- Email: [email protected]
The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Cover Comment
Michael Salcman, M.D. Special Lecturer, Osher Institute Towson University
The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) Michael Salcman
A
lmost everything you need to know about him is in that celebrity shot—one of the most famous photographs of the 1940s: he is painting inside an empty frame, cats and spilled pitchers of water flying through the air, the easel, a chair, the maestro and his moustaches having leapt off the ground, and the supporting wires for all this “magic” pre-digitally erased by Philippe Halsman, a great fashion photographer of thetime.IntheunretouchedversionofthephotographaspublishedinLIFE magazine, you can see an assistant’s hand holding up the chair, a prop lifting up the footstool, and wires suspending the easel. Dali Atomicus (1948) (Figure 1) is a portrait of a man who was then the most famous living artist in the world; its strange conjunction of objects and actions the epitome of theSurrealistideal;itsconjunctionofartandcommerceandfashionatoxic combination that haunts the art world down to the present day. And because it is a photographic document endowed with supposed scientific veracity, its purpose is to make you believe in a reality that is manifestly unreal,aworldbasedonthesamesuspensionofthenormallawsofphysics one usually encounters only in one’s dreams. It is not often appreciated that Surrealism began as a literary movement; theterm“surrealist”wasfirstusedin1917bytheFrenchpoetApollinairein reference to his own drama, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, and also to the ballet Parade,producedbyDiaghilev,withmusicbyStravinskyandsetsbyPicasso. Thereafter, the term “surrealist” was taken up by other poets, including André Breton, the future “Pope” of Surrealism, and Paul Éluard, but Surrealism as a formal movement in art and literature did not emerge until the demiseofParisianDada,anearlieranarchicmovementborninresponseto the carnage of the First World War (2). In 1922, Breton, already disillusioned with the increasing academicism of Dada, formulated an aesthetic of the nonrational by utilizing the technique of “automatic writing.” Pure psychic automatism was defined by Breton as “dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.” While originally designed for writing, this method ofcompositionwaslaterappliedbytheSurrealiststodrawing(ie,theexquisitecorpse)and,inmodifiedform,bytheAmericanAbstractExpressionists to painting. In the exercise known as the exquisite corpse, each participant at a party would add a line to a poem or a line to a drawing on a folded sheet of paper without seeing the contributions already made by their associates. By this method, an element of chance or randomness and coincidence
Towson University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA To whom correspondence should be addressed: Michael Salcman, M.D. [E-mail: [email protected]]
enteredthemakingofart.Breton’soriginalbandofartistsincludedPicabia, Man Ray, and Max Ernst. After meeting with his artists and writers, Breton issued his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) and included the following statement in his formal definition: “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality [emphasis mine] of certain forms of association heretofore neglected,intheomnipotenceofthedream,andinthedisinterestedplayof thought.”ThoughstronglybasedonhisstudyofFreud,Breton’sideasdate back to a pair of nineteenth-century poets, both child prodigies: Isidore Ducasse, better known as the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont (18461870), and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Their work is suffused with the idea of revolt against convention and the implications of dreams, the subconscious, and chance. “Surrealism” literally means above or beyond reality. In Les Chants des Maldoror (1868), Isidore Ducasse famously described the beautyofaboyas“achancemeetingonadissectingtablebetweenasewing machine and an umbrella.” The first group exhibition of Surrealist artists occurred in 1925 at the Galerie Pierre in Paris; the roster included Jean Arp, de Chirico, Ernst, Klee, ManRay,Masson,Miró,andPicasso.Forthenext20years,Surrealismwas the most influential art movement, until the advent of Abstract Expressionism, itself impossible without the example of its predecessor. In 1925, Yves Tanguyjoinedthegroup,andaSurrealistgallerywasfoundedin1927when Marcel Duchamp and Picabia also exhibited with them. Later that year, the Belgian René Magritte joined. The first generation of Surrealist artists was notcompleteduntil1929whenitsfinalmember,SalvadorDalí(1904-1989), visited Paris for the first time. He was also probably the first artist “excommunicated” by Breton and thrown out of the group (1934). Dalí’s father,astrictdisciplinarian,wasamiddleclasslawyerandnotary;hismother a housewife who tempered her husband’s approach and encouraged her son’s artistic tendencies. Dalí was born in Figueras, a Catalonian town on the French-Spanish border, not far from Barcelona, and summered on the beach at Cadaqués. Nine months before his birth, the artist’s older brother died of gastroenteritis; the parents took five-year-old Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí Domènech to his brother’s grave and told him he was the reincarnation of his brother! Out of such humble beginnings and mysterious circumstances came an artistic career of considerable achievement and greatcontroversy,becauseDalíbecamenotonlyapioneeringSurrealistbut also a master of modern media, a self-promoter, a man who cultivated
Journal homepage: www.WORLDNEUROSURGERY.org Available online: www.sciencedirect.com 1878-8750/$ - see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Citation: World Neurosurg. (2011) 76, 5:364-367. DOI: 10.1016/j.wneu.2011.07.025
364
www.SCIENCEDIRECT.com
WORLD NEUROSURGERY, DOI:10.1016/j.wneu.2011.07.025
COVER COMMENT MICHAEL SALCMAN
Figure 1. Dali Atomicus. Creator: Halsman, Philippe, photographer. Date Created/Published: c1948. Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-09633 (digital file from original photograph). Call Number: PH - Halsman (P.), no.
eccentricity and exhibitionism, who offered up his own persona, bizarre behavior, and unique appearance as his greatest work of art. Dalí’s most important influences included the Catalan countryside, a rich cultural environment that had previously nurtured Miró, Picasso, and Gaudí, his violent temperament filled with ecstasy, fantasy, terror, and megalomania, and his love of nineteenth-century academic realist painters suchasMillet,Böcklin,andthemeticulousErnestMeissonier.Unlikemost advancedpainters,suchasPicassoandMatisse,Dalístudiedbutdidnotfall in love with the Impressionists or their successors, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Seurat. He entered Madrid’s conservative Academy of Fine Arts in 1921 and spent the rest of the decade discovering de Chirico, Carrá, Picasso, and Freud. It should be noted that most of his artistic models, de Chirico and Picasso excepted, were not of the first rank. From the beginning, his draftsmanship was greatly admired. At the Academia, he became friends with Luis Buñuel and the great Surrealist poet Federico Garcia Lorca,awould-belover,andwasexpelledin1926forincitingotherstudents to rebel. Between 1925 and 1927, Dalí worked his way through the Cubism
WORLD NEUROSURGERY 76 [5]: 364-367, NOVEMBER 2011
PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
14 (AA size) [P&P] Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., USA.
of Picasso and Gris, the decorative and derivative Purism of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, the Neoclassicism of Picasso, and a precise realism derived from Vermeer and other Dutch masters. During his first visit to Paris in 1929, Dalí was introduced to the Surrealist circle by his countryman Miró and fell in love with Gala Éluard, the wife of the poet and a Russian immigrant 10 years his senior. They married in 1934. Gala would prove to be a majorinfluenceonDalí’sartisticcareer,hisfinancialarrangements,andhis lifestyle. During this time he elaborated a Freudian theory of his artistic practice called the “paranoic-critical,” a method of creating a “visionary reality from elements of visions, dreams, memories, and psychological or pathological distortions” (2). This, combined with his meticulous, miniaturized realism and luminous colors, created a dreamscape that seemed more real than the natural world; he called his paintings “hand-painted dream photographs.” Dalí learned that “realism, pressed to an extreme of detail, could subvert one’s sense of reality” (4). Although his paintings are often filled with everyday (frequently fetishistic) objects, such as ants, watches, telephones, pianos, and old prints, Dalí declared his main inspi-
www.WORLDNEUROSURGERY.org
365
COVER COMMENT MICHAEL SALCMAN
Figure 2. Dalí, Salvador (1904-1989) © ARS, NY. The Persistence of Memory. 1931. Oil on canvas, 9½ ⫻ 13⬙ (24.1 ⫻ 33 cm). Given anonymously. © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/Artists Rights
rations to be blood, decay, and excrement. In his art, Dalí’s objects are subjectedtoaseriesofmetamorphicchangesleadingtoanightmarevision. The process of transformation is most clearly visible in two path-breaking Surrealist films Dalí made in collaboration with Luis Buñuel, Un chien andalou(AnAndalusianDog,1929)andL’Aged’or(TheGoldenAge,1930).Later,Dalí created dream sequences for Walt Disney and for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1944). His first Surrealist paintings date from the year of Un chien andalou.TheAccommodationsofDesire(1929,MetropolitanMuseum),acollage inwhichthemutanteggsandrocksofanapocalypticlandscapegivebirthto fragmented lion heads, are attacked by ants, or contain miniature collections of all of the other objects at different magnifications, is especially brilliant; the lion heads represent the sexual anxiety of his affair with Gala. Soon thereafter, he began work on one of the most popular and widely known images of the twentieth century, The Persistence of Memory (Figure 2, 1931, Museum of Modern Art). Dalí’s iconic painting helped make him the very symbol of Surrealism in the public mind. It is an outstanding example of his general method: a concatenation of incompatible or unrelated dream-like objects placed in a synthetic landscape and used for symbolic purposes. The painting was shown at his first exhibition in America (1934)
366
www.SCIENCEDIRECT.com
PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
Society (ARS), New York. Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NYImage.
and caused an immediate sensation; Dalí came to the opening ball dressed inaglasscasecontainingabrassiere.UnlikeMiró,Dalísharedtheantipathy of most Surrealists to twentieth-century abstract and formalist art; in this sense, at least, he sympathized with the taste of the general public. The Persistence of Memory contains a litany of devices that deny the primacy of formal composition and abstraction. The small size of the painting (just over a foot wide) and its miniature realism go back to Flemish art of the fifteenth century; its sour greens and yellows echo the colors of nineteenthcenturychromolithographs.Inthispainting,asinmanyothers,Dalí’sphotographic realism is put in the service of a variety of ordinary objects subjected to distortions of scale and physical consistency: the hard is made soft (the infamous melting watches), the soft hard, the person’s profile on the ground, softened like a jellyfish thrown up on the shore, shares the scale of the cliffs in the distance. This profile is thought to be that of the artist, and the general flaccidity of the objects a commentary on sexual impotence. At Cape Creus, Dalí claimed to have seen a rock whose general shape was very similar to his head. The same profile in the same orientation was used in one of his earliest important large paintings, The Great Masturbator (1929, Madrid), and Dalí’s ants and other insects, previously seen crawling over a
WORLD NEUROSURGERY, DOI:10.1016/j.wneu.2011.07.025
COVER COMMENT MICHAEL SALCMAN
PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
hand in Un chien andalou and attacking an egg in The Accommodations (itself lessthanafootsquare)alsomaketheirreappearance(3).Heoftenusedants as a symbol of death or the female genitalia. In addition to the drooping watches seen at the edge of a shelf and on the rigid branch of a leafless olive tree,Dalídrapedapocketwatchoverthealmostbonelessheadofhisprofile with its protruding tongue and lifeless brush moustache; Dalí described these soft objects as “nothing more than the soft, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical Camembert cheese of space and time” (2). Unlike the Cubists and Futurists, artists passionately interested in new theories of space and time (5), the early Dalí could not have cared less about Einstein and modern physics; he painted The Persistence of Memory one night after dinner, having contemplated a real Camembert melting on the table! In spite of the facts of the case, Dalí’s melting watches soon became the most famous symbols of time’s newly discovered mutability; each of his three watches is stopped at a different time. Unlike Dalí’s cinematic achievements, Cubist art, or Picasso’s metal Guitar (c. 1914), the painting does not inscribe the sensation of time into its own structure. Throughout the 1930s, Dalí remained an inventive and disturbing artist. Almost all of his most important work was completed by 1939, when he turned 35 years of age (4). In a de Chirico-like painting about predatory female sexuality, he placed portraits of Gala, Millet, and Lenin in box-like spaces (1933, Ottawa); and in a truly frightening landscape, he painted premonitions of the Spanish Civil War (1936, Philadelphia). But Dalí was always looking out for himself, and his condemnation of Fascism was not consistently universal; in 1934, he broke with the other Surrealists when he failed to condemn Hitler—Dalí was subjected to a “trial” and expelled. In 1936, he showed up in London for a lecture he was to deliver dressed in a deep-sea diving suit and helmet; he almost passed out from lack of oxygen. After1940,likemanyEuropeanartists,DalíspentagoodpartoftheSecond World War in the United States where he made society portraits and turned to the design of jewelry and theatrical sets and costumes. In The Poetry of America (1943, Figueras), painted in Monterey, California, Dalí was one of thefirstartiststometiculouslydepictaCoca-Colabottleandmakereference to American football and race relations (3). Not long after, he and Gala announced his desire to become a “classic” by painting like Raphael, and so, after returning to Spain in 1948, his work became increasingly devoted to Christian imagery. An example of a painting from this period, RaphaelesqueHeadExploding(1951),isdiscussedinmypreviousarticleabouttheartist (6); the first paragraph of the essay was recently reprinted in an online blog under the heading of “Neurosurgeon/Poet Slices Up Dali” (1). But I am not theonlyone;asmanyothershavenoted,Dalí’slifeandmannersbecameso completelySurrealistthathisintegrityandpictorialaccomplishmentscame under serious question. Dalí liked to point out that “the difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.” After 1950, he chose to live in Catalonia, despite the fact that it was run by Franco. Dalí is infamous for a
REFERENCES
greed that helped to ruin his own posthumous print market and make life impossible for scholars of his work. Sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, Dalí begansigning(foralargefee)hisauthenticsignaturetostacksofblankprint paper upon which photographic copies of paintings were later printed without his involvement or supervision. None of these works can be consideredoriginalworksofart,unlikehisastoundingetchingsforLesChantsde Maldoror(1933-1934),buttheydocarryhisrealsignature—perhapstheonly occasion in art history when an important painter signed ahead of time printed fakes that he never saw! No wonder that André Breton was led to coin from Dali’s name the most notorious anagram in the history of art, Salvador Dalí ⫽ Avida Dollars (in French, avide à dollars or “eager for dollars”,1939).SomeSurrealistsbegantospeakofhiminthepasttense,as if he were dead. As his paintings became more monumental in scale, their interest and power emptied out. A more hagiographic view of his late work is available in a study by a member of his inner circle (3). In his later years, Dalí became the world’s most famous recluse, experimented with holography, and made some truly terrible bronze sculptures. He became fascinated by science and mathematics, basing some of his paintings on the hypercube (four dimensions) and rhinoceros horn. He participated in exorcisms and developed a neurological disorder from the medicinal cocktails that Gala administered to him. After Gala’s death in 1982, Dalí lost much of his will to live. He had already stopped creating art after he developed a tremor in 1980. Eventually, Dalí became the very definition of a celebrity, a man famous for being famous. As I have said elsewhere, before there was Warhol, there was Dalí, a luxury-mad publicity hound, a man who lived long enough to see his almost conceptual lifestyle become the template for today’s most widely traded luminaries of the art world: Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami. Warhol freely acknowledgedtheimpactofDalí’slifeandworkonthedevelopmentofPop Art.Somehow,throughallthevicissitudesofhiscareerandreputation,Dalí neverlosttheessentialconnectiontohisnativeCatalonia;heisburiedinhis own Teatro-Museo Dalí, a monument he built across the street from the church in which he was baptized, three blocks from the house in Figueras where he was born. Dalí’s worldwide popularity and commercial success, his outrageous behavior and dress, his involvement in film and photography, his deft mix of the serious in art and the frivolous in life, his indeterminate sexuality, and camp lifestyle point well beyond early Surrealism and deep into the Post-Modernism of contemporary life. He and his moustaches are simply unforgettable, and at least one of his paintings, The Persistence of Memory, has the perfection of poetry. In it, Dalí makes us feel the capricious power of recollection, how our memories are bound to seeminglyirrationalcuesandstimuli,andhowourmemoriessurfacedream-like from the deepest parts of our subconscious, just as Proust had described in the opening pages of his great novel.
3. Descharnes R: Dali. New York: Abradale (Abrams); 1993: 26,136–137.
1. Abrahams M: Improbable research. Neurosurgeon/ poet slices up Dali. Available at: http://improbable. com/2011/04/01/neurosurgeonpoet-slices-up-dali/. Accessed July 8, 2011.
4. Hughes R: The Shock of The New, revised edition. New York: Knopf; 1991:237–241.
2. Arnason HH, Prather MF: History of Modern Art, 4th ed. New York: Abrams; 1998:306-307, 317-320.
6. Salcman M: Raphaelesque Head Exploding, Salvador Dali. Neurosurgery 38:225, 1996.
5. Salcman M: Guitar (c.1914) by Pablo Picasso. Neurosurgery 69:235-237, 2011.
WORLD NEUROSURGERY 76 [5]: 364-367, NOVEMBER 2011
Citation: World Neurosurg. (2011) 76, 5:364-367. DOI: 10.1016/j.wneu.2011.07.025 Journal homepage: www.WORLDNEUROSURGERY.org Available online: www.sciencedirect.com 1878-8750/$ - see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
www.WORLDNEUROSURGERY.org
367
Michael Salcman, M.D. Special Lecturer, Osher Institute Towson University
The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) Michael Salcman
A
lmost everything you need to know about him is in that celebrity shot—one of the most famous photographs of the 1940s: he is painting inside an empty frame, cats and spilled pitchers of water flying through the air, the easel, a chair, the maestro and his moustaches having leapt off the ground, and the supporting wires for all this “magic” pre-digitally erased by Philippe Halsman, a great fashion photographer of thetime.IntheunretouchedversionofthephotographaspublishedinLIFE magazine, you can see an assistant’s hand holding up the chair, a prop lifting up the footstool, and wires suspending the easel. Dali Atomicus (1948) (Figure 1) is a portrait of a man who was then the most famous living artist in the world; its strange conjunction of objects and actions the epitome of theSurrealistideal;itsconjunctionofartandcommerceandfashionatoxic combination that haunts the art world down to the present day. And because it is a photographic document endowed with supposed scientific veracity, its purpose is to make you believe in a reality that is manifestly unreal,aworldbasedonthesamesuspensionofthenormallawsofphysics one usually encounters only in one’s dreams. It is not often appreciated that Surrealism began as a literary movement; theterm“surrealist”wasfirstusedin1917bytheFrenchpoetApollinairein reference to his own drama, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, and also to the ballet Parade,producedbyDiaghilev,withmusicbyStravinskyandsetsbyPicasso. Thereafter, the term “surrealist” was taken up by other poets, including André Breton, the future “Pope” of Surrealism, and Paul Éluard, but Surrealism as a formal movement in art and literature did not emerge until the demiseofParisianDada,anearlieranarchicmovementborninresponseto the carnage of the First World War (2). In 1922, Breton, already disillusioned with the increasing academicism of Dada, formulated an aesthetic of the nonrational by utilizing the technique of “automatic writing.” Pure psychic automatism was defined by Breton as “dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.” While originally designed for writing, this method ofcompositionwaslaterappliedbytheSurrealiststodrawing(ie,theexquisitecorpse)and,inmodifiedform,bytheAmericanAbstractExpressionists to painting. In the exercise known as the exquisite corpse, each participant at a party would add a line to a poem or a line to a drawing on a folded sheet of paper without seeing the contributions already made by their associates. By this method, an element of chance or randomness and coincidence
Towson University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA To whom correspondence should be addressed: Michael Salcman, M.D. [E-mail: [email protected]]
enteredthemakingofart.Breton’soriginalbandofartistsincludedPicabia, Man Ray, and Max Ernst. After meeting with his artists and writers, Breton issued his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) and included the following statement in his formal definition: “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality [emphasis mine] of certain forms of association heretofore neglected,intheomnipotenceofthedream,andinthedisinterestedplayof thought.”ThoughstronglybasedonhisstudyofFreud,Breton’sideasdate back to a pair of nineteenth-century poets, both child prodigies: Isidore Ducasse, better known as the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont (18461870), and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Their work is suffused with the idea of revolt against convention and the implications of dreams, the subconscious, and chance. “Surrealism” literally means above or beyond reality. In Les Chants des Maldoror (1868), Isidore Ducasse famously described the beautyofaboyas“achancemeetingonadissectingtablebetweenasewing machine and an umbrella.” The first group exhibition of Surrealist artists occurred in 1925 at the Galerie Pierre in Paris; the roster included Jean Arp, de Chirico, Ernst, Klee, ManRay,Masson,Miró,andPicasso.Forthenext20years,Surrealismwas the most influential art movement, until the advent of Abstract Expressionism, itself impossible without the example of its predecessor. In 1925, Yves Tanguyjoinedthegroup,andaSurrealistgallerywasfoundedin1927when Marcel Duchamp and Picabia also exhibited with them. Later that year, the Belgian René Magritte joined. The first generation of Surrealist artists was notcompleteduntil1929whenitsfinalmember,SalvadorDalí(1904-1989), visited Paris for the first time. He was also probably the first artist “excommunicated” by Breton and thrown out of the group (1934). Dalí’s father,astrictdisciplinarian,wasamiddleclasslawyerandnotary;hismother a housewife who tempered her husband’s approach and encouraged her son’s artistic tendencies. Dalí was born in Figueras, a Catalonian town on the French-Spanish border, not far from Barcelona, and summered on the beach at Cadaqués. Nine months before his birth, the artist’s older brother died of gastroenteritis; the parents took five-year-old Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí Domènech to his brother’s grave and told him he was the reincarnation of his brother! Out of such humble beginnings and mysterious circumstances came an artistic career of considerable achievement and greatcontroversy,becauseDalíbecamenotonlyapioneeringSurrealistbut also a master of modern media, a self-promoter, a man who cultivated
Journal homepage: www.WORLDNEUROSURGERY.org Available online: www.sciencedirect.com 1878-8750/$ - see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Citation: World Neurosurg. (2011) 76, 5:364-367. DOI: 10.1016/j.wneu.2011.07.025
364
www.SCIENCEDIRECT.com
WORLD NEUROSURGERY, DOI:10.1016/j.wneu.2011.07.025
COVER COMMENT MICHAEL SALCMAN
Figure 1. Dali Atomicus. Creator: Halsman, Philippe, photographer. Date Created/Published: c1948. Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-09633 (digital file from original photograph). Call Number: PH - Halsman (P.), no.
eccentricity and exhibitionism, who offered up his own persona, bizarre behavior, and unique appearance as his greatest work of art. Dalí’s most important influences included the Catalan countryside, a rich cultural environment that had previously nurtured Miró, Picasso, and Gaudí, his violent temperament filled with ecstasy, fantasy, terror, and megalomania, and his love of nineteenth-century academic realist painters suchasMillet,Böcklin,andthemeticulousErnestMeissonier.Unlikemost advancedpainters,suchasPicassoandMatisse,Dalístudiedbutdidnotfall in love with the Impressionists or their successors, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Seurat. He entered Madrid’s conservative Academy of Fine Arts in 1921 and spent the rest of the decade discovering de Chirico, Carrá, Picasso, and Freud. It should be noted that most of his artistic models, de Chirico and Picasso excepted, were not of the first rank. From the beginning, his draftsmanship was greatly admired. At the Academia, he became friends with Luis Buñuel and the great Surrealist poet Federico Garcia Lorca,awould-belover,andwasexpelledin1926forincitingotherstudents to rebel. Between 1925 and 1927, Dalí worked his way through the Cubism
WORLD NEUROSURGERY 76 [5]: 364-367, NOVEMBER 2011
PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
14 (AA size) [P&P] Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., USA.
of Picasso and Gris, the decorative and derivative Purism of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, the Neoclassicism of Picasso, and a precise realism derived from Vermeer and other Dutch masters. During his first visit to Paris in 1929, Dalí was introduced to the Surrealist circle by his countryman Miró and fell in love with Gala Éluard, the wife of the poet and a Russian immigrant 10 years his senior. They married in 1934. Gala would prove to be a majorinfluenceonDalí’sartisticcareer,hisfinancialarrangements,andhis lifestyle. During this time he elaborated a Freudian theory of his artistic practice called the “paranoic-critical,” a method of creating a “visionary reality from elements of visions, dreams, memories, and psychological or pathological distortions” (2). This, combined with his meticulous, miniaturized realism and luminous colors, created a dreamscape that seemed more real than the natural world; he called his paintings “hand-painted dream photographs.” Dalí learned that “realism, pressed to an extreme of detail, could subvert one’s sense of reality” (4). Although his paintings are often filled with everyday (frequently fetishistic) objects, such as ants, watches, telephones, pianos, and old prints, Dalí declared his main inspi-
www.WORLDNEUROSURGERY.org
365
COVER COMMENT MICHAEL SALCMAN
Figure 2. Dalí, Salvador (1904-1989) © ARS, NY. The Persistence of Memory. 1931. Oil on canvas, 9½ ⫻ 13⬙ (24.1 ⫻ 33 cm). Given anonymously. © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/Artists Rights
rations to be blood, decay, and excrement. In his art, Dalí’s objects are subjectedtoaseriesofmetamorphicchangesleadingtoanightmarevision. The process of transformation is most clearly visible in two path-breaking Surrealist films Dalí made in collaboration with Luis Buñuel, Un chien andalou(AnAndalusianDog,1929)andL’Aged’or(TheGoldenAge,1930).Later,Dalí created dream sequences for Walt Disney and for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1944). His first Surrealist paintings date from the year of Un chien andalou.TheAccommodationsofDesire(1929,MetropolitanMuseum),acollage inwhichthemutanteggsandrocksofanapocalypticlandscapegivebirthto fragmented lion heads, are attacked by ants, or contain miniature collections of all of the other objects at different magnifications, is especially brilliant; the lion heads represent the sexual anxiety of his affair with Gala. Soon thereafter, he began work on one of the most popular and widely known images of the twentieth century, The Persistence of Memory (Figure 2, 1931, Museum of Modern Art). Dalí’s iconic painting helped make him the very symbol of Surrealism in the public mind. It is an outstanding example of his general method: a concatenation of incompatible or unrelated dream-like objects placed in a synthetic landscape and used for symbolic purposes. The painting was shown at his first exhibition in America (1934)
366
www.SCIENCEDIRECT.com
PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
Society (ARS), New York. Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NYImage.
and caused an immediate sensation; Dalí came to the opening ball dressed inaglasscasecontainingabrassiere.UnlikeMiró,Dalísharedtheantipathy of most Surrealists to twentieth-century abstract and formalist art; in this sense, at least, he sympathized with the taste of the general public. The Persistence of Memory contains a litany of devices that deny the primacy of formal composition and abstraction. The small size of the painting (just over a foot wide) and its miniature realism go back to Flemish art of the fifteenth century; its sour greens and yellows echo the colors of nineteenthcenturychromolithographs.Inthispainting,asinmanyothers,Dalí’sphotographic realism is put in the service of a variety of ordinary objects subjected to distortions of scale and physical consistency: the hard is made soft (the infamous melting watches), the soft hard, the person’s profile on the ground, softened like a jellyfish thrown up on the shore, shares the scale of the cliffs in the distance. This profile is thought to be that of the artist, and the general flaccidity of the objects a commentary on sexual impotence. At Cape Creus, Dalí claimed to have seen a rock whose general shape was very similar to his head. The same profile in the same orientation was used in one of his earliest important large paintings, The Great Masturbator (1929, Madrid), and Dalí’s ants and other insects, previously seen crawling over a
WORLD NEUROSURGERY, DOI:10.1016/j.wneu.2011.07.025
COVER COMMENT MICHAEL SALCMAN
PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
hand in Un chien andalou and attacking an egg in The Accommodations (itself lessthanafootsquare)alsomaketheirreappearance(3).Heoftenusedants as a symbol of death or the female genitalia. In addition to the drooping watches seen at the edge of a shelf and on the rigid branch of a leafless olive tree,Dalídrapedapocketwatchoverthealmostbonelessheadofhisprofile with its protruding tongue and lifeless brush moustache; Dalí described these soft objects as “nothing more than the soft, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical Camembert cheese of space and time” (2). Unlike the Cubists and Futurists, artists passionately interested in new theories of space and time (5), the early Dalí could not have cared less about Einstein and modern physics; he painted The Persistence of Memory one night after dinner, having contemplated a real Camembert melting on the table! In spite of the facts of the case, Dalí’s melting watches soon became the most famous symbols of time’s newly discovered mutability; each of his three watches is stopped at a different time. Unlike Dalí’s cinematic achievements, Cubist art, or Picasso’s metal Guitar (c. 1914), the painting does not inscribe the sensation of time into its own structure. Throughout the 1930s, Dalí remained an inventive and disturbing artist. Almost all of his most important work was completed by 1939, when he turned 35 years of age (4). In a de Chirico-like painting about predatory female sexuality, he placed portraits of Gala, Millet, and Lenin in box-like spaces (1933, Ottawa); and in a truly frightening landscape, he painted premonitions of the Spanish Civil War (1936, Philadelphia). But Dalí was always looking out for himself, and his condemnation of Fascism was not consistently universal; in 1934, he broke with the other Surrealists when he failed to condemn Hitler—Dalí was subjected to a “trial” and expelled. In 1936, he showed up in London for a lecture he was to deliver dressed in a deep-sea diving suit and helmet; he almost passed out from lack of oxygen. After1940,likemanyEuropeanartists,DalíspentagoodpartoftheSecond World War in the United States where he made society portraits and turned to the design of jewelry and theatrical sets and costumes. In The Poetry of America (1943, Figueras), painted in Monterey, California, Dalí was one of thefirstartiststometiculouslydepictaCoca-Colabottleandmakereference to American football and race relations (3). Not long after, he and Gala announced his desire to become a “classic” by painting like Raphael, and so, after returning to Spain in 1948, his work became increasingly devoted to Christian imagery. An example of a painting from this period, RaphaelesqueHeadExploding(1951),isdiscussedinmypreviousarticleabouttheartist (6); the first paragraph of the essay was recently reprinted in an online blog under the heading of “Neurosurgeon/Poet Slices Up Dali” (1). But I am not theonlyone;asmanyothershavenoted,Dalí’slifeandmannersbecameso completelySurrealistthathisintegrityandpictorialaccomplishmentscame under serious question. Dalí liked to point out that “the difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.” After 1950, he chose to live in Catalonia, despite the fact that it was run by Franco. Dalí is infamous for a
REFERENCES
greed that helped to ruin his own posthumous print market and make life impossible for scholars of his work. Sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, Dalí begansigning(foralargefee)hisauthenticsignaturetostacksofblankprint paper upon which photographic copies of paintings were later printed without his involvement or supervision. None of these works can be consideredoriginalworksofart,unlikehisastoundingetchingsforLesChantsde Maldoror(1933-1934),buttheydocarryhisrealsignature—perhapstheonly occasion in art history when an important painter signed ahead of time printed fakes that he never saw! No wonder that André Breton was led to coin from Dali’s name the most notorious anagram in the history of art, Salvador Dalí ⫽ Avida Dollars (in French, avide à dollars or “eager for dollars”,1939).SomeSurrealistsbegantospeakofhiminthepasttense,as if he were dead. As his paintings became more monumental in scale, their interest and power emptied out. A more hagiographic view of his late work is available in a study by a member of his inner circle (3). In his later years, Dalí became the world’s most famous recluse, experimented with holography, and made some truly terrible bronze sculptures. He became fascinated by science and mathematics, basing some of his paintings on the hypercube (four dimensions) and rhinoceros horn. He participated in exorcisms and developed a neurological disorder from the medicinal cocktails that Gala administered to him. After Gala’s death in 1982, Dalí lost much of his will to live. He had already stopped creating art after he developed a tremor in 1980. Eventually, Dalí became the very definition of a celebrity, a man famous for being famous. As I have said elsewhere, before there was Warhol, there was Dalí, a luxury-mad publicity hound, a man who lived long enough to see his almost conceptual lifestyle become the template for today’s most widely traded luminaries of the art world: Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami. Warhol freely acknowledgedtheimpactofDalí’slifeandworkonthedevelopmentofPop Art.Somehow,throughallthevicissitudesofhiscareerandreputation,Dalí neverlosttheessentialconnectiontohisnativeCatalonia;heisburiedinhis own Teatro-Museo Dalí, a monument he built across the street from the church in which he was baptized, three blocks from the house in Figueras where he was born. Dalí’s worldwide popularity and commercial success, his outrageous behavior and dress, his involvement in film and photography, his deft mix of the serious in art and the frivolous in life, his indeterminate sexuality, and camp lifestyle point well beyond early Surrealism and deep into the Post-Modernism of contemporary life. He and his moustaches are simply unforgettable, and at least one of his paintings, The Persistence of Memory, has the perfection of poetry. In it, Dalí makes us feel the capricious power of recollection, how our memories are bound to seeminglyirrationalcuesandstimuli,andhowourmemoriessurfacedream-like from the deepest parts of our subconscious, just as Proust had described in the opening pages of his great novel.
3. Descharnes R: Dali. New York: Abradale (Abrams); 1993: 26,136–137.
1. Abrahams M: Improbable research. Neurosurgeon/ poet slices up Dali. Available at: http://improbable. com/2011/04/01/neurosurgeonpoet-slices-up-dali/. Accessed July 8, 2011.
4. Hughes R: The Shock of The New, revised edition. New York: Knopf; 1991:237–241.
2. Arnason HH, Prather MF: History of Modern Art, 4th ed. New York: Abrams; 1998:306-307, 317-320.
6. Salcman M: Raphaelesque Head Exploding, Salvador Dali. Neurosurgery 38:225, 1996.
5. Salcman M: Guitar (c.1914) by Pablo Picasso. Neurosurgery 69:235-237, 2011.
WORLD NEUROSURGERY 76 [5]: 364-367, NOVEMBER 2011
Citation: World Neurosurg. (2011) 76, 5:364-367. DOI: 10.1016/j.wneu.2011.07.025 Journal homepage: www.WORLDNEUROSURGERY.org Available online: www.sciencedirect.com 1878-8750/$ - see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
www.WORLDNEUROSURGERY.org
367