainly served to mask any gradual lessening of quality in his art. Moreover, Dalí was also probably the greatest artistic self-publicist in a century in which (as Igor Stravinsky commented in 1970), publicity gradually became ‘about all that is left of the arts’. In this respect he was in a class of his own for much of his lifetime, as was his brilliant wife and co-publicist, Gala.

Yet Dalí’s immense popularity is also rather ironic, for his work – in its finest phase, at least – constitutes an attack on the social, sexual and cultural morés of the very society that feted him. The notion that an artist should be culturally subversive has proven central to modernist art practice, and it was certainly essential to Surrealism, which aimed to subvert the supposedly rational basis of society itself. In time, Dalí’s subversiveness softened, and by the mid-1940s André Breton, the leading spokesman for Surrealism, was perhaps justifiably dismissing the painter as a mere showman and betrayer of Surrealist intentions. But although there was a sea-change in Dalí’s art after about 1940, his earlier work certainly retains its ability to bewilder, shock and intrigue, while also dealing inventively with the nature of reality and appearances. Similarly, Dalí’s behaviour as an artist after about 1940 throws light on the basically superficial culture that sustained him, and this too seems worth touching upon, if only for what it can tell us about the man behind the myths that Salvador Dalí projected about himself.

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on 11 May 1904 in Figueres, a small town in the Catalan province of Gerona, northern Spain, the son of Salvador Dalí i Cusi and Felipa Domènech. Dalí senior was the public notary of Figueres and, as such, an important and widely respected local official. He was a very forceful man, and it was rumoured that he had been responsible for the death of Dalí’s elder brother, also named Salvador, who had been born in 1901 and who died in 1903; officially the death was caused by catarrh and gastroenteritis but according to Dalí, his older brother died of meningitis that had possibly been brought on by a blow to the head. Certainly that death left Dalí’s parents with an inescapable sense of anguish, and the young Dalí was always aware of the demise simply because both parents constantly projected his lost brother onto him, every day making comparisons between the two boys, dressing the younger Salvador in his deceased brother’s clothes, giving him the same toys to play with, and generally treating him as the reincarnation of his departed brother, rather than as a person in his own right.

Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), The Angelus, 1857-1859.

oil on canvas, 55.5 x 66 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Faced with such a denial of self, Dalí understandably mutinied in an assertion of his own identity, while equally rebelling against the perfected image of the dead brother his parents attempted to impose upon him. Thus the painter later recounted that ‘Each day I looked for a new way of bringing my father to a paroxysm of rage or fear or humiliation and forcing him to consider me, his son, me Salvador, as an object of dislike and shame. I threw him off, I amazed him, I provoked him, defied him more and more.’ If Dalí’s later claims are to be taken seriously, among other things his rebelliousness involved him in deliberate bed-wetting, simulated convulsions, prolonged screaming, feigned muteness, jumping from heights, and acts of random aggressiveness such as flinging another little boy off a suspension bridge or kicking his younger sister in the head for no apparent reason. Supposedly Dalí also frequently overcompensated for the suppression of his identity by indulging in exhibitionist behaviour, as when he placed a dying, ant-covered bat in his mouth and bit it almost in half. There is probably only a very limited amount of truth in these assertions, but eventually both Dalí’s innate rebelliousness and exhibitionism would serve him in good stead artistically.

Dalí received his primary and secondary education in Figueres, first at a state school where he learned nothing, and then at a private school run by French Marist friars, where he gained a good working knowledge of spoken French and some helpful instruction in taking great artistic pains. The cypress trees visible from his classroom remained in his mind and later reappeared in many of his pictures, while Jean-François Millet’s painting The Angelus (above) that he saw in reproduction in the school also came back to haunt him in a very fruitful way. But the main educational input of these years clearly derived from Dalí’s home life, for his father was a relatively cultured man, with an interest in literature and music, a well-stocked library that Dalí worked through even before he was ten years old, and decidedly liberal opinions, being both an atheist and a Republican. This political nonconformism initially rubbed off on Dalí, who as a young man regarded himself as an Anarchist and who professed a lifelong contempt for bourgeois values.

Angelus, c. 1932.

Oil on wood, 16 x 21.7 cm.

Private collection, courtesy Galerie Natalie Seroussi, Paris.

More importantly, the young Dalí also received artistic stimulation from his father, who bought the boy several of the volumes in a popular series of artistic monographs. Dalí pored over the reproductions they contained, and those images helped form his long term attraction to nineteenth century academic art, with its pronounced realism; among the painters who particularly impressed him were Manuel Benedito y Vives, Eugène Carrière, Modesto Urgell and Mariano Fortuny, one of whose works, The Battle of Tetuan, would inspire Dalí to paint a companion picture in 1962. And Dalí also received artistic encouragement from a friend of his father’s, the Figueres lawyer Pepito Pichot whose brother, Ramon, was a fluent impressionist painter who lived in Paris and was known to Picasso. It may have been in the Pichot summer residence in an old mill-tower near Figueres that the young Dalí took his first steps as a painter, for when he was about nine years old he produced a still life of cherries on the back of an old, worm-eaten door, using merely vermilion and carmine for the fruits, and white for the highlights. (Dalí also later claimed that in this work he first blurred the dividing lines between differing realities, initially by gluing the stems of the real cherries to the bases of the painted ones, and then by transferring several worms from their holes in the door – and thus in his painted cherries – to the worm holes in the real cherries.)

Quite naturally the young Dalí was influenced by the numerous impressionistic and pointillist canvases of Ramon Pichot that hung in the old mill-tower, and his precociousness was such that Pepito Pichot soon persuaded Dalí senior to allow his son to study drawing with Professor Juan Nuñez at the Municipal School of Drawing in Figueres, where the boy enrolled in 1917. Because Nuñez found Dalí unusually talented, he took great pains over his education. The student remained under his tuition for about two years, and freely admitted he learned much from his teacher. And in December 1918 Dalí exhibited his first pictures publicly, in a show shared with two other painters that was mounted in the municipal theatre in Figueres, a building that would later become a museum devoted solely to his own works. A local art critic wrote that

The person who has inside him what the pictures at the Concerts Society reveal is already something big in the artistic sense... We have no right to talk of the boy Dalí because the said boy is already a man... We have no right to say that he shows promise. Rather, we should say that he is already giving... We salute the novel artist and are quite certain that in the future our words... will have the value of a prophecy: Salvador Dalí will be a great painter.

Self-portrait, 1923.

India ink and pencil on paper, 31.5 x 25 cm.

Collection of the Estalella brothers, Madrid.

This was very heady praise for a boy of fourteen, and it was true: he was a great painter in the making.

Over the next couple of years the little genius continued to broaden his horizons. He helped bring out a local student magazine that appeared mostly in Spanish rather than Catalan so as to reach a wider readership. To this Dalí contributed illustrations and a series of articles on great painters, taking as his subjects Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, El Greco, Durer, Velásquez and Goya. He widened his reading and thereby assimilated advanced views on politics, culture and society, in 1921 even claiming to be a communist. Naturally he rebelled against paternal authority, but who doesn’t? And he discovered the joys of masturbation, as well as the self-loathing that usually accompanied it in an age of anxiety about all things sexual. This was especially the case in Spain where sexual ignorance was endemic and sexual guilt was universally promulgated. In order to get aroused the youth did not necessarily fantasise about women: towers and church belfries could just as easily help him rise to the occasion (which is surely why there are so many towers and belfries in his art). He worried intensely about the smallness of his sexual organ, and his sexual anxiety made him ‘the victim of inextinguishable attacks of laughter’. He also realised that ‘you have to have a very strong erection to be able to penetrate. And my problem is that I’ve always been a premature ejaculator. So much so, that sometimes it’s enough for me just to look in order to have an orgasm.’ It appears probable that never in the history of art has such an avid masturbator and voyeur become such a great painter, and certainly no artist has ever admitted to these predilections as openly as Dalí would do in 1929 and thereafter.

Asensio Juliá (1760- 1832) [formerly attributed to Francisco de Goya (1746-1828)], The Colossus (Panic), c. 1809.

Oil on canvas, 116 x 105 cm.

Museo del Prado, Madrid.

In February 1921 Dalí’s mother, Felipa Domènech, died suddenly of cancer of the uterus. She was just forty-seven years of age. Dalí was exceedingly pained by the loss, stating later that

With my teeth clenched with weeping, I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death and destiny with the swords of light that some day would savagely gleam around my glorious name.

In November 1922 Dalí’s father would remarry, although he had to obtain a papal dispensation in order to do so, as his new bride, Catalina Domènech, was the sister of his dead wife.

In September 1922 Dalí was accompanied by his father and sister to Madrid in order to apply for admittance to the leading art school in Spain, the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. The boy had long wanted to devote himself to art, and although his father harboured the usual reservations about such an uncertain career, clearly he was relieved that his unstable son had some set target in mind. The entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts involved spending six days drawing a cast of Jacopo Sansovino’s Bacchus, and although Dalí failed to make his drawing to the required size, his facility was such that the dimensions of his work were ignored and he was granted a place.

Dalí was not to prove happy with the tuition he would receive at the San Fernando Academy, mainly because impressionism was still the prevailing artistic mode there and it was a style he had already worked through and exhausted. Instead, he took an interest in more advanced visual thinking, such as Cubism, while equally being attracted to traditional artistic techniques, which unfortunately were no longer being much taught at the Academy because of the prevailing taste for the loose painterly techniques demanded by an impressionistic approach. But if the San Fernando Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving made only a passing contribution to Dalí’s artistic development, his choice of accommodation in Madrid gave him much more creative stimulation, for he stayed in the Residencia de Studia, or University Hall of Residence. This was not just a place to eat and sleep but was far more like a college in itself, with activities taking place on all kinds of intellectual levels. Dalí’s sojourn in the Residencia coincided with that of some of the most brilliant emergent minds in contemporary Spanish culture. These included Luis Buñuel, then a philosophy student and later to be an outstanding film director with whom he would collaborate; and the finest modern Spanish poet and playwright (and arguably the greatest poet of the twentieth century), Federico García Lorca. At first Dalí was somewhat distanced from his more advanced fellow students in the Residencia by his assumed, defensive haughtiness and bohemian way of dressing, but when his modernist sympathies were discovered he was readily admitted to the circle of Buñuel and Lorca, with whom he became firm friends by early 1923.

Dalí’s dissatisfaction with the San Fernando Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving moved onto a new plane in the autumn of 1923 when, along with five other students, he was rusticated for a year for supposed insubordination. He had supported the appointment of a progressive artist to the post of Professor of Open-Air Painting, and when his favourite failed to obtain the job, in protest he had walked out of the meeting at which the news of the failure was announced; this was followed by a vociferous student protest, for which it was assumed that Dalí’s walkout had been the starting signal. Dalí thereupon returned to Figueres. Soon afterwards, in May 1924, he unwittingly found himself in further trouble with authority because of the political leanings of other members of his family; as a consequence, Dalí was imprisoned without trial in Figueres and later transferred to the provincial capital of Gerona before being released.

Portrait of Maria Carbona, 1925.

Oil on cardboard, 52.6 x 39.2 cm.

Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal.

Penya-Segats (Woman by the Cliffs), 1926.

Oil on wood, 26 x 40 cm.

Private collection.

The Spectral Cow, 1928.

Oil on laminated panel, 49.8 x 64.4 cm.

Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

Fried Eggs on the Plate without the Plate, 1932.

Oil on canvas, 60 x 42 cm.

Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida.

By this time Dalí had experimented with various artistic styles. Picasso was one influence, Derain another, while in 1923 Dalí had painted pictures of groups of nudes in the open air that were heavily indebted to pointillism and the flowing, linear style of Matisse. By the autumn of 1924, when Dalí returned to Madrid and his formal studies, he had also begun to assimilate more recent developments in Cubism and Purism. Yet simultaneously he started exploring a highly detailed representationalism, and here too the influence of Picasso – in the form of the latter’s neo-classicism of the late 1910s and early 1920s – is apparent. And Romantic painters of an earlier period such as Caspar David Friedrich also made their mark upon him. Clearly, the young man was searching for a style that could express his innermost self, without yet being able to find it.

Back in Madrid Dalí resumed his friendship with Buñuel and Lorca. On the creative level the relationship between Dalí and Lorca would prove especially important, for it would strengthen their mutual attraction to Surrealism. However, the sympathy between them also led the homosexual Lorca to fall in love with Dalí. Being perhaps bisexual but more usually asexual, Dalí could not return his affections in the same way. However, on two occasions probably in 1926, and surely in the spirit of sexual experimentation, Dalí did passively allow Lorca to try making love to him. The experiment was unsuccessful. Apparently Dalí had no regrets and later commented that ‘I felt awfully flattered vis-a-vis the prestige. Deep down, I felt that he was a great poet and that I did owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí’s asshole.’

In early April 1925 Dalí and Lorca went to stay just outside Cadaqués, about twenty-five kilometres to the east of Figueres on the Mediterranean, where the Dalí family had long had use of a summer villa. There Dalí introduced his friend to the widow of a local fishermen, Lídia Noguér Sabà, who bordered on the harmlessly lunatic but who had always thrilled Dalí with her freewheeling associationism, something that would soon become one of the cornerstones of not only his own art but also that of his friend. Lorca was delighted with the local landscapes, the food, the Greek and Roman ruins, and the enthusiasm with which he was received by Dalí’s father and sister.

In November 1925 Dalí held his first one-man exhibition, at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona, showing seventeen, mostly recent paintings that ranged stylistically across the visual spectrum from Cubist semi-abstraction, as in the Venus and Sailor, to a low-keyed realism, as in the Figure at a Window. The show was well received by the critics, although some of them were understandably puzzled by the stylistic diversity of the pictures.

Surrealist Horse-Woman-Horse, 1933.

Pencil and pen on paper, 52.6 x 25 cm.

Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida.

Gradiva, 1933.

Pen and India ink on sandpaper.

Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

In April 1926 Dalí received an overwhelming testimonial to his talents through the publication of Lorca’s Ode to Salvador Dalí, a poem that has been called ‘perhaps the finest paean to friendship ever written in Spanish’. And later that month Dalí, accompanied by his stepmother and sister, at last visited Paris for the first time. They also went on to Brussels. The trip was paid for by Dalí’s father who was delighted at the success of the Dalmau Gallery exhibition the previous autumn. In Brussels, Dalí was attracted to Flemish painting, with its microscopic attention to detail, while in Paris he again met up with Buñuel. The family took an excursion to Versailles, visited the studio of Jean-François Millet in Barbizon, and explored the Grevin waxworks museum. Yet without doubt the high point of the entire trip was Dalí’s visit to Picasso, which was arranged by another Spanish artist living in Paris. As Dalí later recalled:

When I arrived at Picasso’s [studio] on Rue de la Boetie I was as deeply moved and as full of respect as though I was having an audience with the Pope.

‘I have come to see you,’ I said, ‘before visiting the Louvre.’

‘You’re quite right,’ he answered.

I brought a small painting, carefully packed, which was called The Girl of Figueres. He looked at it for at least fifteen minutes, and made no comment whatever. After which we went up to the next storey, where for two hours Picasso showed me quantities of his paintings. He kept going back and forth, dragging out great canvases which he placed against the easel. Then he went to fetch others among an infinity of canvases stacked in rows against the wall. I could see that he was going to enormous trouble. At each new canvas he cast me a glance filled with a vivacity and an intelligence so violent that it made me tremble. I left without in turn having made the slightest comment.

At the end, on the landing on the stairs, just as I was about to leave, we exchanged a glance which meant exactly,

‘You get the idea?’

‘I get it!’

By the time Dalí visited Picasso he had for some years been assimilating elements from the latter’s art as viewed in reproduction, such as the stylisation of figures in pictures of the Blue and Rose periods, the manifold spatial dislocations and ambiguities of Cubism, and the strain of neo-classicism that emerged in 1919. It must have been rewarding, then, to see large numbers of original works by Picasso from all these phases of his career. And one picture in particular, if seen, would have linked to Dalí directly, for Picasso’s Three Dancers of 1925 (London, Tate Modern) alludes to the recent death of Ramon Pichot, whose silhouette is descernible against the window on the right. Naturally, the influence of Picasso upon Dalí continued for some time after the 1926 visit to the Rue de la Boetie, and it derived from the elongated figures, flat shapes, crisp silhouettes and bright colours visible in Picasso’s Cubist style of the mid-1920s (all of which elements are visible in The Three Dancers). But simultaneously Dalí continued to develop the strain of realism that had previously emerged in his work. Clearly, he was still searching for his true self.

The welcome that Dalí had received in Paris led him to think of moving there. In order to do so he evolved a crafty, long-term strategy that involved engineering his own expulsion from the San Fernando Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. As he later stated,

The motives for my action were simple: I wanted to have done with the School of Fine Arts and with the orgiastic life of Madrid once and for all; I wanted to be forced to escape all that and come back to Figueres to work for a year, after which I would try to convince my father that my studies should be continued in Paris. Once there, with the work that I should take, I would definitely seize power!

By being ‘forced to escape all that’, Dalí surely meant his need to overcome a seemingly insuperable obstacle, namely that if he obtained his academic degree his father would expect him to support himself by teaching for a living, rather than maintain him financially in Paris. And with his talents how could he fail to win his degree?

Dalí found a typically outrageous way of solving the problem. In mid-June 1926, when he was summoned for the art history component of his final examination, he refused to be examined, stating that ‘none of the professors of the school of San Fernando being competent to judge me, I retire’. The ploy was successful, for the professors were infuriated, and eight days later Dalí was expelled from the institution without obtaining his degree.