Salvador Dali, by far the greatest of the surrealists, was fortunate to belong to a time when the surrealist movement in art was already in swing in Europe. Dali's fantastic and unusually powerful imaginative powers adapted themselves very well to this already established style and movement, which he promoted and strengthened by producing works of extraordinary effect. While Dali was still in his mid-thirties, he became so well known and successful that surrealism came to be identified with Salvador Dali and art came to be identified as pre-Dali and post-Dali. His paintings and objects sold for millions and when he came to live in the US, the government wanted to tax him for millions of dollars, which he avoided by donating or selling his paintings to a couple who were close friends and patrons and who founded a gallery with the works.
Paranoiac, obsessive, with a fanatic mind beset with strange fears and phobias, even occasional hallucination, Dali was nevertheless a deep and original thinker with his individual philosophy of art, architecture, politics and morality. He was a film-maker whose films aroused acclaim and controversy and he was a terrific inventor whose inventions have been copied and used without due recognition. A megalomaniac, a hyper-individualistic, self-obsessed supreme narcissist who believed fanatically in his own ideas, he called himself a genius who believed, like his contemporary and friend Juan Miro, that "The important thing in life is to be stubborn."Â His sheer confidence in himself together with his insistence to live the life he wanted was the cause of his phenomenal success.
The nature of surrealist paintings and objects:
Sigmund Freud's seminal work, "The Interpretation of Dreams" showed how powerful forces at the sub-conscious and unconscious levels of the human mind reveal themselves through dreams and how they have a language of their own, the interpretation of which is critical in understanding desires and fears, psychoses and neuroses. Freud's theories had a powerful hold in Europe and influenced the birth of surrealism as a movement in art, which was contemporaneous with the time of Freud. It was a time when people in high society talked fashionably of their dreams and tried to interpret their language.  Surrealism as a movement in art tried to portray the visions of dreams and the language of the unconscious at the level of day-to-day visible reality. For example, Dali explains his painting of himself as a little boy of eight with a raw chop on his head. In the picture Dali is symbolically trying to tempt his father to come and eat the chop instead of him. The painting was inspired by the story of William Tell aiming his arrow on the head of his own son. The apple or the raw chop becomes a symbol of an expiatory object in an abortive sacrifice. When Dali did the painting he was cut off by his family and was facing persecution from them for living together with a married woman, i.e. Gala. Dali is depicting the theme of sacrifice of a son by his father through the symbolism of eating.
Similarly the surrealist object, in Dali's own words, is "the irrational object, the object with a symbolic function," an object "that is absolutely useless from the practical and rational point of view, created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with the maximum of tangible reality, ideas and fantasies having a delirious character….people were no longer limited to talking about their phobias, manias, feelings and desires, but could now touch them, manipulate and operate them with their own hands…". Thus "…the surrealist object had created a new need of reality." The surrealist object became so popular that it came to be used commercially to attract customers to shops and Dali was commissioned by fashionable shops to put up such objects in their shop windows. Dali mentions a "surrealist ball" given in his honour when he first went to New York in 1934 where society men and women came dressed in the strangest costumes that "brought out the germs of mad fantasy that slumbered in the depths of everyone's brains and desires with the maximum of violence." This ball was so successful that Gala's costume caused a scandal in Europe while the ball was repeated and imitated in most American cities. With the surrealist object, Dali said, he "killed elementary surrealist painting and modern painting in general."
The secret life of Salvador Dali: Style of writing:
People usually write autobiographies when their lives are almost over but Dali writes his autobiography, "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali" at the age of thirty-seven, "… with my vice of doing everything differently from others," as he says. He does this with a desire of getting freed from the chains of the past and to live the rest of his life enriched by the experience, something he likens to shedding his old skin and getting into a new one. This very readable autobiography which spans the Spanish Civil War and World War I, charts not only the story of Dali's first life and struggle but also the social milieu of Europe at that time, the movements in art and architecture, the political ideologies and the many isms that were in vogue at that time in Europe.
Dali uses a very individualistic style, using humour and sarcasm to tell his life story. In the first chapter he gives short sketches from various stages of his life that illuminate his self-portrait, as it were, from various angles. These sketches illustrate his eccentric temperament and the unusual acts and events of his life that let the reader beware that he is in unfamiliar terrain. Dali's own drawings pictorially support the story and illuminate the subtle shades of mood and the artist's mental state. Written with a strong command of language and powerful and evocative imagery, Dali's autobiography confirms his place as a writer of the first order, establishing that his writing genius is parallel to his genius as an artist. Dali writes to tell the story of the experiences he lived through, first-hand, as opposed to presenting a "pseudo-philosophical" doctrine. He writes as "a protagonist of the surrealist revolution," who has chartered the philosophical, ideological and political doctrines in vogue, but nevertheless writes to tell only his true story in his own, authentic tone.    Â
Dali writes with a hardboiled honesty, not turning away from describing such things as his little game of playing with the first discovered pubic hairs in his adolescence, the auto-erotic acts of young men at the Academy of Fine Arts, his natural cowardice, tendencies to cruelty and occasional violence, his fits of uncontrolled anger, of paranoia or his tendencies to madness. He sacrifices no depiction to "good taste," Dali uses his frankness and open expression of original beliefs to surprise and shock, to subvert ways of thinking and expression that have been established as standards of what is acceptable and what may or may not be said.
At the same time he chooses to be reticent in certain places, either for certain strategic reasons or because the events have caused him a degree of agony. Thus he does not wish to elaborate on his personal reaction to the influence of Frederico Garcia Lorca, the famous poet whom Dali met in his student days; he is silent on his mother's death and his father's remarriage to his aunt; he is silent on the reaction of Paul Eluard, Gala's first husband, after she left him for Dali.
Palpably influenced by Sigmund Freud whose theories on psychology were then revolutionizing the discipline, Dali shows a clear consciousness of the Freudian theory of libido and of the forces of the subconscious. In writing about his childhood love for the boy Buchaques, his sexual interest in the little Russian girl of his imagination, Galuchka, his tendencies to cruelty and sado-masochism, Dali shows himself a faithful student of Freud. He applies Freudian theories to analyze his own psychosis, his urge to kill the girls or women he fell in love with, although he calls it psychoanalysis by his own original methods of investigation. He also applied Freudian theories consciously in his life for the purpose of furthering his artistic creativity, abstaining from sexual relations with his wife Gala from time to time in order to channel his libido to his art.
On the other hand, in narrating the significant events of his earliest childhood he claims to have remembered the time he passed in his mother's womb, which he calls "intra-uterine memories." He also refers to a piece of imaginative life lived by his mind which he uniquely calls "false memories," that is nevertheless very much part and parcel of his past and has contributed to his development. Dali uses an intriguing manner of post-event narration, leaving it to the intelligence of the reader to judge the credibility of the events and to decide which part of the memories are false; after giving enough hints on the way. For example, the entire series of events in his childhood involving his highly erotic exchange with the little Russian girl Galuchka as well as the highly dramatic confrontation within the love triangle that is formed of Buchaques, Galuchka and himself, involving Dali's attempts to kill Buchaques with a strategically placed sword, is absurd and highly improbable, and therefore false. Nevertheless, this sustained false memory is important in understanding Dali not only because the events illustrate the sustained, voluminous and detailed chain of events that the child Dali constructed in his fantastic mind when left to muse by himself for long hours, but also how these made up the reality of the imaginative world in his life, becoming an important part of his memories. Also, the being of Galuchka, while only occurring in Dali's imagination, is of supreme importance in Dali's life; she appears and reappears in his life in the form of little girls and young women he desires. It is somehow mystically important also that the first Galuchka was a Russian figure. When he meets Gala, the love of his life, he sees her as a grown-up Galuchka. Moreover, she is Russian.
Formative influence of early years on Dali's mind
Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904 in the town of Figueras in Spain, where his father was a respected notary. His father was a native of Cadaques, a white-washed village on the edge of the Mediterranean, and the family during Dali's childhood often spent their summers there. The peculiarities of the landscape in the vicinity of Cadaques, with its open skies and sea, surrounded by mountains and hills covered with olive trees, with almost non-existent vegetation, appealed so strongly to Dali that he insisted that this was by far the most beautiful landscape in the world. During the long summer days that Dali spent there in his childhood, he came to "know by heart each contour of the rocks and beaches of Cadaques, each geological anomaly of its unique landscape and light,…the exact itinerary of the shadows as they traced their languishing course around the bosom of the rocks…" Indeed Dali languishes into poetry as he describes the beauty of Cadaques. He studied the formations of rock and hollow, light and shade in the landscape he came to love and this had a powerful influence on the formation and development of his mind and his artistic faculties. Dali's genius consisted of a remarkable degree of observation and image retention. He describes how, in the vicinity of Cadaques, he had studied the landscape so well that he knew which part of jutting rock would be illumined at a certain time of day.
When Dali was seven, his father, who was a free-thinker, inspired by certain Catalonian loyalties and sentiments, sent Dali to the school of Senor Traite, where the children of poor people went, instead of sending him to a school more suitable to his rank. Dali was by far the most well-dressed and the most coddled child there and he writes in his autobiography that spending that first school year living with the poorest children was very important for the development of his natural tendencies to megalomania. In addition to being ragged, the "frenzy of continual turbulence" that these children engaged in, and their "principle of action," displaying "that common and ancestral dementia" totally bewildered and alienated the quiet and withdrawn Dali, who, because the school-master virtually slept throughout the day, spent his solitary hours fabricating "false memories," which is the name given by him to long reveries during which he fabricated a long, sustained chain of events inspired by real people, pictures and objects and fuelled by his desires. At the end of the first year in this dysfunctional school where Dali even forgot the alphabet and how to write his own name he had been taught at home, his parents moved him to the Christian Brothers' School of Figueras. Ironically, it was the "supposedly harmful pedagogical experience" at Senor Traite's school that had given that vacancy and freedom to the young Dali to develop powerful faculties of reverie and imagination.
 (The article is inspired by a recent visit to the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, by a study of Dali's autobiography "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali" and "50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship" by Salvador Dali.)    Â
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In the mind of Salvador Dali: His mysticism and madness
Sadia Arman in the first of a four-part article | Published: December 13, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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