by admin » Tue Dec 11, 2018 5:17 am
The road through Dali's memory
The road on which we are now about to set out is a symbolic itinerary. The territory it crosses is that of the Museum-Theatre of Figueres, a region over which Dali has deposited down through the years all his basic artistic and psychological experiences, rather as though they were the alluvial sediments left by a great river at its mouth.
The first thing that attracts our attention -- before we have even begun our tour, at milestone zero as it were is the sculpture that stands, all alone, in front of the Museum-Theatre. It stands precisely between the Theatre and the Church. And this church, as a matter of fact, is the parish church of Figueres, in which Salvador Dali was christened with a name that, for the artist himself, was to represent a whole programme of 'salvation of art.' For Dali, once he had properly digested the avant-garde experience and gradually begun to .settle into his own work and the memory of history, set his sights on 'the perenniality of the acanthus' and committed himself to the quixotic enterprise of saving art from the impoverishment, trivialization and primitivism into which it had been cast by the constant rush and other circumstances of this age of the masses which is the 20th century.
The sculpture with which our itinerary begins, stands in a no-man's-land, in the smooth public space between the two great dramatic scenographies of Time. It is a hieroglyphic figure which announces the Theatre and, with the empty eyes of its ovoid head, gazes meditatively at the Church.
Its body is formed from an ancient olive tree with a twisted trunk, like entrails or like the dragons that guard the underworld. The breast of the sculpture is outlined by little figures in relief representing the men of the people; and protruding as its heart -- a heart out in the open -- we see the head of a Roman patrician. Above it is that of the Emporda philosopher Francesc Pujols.
On the back, in the penumbra of the collar bone, smiles the remote countenance of Ramon Uull, a blend of algebra and mysticism, of combinatorial rotation and ascent by the ladder of being. (Is not the olive the Uullian tree of the species?).
The Figure is in the symbolic posture of Melancholy, the temperament of the philosopher and of the man who remembers, the saturnine humour of speculation and reminiscence. Its powerful hand strokes the head, or egg, from which all comes forth.
And now our eyes can inspect the facade of the Theatre. In the centre a Diver, with the diving-suitlantern as a celestial vault or Neptunian dome. This idea of penetration and immersion is repeated and multiplied by the female figures on the balconies accompanying the Diver. They are women whose torsos and bemes are pierced with amoeba-shaped holes: dematerialization of the body in pure space and energy. Giulio Camillo called his Theatre of Memory 'a soul with windows.' The figures in the Theatre of Figueres are bodies that open like windows, that become windows.
While the Diver represents the visitor who will be plunging into the abyssal spaces of the Museum-Theatre, the female Figures are the space itself, the multiplied and penetrated place itself. The long loaves of bread that they bear on their heads (a motif that is as important in Dali's painting as that of the perforations) open and satiate the appetite: bread is matter and communion. They are leaning on crutches (another essential motif in Dali's work) which should be seen as 'crutches of that reality thanks to which they remain, in away, suspended above the earth during sleep.' Like the Pythagorean Y, which, according to Dali, expresses 'the mystery of bifurcation', about these crutches our painter from Figueres has said: 'And ever since then (he is referring to a childhood experience) that anonymous crutch has been for me, and will always be till the end of my days, the symbol of death and the symbol of resurrection.'
Above the Diver and the female Figures stretches the series of suits of armour, with their allusion to external appearance, to the skin as carapace, to exhibition -- an armed exhibition of strength, for the Museum-Theatre is also a set of exhibitions, in which is represented that which is frequently inhibited in the spirit.
Above this again -- in the serrated outline of the facade -- there are figures waving a greeting, welcoming us.
The vehicle for our itinerary is parked in the Patio-Garden. Its interior is watered with secret rains. It is the intestinal lust of the jungles and the ocean depths. I call it a 'hepatic vehicle,' because the liver -- the pictorial viscus par excellence, which gives the eyes a golden tinge constitutes the roots· of the human plant, the seat of dreams. On the bonnet of the car rises the opulent, colossal figure of Mnemosine-Ester, the goddess of profound memory. Mnemosine has her arms open and is gazing at a figure without a body, a figure which is only clothing, placed at the middle window of the hemicycle (in front of the stage). This figure's dress is made up of miniature patches or squares of memory. Its being is nothing but externals. Its being is only appearing. The Dress-figure is flanked by two Chain- figures, which personify the practice of connecting or linking the different places in the Theatre of Memory. The Renaissance philosopher and mnemonicist Giordano Bruno recommended this practice, and added that all magic is condensed in the art of establishing links.
Crowning the Patio-Garden there is a frieze of twenty-five washbasins: attestation for an attentive and well- attended act of purification.
What drama is performed in Dali's Theatre of Memory? What mystery is celebrated there? The great backdrop to the stage is sufficiently explicit. It represents the bust of a man. In his breast there is a heavy open door, of Mycenaean or Egyptian appearance. This figure, with its sorrowfully drooping head, resembles the one that the artist used, in his illustrations for Dante's Divina Commedia, to represent the logical Demon (Canto XXVII of the Inferno). But in the Theatre of Figueres a certain dreaminess has softened the figure of that infernal character who, like the Greek god of Time, crushed human limbs between his jaws.
What does one enter by this heavy door of the backdrop? One enters the interior of an Island. The Island is a Garden. The Garden is a Labyrinth. Sharp-edged cliffs separate this intimate place, this Backlinian island, from the ocean swell, from the continuous attacks that come from outside, while long lines of cypresses pierce the night sky with their lugubrious lances. This drama of solitude, drama of isolation, is modulated by the remaining images that can be seen on the stage: bullrings, in which the audience is a heap of skulls -- the animal is sacrificed and carried off on a grand piano, followed by a train of prelates, mitres and night-flying birds. Bullrings as the frame for the double image of Venus and the Matador.
There we can see the valiant knight, Sir Roger, with his long, sharp sword, killing the dragon who has carried off the fair Angelica. There, too, we can see, on an altar, a soft Christ crucified. The stage of the Museum-Theatre is the arena, altar or grotto where the passion and death of Appearance are performed. The crystal cupola that covers this space (seen from the patio, it reflects the tower of the church) proclaims through its shape -- a geodesic dome -- that the drama is taking place in 'The great theatre of the world.'
And now our tour takes us up to the First Floor. There we find: Newton, the pendulum. Velazquez, the ruff from the Maids of Honour. A female torso is transformed into a face. Perseus blends into Christ. Above all this, a self-portrait of Dali. On the opposite wall, a portrait of Gala. Under her, a little boy wearing a warlike helmet.
On the vaulted ceiling of this noble drawing-room, the Palace of the Air, a sky painted by Dali -- reminiscent of those created by the Jesuit painter of the Baroque age, Pozzo -- with some of his best-loved themes and memories. The hands of a man and a woman, Dali and Gala, are holding up this sky, this Palace of the Wind. Next to them, the bust of the 'Logical Demon,' wheels of triumphal chariots or Uullian combinations, Danaean showers of gold, the plain of the Emporda.
In a prominent position opposite the entrance door to this room hangs the painting that represents an ancient river-dweller. Beside the three great goddesses -- the Three Graces -- he pours the water from his inexhaustible pitcher. This is Time. On the other side of the partition on which this picture of Time hangs, in the room that gives on to the central balconies of the facade, complicated relationships are being woven around 'genetic imperialism.' There we see Dali's huge, heavy book, Dix recettes d'immortalite, with its interior multiplied in mirrors that take in the gilded fishbone-throne, which, equidistant from the two covers of the volume, ascends as though it were a staircase, with vertebrae for steps.
As though echoing this throne, on the other side of the room, there is the portrait of the King of Spain, Juan Carlos I, in naval uniform. He is surrounded by different images alluding to 'genetic imperialism': helicoidal towers arising out of the dream, like structures of deoxyribonucleic acid. Next to Jacob's ladder, the tree of Jesse, the genealogy of Christ and the motto Tetracedron abscisus vacuus. The common denominator of this room is immortality through genetic transmission and its imperial legislation.
Now we return to the apartment that is the Palace of the Wind. In the room on the left a great number of slippers have left their prints on the ceiling and the glass screen through which we can perceive a Wagnerian love scene. Prints of passion? Dangling from the ceiling of this room, like a serpent or a helicoid, is a string of teaspoons (Dali's favourite gnostic symbol), at the bottom of which a little female face smiles at us with an Art-Nouveau smile. Looking at this face is the molecular whirler of the atomic head, While in distraction, like the famous Thornery of the Island Garden in Aranjuez, a woman on the beach, painted by Bouguereau, extracts a thorn that has entered the sole of her foot. Image of distraction: the eye lets itself be submerged by the nonspatial point of the thorn. Distraction is the only experience that admits no reflection on itself.
In front of this room, and on the other side of the Palace of the Wind, we come to one of the key spaces in this Theatre of Memory of Dali, this Museum of Dali's memory. It is presided over by a tapestry representing The Persistence of Memory. The soft watches seem to be saying to us: This is the decisive moment, this is the Time of this Theatre. Only the soft endures. The hard does not last. The soft is time: the wave. 'As for the Witches, they must either be soft or not exist at all!' Dali has said. The soft watches hang in the picture like a couple of fried eggs. And fried eggs, in Dali's imagination, constitute the earliest of all memories of prenatal life, as well as being the expression of the incessant movement of the retinal phosphenes.
Let us pause for a moment in front of The Persistence of Memory, for -this work is connected .- like the cogwheels of a watch -- with the rest of the Museum-Theatre. The principal motif of the picture is a watch hanging flaccidly from the branch of a tree standing beside the sea in a sort of finis mundi; or land's end, a lonely landscape of cliff and shore. And the watch hanging from the tree has adopted the exact shape of a famous theme of legend that has been very frequently depicted in painting, above all in Spanish painting: I refer to the theme of the Golden Fleece. The soft watch hanging from the tree, then, is a metaphor of that Golden Fleece that Jason went in quest of with all those other great Greek heroes, the crew of the good ship Argo, when they set sail for Colchis, in the region of the rising sun.
The soft/hard semantic duality that constitutes the structural principle of the representation, is rather like an echo of another morphological duality: the hardness of the horn of the ram and the softness of his skin. As a metaphor of time, the Golden Fleece represents the sun rising in the sign of Aries -- the Ram of the zodiac and is tinged with heraldic eroticism, since the origin of the Order of Knighthood of the Golden Fleece, the supreme grand master of which is the King of Spain, is associated with the pubic hair of a maiden who took the fancy of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. The wool trade and the dewy fleece of Gideon round off the semantic constellation in which the Order of the Golden Fleece is situated.
In the same way as the dial of the watch, that instrument emblematic of royalty, the Golden Fleece, or ram's skin and wool, expresses superficiality in the pure state, the realm of pure appearance, without which painting would not exist.
The marine background of the picture is echoed by the great bed that we find in this room. It is in the form of an enormous shell supported by four dolphins, those warm-blooded aquatic mammals so highly esteemed by the Greeks, who saw in them the beings that reincarnated the souls of shipwrecked sailors.
The enigmatic theme of the sphinx appears in different elements in this room. In the corner beside the balcony the eye is caught by the skeleton of an anthropoid. Its bones are covered with gold leaf; they are Sublimated. Underneath the vertebrae, in the hollow of the breastbone, we see Bernini's head of St Teresa in ecstasy. In this ensemble Dali has endeavoured to harmonize contraries.
Quite recently Dali has hung a new picture here which completes the symbolic value of this room of The Persistence of Memory. It is a picture of some Uullian wheels, their rotation being achieved by means of the movement of the phosphenes provoked by an optical contrast of colours. With this picture, placed on top of a poster that represents Le visage de la chance, Dali is clearly affirming that his Museum-Theatre is a Theatre of Memory that revolves around itself like Ramon Llull's combinatorial wheels.
To the right of the stage there is a corner with scenography that constitutes a complicated reflection on the theme of the Golden Fleece. Hanging from the ceiling, above an elongated bone armchair with a figure reclining on it of which only the head can be seen, there are a great many buckets, of the type used for drawing water from a well. The theme of the fleece-watch is represented here by the ropes, cloths and draperies that descend in the typical curve of the catenoid. And on the wall we see the actual horns of a ram. Beneath them there is a sword, which is an allusion to the imperial function, to the civil power. The curve of the horns is repeated, in stylized form, in the moustaches of the warriors and in other motifs in this locus memoriae.
But let us continue our tour of the images in this Theatre. The polymorphic power of images may be observed in 'the face of Mae West which can be used as a drawing-room.' In this room the image becomes a place. The hair becomes draperies. The eyes, landscapes. The mouth, a sofa. The nose, a fireplace. Another instance of this polymorphism of the image, of its transformation into a place, can be found in the showcase devoted to the wheelbarrow in Millet's Angelus, the picture that was used by Dali as the motif for the initiation of his paranoiac-critical method.
Above Michelangelo's Moses, which is on the left of the stage, we can see an octopus, and above the octopus the threatening head of the rhinoceros (its horn is a characteristic example of a logarithmic curve, as frequently employed by Dali). Here once again we find the contrasting duality of soft/hard, terrestrial/aquatic, visible/invisible. At the feet of the Moses we see Ramon Llull's combinatorial wheels. Like Moses on the top of . Mount Sinai, Llull had his moment of illumination on the top of Mount Randa, in Majorca. From there the land all around looks like a vast revolving wheel.
And, exactly as though by Llullian wheels, the Theatre of Figueres is surrounded by three circular passages. One is called rue Trajan, the street of Trajanus -- thrice Janus .:...- that Spanish emperor who set out from Triana (Traiana) to conquer Rome and to create Rumania (the ancient Dacia). One of these circular corridors is presided over by a great picture by Antoni Pitxot entitled Allegory of Memory (it is also known by the name of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, doubtless because of the deep grotto depicted in it).
Three female figures, whose limbs are anamorphoses of rocks, stand out in the centre of the resounding grotto. They form the classic group of the Three Graces, a chorus in which the oneness of Venus is tripled. But their respective placing (one of the figures stands apart from the other two and is repeated in the back of the grotto and in the foreground) differs from the classical version, which expressed the three operations of Liberality -- give, receive, return -- or the Neo-Platonic trinities -- commented on by Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola -- of Beauty, Chastity and Pleasure (in Botticelli's Spring, for instance) or of Beauty, Love and Pleasure (as, for example, in the Medal of Pico della Mirandola). The figure that is repeated three times, and which is very clearly separated from the other two, undoubtedly symbolizes Memory. The key to Pitxot's interpretation may be found in Ramon Llull's Book of Contemplation, in which the three powers of the soul are embodied in three noble and beautiful young ladies. The great Majorcan philosopher describes their operations as follows:
'The first remembers what the second understands and the third desires; the second understands what the first remembers and the third desires; the third desires what the first remembers and the second understands.'
In Dali's Museum-Theatre there is a room, communicating with the stage, which is very properly known as the treasure, because it contains images which can be of assistance to the visitor on his mnemonic journey through the Theatre. Presiding over this room is the famous Bread-basket, which speaks to us of the nutritious character of the images exhibited in the Museum, and also of the communion of art.
It is true that the Museum-Theatre of Figueres, with its delirious flowerings, has much of the character of a hell, but it is a hell that has become aurified, transcendental, transfigured. To this it has come by the ways that explore the labyrinthine confines of consciousness and bring out into the light of day all that we keep hidden in the most secret corners of our psyches. The Theatre, therefore, is a work of publicity. A colossal window.
The pictures and images of the memory, however, prepare one to forget just as much as they help one to remember. What happens with these images is what happens with contraries that resolve their differences in unity: in the harmonized unity of opposites there is a serene comprehension that resembles memory in its presence, but resembles oblivion because the soul is soothed and calmed in an infinite absence.
But the Museum-Theatre is a place of transformations and one in transformation. One day it may be possible to specify the colours and frames of the loci memoriae. Another day may see the unwinding of a chain, or Ariadne's thread, that will link the places together and help anybody who is lost in space to find himself in time. On yet another day Phrygian caps may be distributed among the visitors, to teach them that the object and the goal of the journey through memory is the conquest of the Golden Fleece, the Soft Watch.
But Mnemosine-Ester still awaits us in the Patio-Garden-Stalls. The bonnet of the surrealist vehicle is pointing to the door, to the way out. The way out? Can one, then, go out of the place one is in?
The first thing we see is the collar bone of Melancholy, the head of Ramon Llull. Turning left, we go round the Museum, and we raise our eyes to the statue of Meissonier, the meticulous painter of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, with the wheelruts of the carts and the hoofprints of the horses on the snow. Meissonier is standing on dark pedestals formed- by tractor wheels. And one recalls the phrase one heard spoken by Dali himself, the day before this itinerary, in the shelter of the white-walled patio in Portlligat:
'The positrons, neutrons and protons must not be left out.'
'Of course they won't.'
Eatables
Man's most philosophical organs are his jaws. This sentence of Dali's is not a resume of the philosophy of Count Keyserling, according to which the driving force of human life and culture is to be found in hunger, but reveals one of the most profound bases of the artistic personality of Salvador Dali.
Perhaps it may not be altogether gratuitous to explain that in the Castilian language the words substancia ('substance') and medula ('marrow' or 'pith') are concepts that are just as valid for metaphysics as for gastronomy. The 'richness' of a broth is its substance, in the same way a, the substance, on the metaphysical plane, is what forms the ontological foundation of a being. Unamuno preferred to speak of the medulla or marrow of beings, as though he were talking about a Castilian stew, of the stock from which it is often said that it would 'revive a corpse.'
In Dali the eatable is frequently confused with the real. The most real is the most eatable. The most real is the richest -- food. His painting, therefore, has to be supremely eatable: the most substantial food, the most exquisite viands for the ravaged palates of the 20th century, in which he has endeavoured to infuse the salivary secretions of the Homeric banquets, those feasts that not infrequently included the roasting of whole herds of Mycenaean oxen.
Dali has told me that when he was still a child he saw all the objects of his consciousness as though they were sweets and all sweets as materialized objects of consciousness. Thus his first childhood ambition was to be a cook, from which he passed to the stage of wanting to be Napoleon. And so a synthesis of Dali might be that of a cook-Napoleon, that of an aesthetic glutton brought up among the unbending and imperial rigours of the Escorial. As a matter of fact, one of the 'thinking machines' invented by Dali is based on the idea of the 'eatable Napoleon,' in which, Dali himself says, 'I have given material form to those two essential phantoms of my childhood -- oral delirium of nutrition and dazzling spiritual imperialism.'
That is why Dali has not the slightest objection to declaring that fifty little glasses of warm milk hanging from a rocking chair have the same significance for him as the plump thighs of Napoleon.
It is, perhaps, in the astonishing illustrations that Dali did in the early nineteen-thirties for Les chants de Maldoror by Lautreamont that one may most overwhelmingly perceive this identification that Dali establishes between Napoleon and eatables; the identification, too, of our age with meat, with the carnality that makes one's mouth water, stimulates the secretion of the salivary glands and even arouses aggressiveness. According to Dali, the marrow of the bone, or medulla, possesses the value of truth, but ... , before that sublime moment of spirit-eatable is reached, what a singular and tenacious battle between the molars and the bone!
Viscera and bones, shreds of flesh and flayed muscles, limbs that have been chopped up or are slashing pieces out of themselves, fragments of physiognomies, transformations of facial features into concretions of bones or intestinal pulp, knives, scalpels and viscera-watches: all of these abound in the aforesaid illustrations by Dali to Les chants de Maldoror, in many aspects the key work of Dali's Surrealism in the thirties. In his preface to the exhibition of that work, at the Galerie des Quatre Chemins in 1934, Dali says:
'No image is capable of illustrating Lautreamont and Les chants de Maldoror in particular -- so "literally" or in such a delirious way as the one that was created some seventy years ago by the painter of the tragic, cannibalistic atavisms, the painter of the ancestral and terrifying encounters of sweet, soft, high-quality meats: I am referring to that immeasurably misunderstood painter, Jean-Francois Millet. Millet's tremendously famous Angelus is exactly what, to my mind, would be the equivalent in painting of the celebrated and sublime "Chance encounter. on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella" ... : the fork bites into that real and insubstantial meat that tilled land has been for man down through the ages; it sinks into it, I say, with that ravening intentionality of fertility peculiar to the delirious incisions of the scalpel, which, as everybody knows, in· the dissection of any corpse is only seeking secretly, on various pretexts of analysis, the synthetic, fertile, nutritious potato of death.'
In the same preface we also read: ' ... and not so much as a raw chop, taken as an average model of the eatable signs, has been placed on the table of the male, when the silhouette of Napoleon, "the starving man," is suddenly formed and drawn in the clouds on the horizon.' Between the cook and the starving man, between the creator of tastes and the recipient of 'savoury' experiences, we find the basic figure of Dali's personality, an oral figure on an imperial triclinium, sublimated in art.
In Dali's pictorial philosophy the eatable is broken down into different but interrelated phenomena: the mouth, the bread, the meat, the milk (as in the case of Vermeer's Maidservant Pouring Milk and the interest Dali has always shown in that work), the bones and the softness of the bones converted into meat and marrow, the act of chewing, often performed in Dali's paintings by a skull, which reveals the relationship between nourishment and death -- in other words, the mortality of the corporeal. Sometimes the terms nourishment-death- sex-aggressiveness are linked together, as is the case in the picture entitled Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano, in which the action of sodomizing is performed by the jaws of a skull.
The beloved mythical woman, so important if we are to understand the psychography of Dali, may take on the attributes of certain eatables. Thus, to a journalist who was surprised that the artist should have painted a portrait of his wife with two grilled chops balancing on her shoulder, Dali replied: 'I like chops and I like my wife; I see no reason why I should not paint them together.' A year after this episode, in the 1934 painting The Spectre of Sex-appeal, an enormous sausage, semicircular in shape, forms the upper portion of a female torso.
The two canvases that best synthesize the occult character of the eatable, which is what relates it to death, destruction and war, are the ones entitled Soft Construction with Cooked Beans (Premonition of the Spanish Civil War), painted in 1936,"and Cannibalism in Autumn; which was done in 1936-1937. In the first of these two pictures we see a dark, savage hand squeezing a dry nipple, while a tongue, like one of the soft watches, dangles from a fleshy excrescence, and there are beans at the feet of the figure -- or, rather, of the monstrous mechanism of flesh. In the other picture Dali has painted, with hallucinatory exactitude, a macabre banquet, well supplied with knives, forks and spoons, at which there is no lack of meat or fruit. The marvellous landscape that wraps the 'cannibal' figures in the soft golds of an autumn evening is a powerful contributory factor in giving the whole scene the unmistakable characteristics of a hallucinated reality.
Of particular importance in Dali's work for their plastic and symbolic values are two eatables, bread and fried eggs, and two kitchen utensils, the cup and the spoon.
We find the fried egg in several important works by Dali. In the 1937 Long Siphon it is matched, simultaneously, with the carapace of a turtle and a woman's breast. In Fried Egg without a Frying-pan, done in 1932, it appears as the sole motif of the picture, hanging from a string, which places it in morphological connection with motifs like that of the soft watches or that of the Coca-Cola bottle hanging from a string in the 1943 Poetry of America. In The Sublime Moment, painted in 1938, a couple of fried eggs like two bulging eyes appear on a plate under a telephone, another characteristic element in Dali's painting in the thirties (the telephone may sometimes be replaced by a lobster, and in Poetry of America it hangs from the Coca-Cola bottle, in a very evident example of 'reduplication of suspension,' a device Dali is very fond of using in his pictorial compositions).
For Dali the fried egg is undoubtedly the paradigm of all matter that is at once soft and consistent. A traditional symbol of birth and cosmogenesis, in Dali's painting it is also tinged with erotic suggestion. In the passage headed Intrauterine memories (Chapter II of The Secret Life of Salvador Dab) the artist explains the symbolic meaning and values the fried egg possesses at his deepest level of thought. He writes: 'The intrauterine paradise was the colour of hell, that is to say red, orange, yellow and bluish, the colour of flames, of fire; above all, it was soft, immobile, warm, symmetrical, double, sticky. Even as long ago as that, for me all pleasure or enchantment was in my eyes, and the most splendid, impressive sight of all was that of a couple of fried eggs in a frying-pan; that is probably the reason for the confusion and excitement I have felt throughout my life since then in the presence of this unfailingly hallucinatory image. The eggs that I saw before I was born -- fried in a pan, without a pan -- were magnificent, phosphorescent and very minutely detailed in the folds of their slightly bluish whites.'
It is no part of my intention, of course to ascertain whether Dali did not did not in fact have prenatal sensorial experiences which left traces in his memory, or even whether what he tells us is true or false. What really matters to us in the present instance is that the lines transcribed above provide us with the clue to the symbolic function performed by the fried egg in the imaginari universe of Dali, within the fundamental category of 'the eatable.'
Bread -- and particularly the loaf of bread -- is at the opposite pole of Dali's system of 'eatables.' It is the 'hard' counterpart of the 'soft' fried egg. 'Bread,' says Dali, 'is one of the oldest themes of fetichism and obsessions in my work; the first, in fact, and the one to which I have been most faithful.' The artist goes on to compare the bread-basket that he painted in 1926, when he was only twenty-one years old (in the interior of this basket we see, on one side, the bread cut into slices and, on the other, the crust or heel of the loaf) with the somewhat barer, more meticulous version done in 1945 (here the crust of the loaf clearly resembles the horn of a rhinoceros, a morphological structure much studied by Dali and one which he used a lot in his work, especially from the nineteen-forties onwards). And he says: 'By making a precise comparison between the two pictures, everybody can study in them the whole history of painting, from the linear enchantment of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism.'
In the picture entitled Two Pieces of Bread Expressing the Feeling of Love, painted at Arcachon in 1940, the central -- almost the only -- theme is, in fact, two hunks of bread and some crumbs. It is the 'hard' counterpart of the 1932 Fried Egg without a Frying-pan. Whereas in this picture of the fried egg what matters is the curving form, in the picture of the stale baked bread the most important morphological feature is the phenomenon of crumbling. In speaking about this picture in his Salvador Dali (1973), Robert Descharnes tells us that Marcel Duchamp, who was staying with the Dalis at the time, played an anecdotal part in the execution of this picture. 'Gala and he,' Dali told Descharnes, 'used to play chess every afternoon, while I concentrated on painting these slices of bread. I was trying to get a very smooth surface on which rough-textured crumbs alighted. Very often things would fall on the floor -- the pawns, for instance -- and one day, before they were put away in their box, one of the pawns was left standing in the middle of my model for a still life. After that they had to look for another pawn to go on with their game, for I had now used that one and didn't want it to be taken away.'
So it is thanks to this incident involving Duchamp that in the work we are now studying we see a chess pawn standing between the two hunks of bread, giving the painting a certain metaphysical air to add to the mystical corporeity of the bread itself and inevitably reminding us of the still lifes, at once symbolic and realistic, of painters like Silnchez Cotlin and Zurbaran.
Bread also makes an appearance, of course, in religious paintings by Dali, like his Last Supper and the Madonna of Portlligat, both painted in the nineteen-fifties. In these pictures the presence of the bread has a more clearly religious tone, but this must be superimposed on, or combined with, the meanings already referred to, the basic one being perhaps a way of regarding paint as a sort of flour that is baked, is browned, acquires consistency and serves both as food and for communion. As a metaphor of the pictorial operation, the fried egg represents the 'soft' stage, meaning the application of the oil to the canvas, while the bread turning into a stale hunk expresses the stage at which the oil dries and acquires consistency.
Other eatables characteristic of Dali's painting are cherries -- particularly cherries in a pair, a grouping that Dali connects with the peasant couple in Millet's Angelus, and which undoubtedly expresses to some extent 'the mystery of bifurcation,' like the crutch or the Pythagorean Y -- and clusters of grapes. The cluster of grapes, with its various morphological echoes, constitutes the central theme of the picture Outskirts of the Paranoiac-critical City; Early Afternoon on the Shore of European History, painted in 1936. The cluster of grapes, whose shape -- like that of a molecular model -- could not fail to captivate Dali, is cryptically repeated in two other motifs on the same canvas: the rump of a sturdy horse and a skull with huge eye-sockets.
The two utensils connected with eatables that are most typical of Dali's imaginary world are the cup and the spoon. Two pictures painted in 1932 are good examples of this. In the one called Agnostic Symbol a spoon with an inordinately long handle marks the diagonal of the picture along almost its whole length. This handle is bent to curve round a pebble, the form of which recalls the heel of a long loaf of bread, and in the bowl of the spoon we see a diminutive pocket watch, similar to the ones in The Persistence of Memory. In this painting, at once simple and baroque, the spoon takes on the attributes of a road, or of a snake with a hyper-attenuated body.
In The True Picture of 'The Island of the Dead' by Arnold Bocklin at the Hour of the Angelus, painted in 1932. on the left-hand side of the canvas we see a stone cube, on the cube a cup and, sticking out of the cup like a pole, the extremely long handle of a spoon, the bowl of which is hidden from us in the cup. It is said of this picture that when its former owner, Baron Von der Heydt, showed it to Hitler, it made a very strong impression on him. In 1944-1945 Dali painted a new version of this work and gave it the title Half a Giant Cup Suspended with an Inexplicable Appendage Five Metres Long. The islet that can be seen in the background is inspired by the Illa de la Rata, off Cap de Creus. Regarding the very pure geometric composition of this work, we are told by Robert Descharnes in his above- mentioned book on Dali: 'This composition was painted in New York and California, at the time when Dali was having a series of absorbing conversations with Prince Matila Ghyka, a Rumanian who was a professor of aesthetics at the University of South California. Dali was well acquainted with Ghyka's works -- The Geometry of Art and Life and, more particularly, The Golden Number, an essay on Pythagorean rites and rhythms in the development of western civilization, which was published in 1931 -- because he had read them in Paris' before the war. The whole construction of this picture is organized on the basis of the development of a strict logarithmic spiral whose starting-point is to be found in the handle of the cup.'
Structurally close to this coupling of cup and spoon, in other pictures by Dali -- the 1936 Solar Table, for instance -- we find the grouping of glass and spoon (in the work mentioned the table and glasses are inspired in those of the casino in Cadaques). And in yet other pictures the glass / spoon arrangement is replaced by one consisting of an inkpot and a pen. A drawing done in 1938 and entitled September Septembered, which was later used as an illustration in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, exemplifies different morphological relationships of such elements as a glass and a spoon, an inkpot and a pen, a girl and a bell, a cluster of grapes and a seated wet-nurse, etc.
In the Portrait of Picasso, painted in California in 1947, we see coming out of the Malaga painter's mouth a spoon with an extremely long handle -- like the one in Agnostic Symbol -- in the bowl of which there is a' tiny lute or guitar. It should be observed that the function performed in this portrait by the spoon and the carnation is entrusted to the crutches and a slice of grilled ham in the Dali self-portrait done in 1941, a work that is much less emphatic and much less baroque than the Picasso portrait.
I need hardly say that the morphological pattern of the cup and spoon, apart from its alimentary implications, possesses certain sex- symbolic values. But Dali, who has always been a great reader and admirer of Freud, never confines himself to painting symbols 'in the raw,' but endeavours to give them additional nuances and flavours; and he always manages to place them in a network of original meanings.
In the border areas between eatables and living animals we may observe Dali's preference for lobsters and other crustaceans worthy of the gourmet's attention, whose organisms constitute veritable marrow-bodies, or at least hard structures protecting a soft, nutritious mass. Sometimes the lobster appears in Dali's imagination as a double for the telephone, not only on account of its shape but also because the hard structure of the telephone receiver encloses a soft or verbal structure. In the first chapter of The Secret Life of Salvador Dali the artist develops some of his ideas regarding 'eatables' and in particular those that refer to crustaceans:
'The direct opposite of spinach is armour. That is why I am so fond of eating armour, and especially the smaller varieties, that is to say shellfish. By virtue of its armour, since that is what its exoskeleton really amounts to, the shellfish is a material realization of the extremely original and intelligent idea of wearing one's bones on the outside rather than the inside, contrary to the usual practice. In this way the crustacean can use the arms or weapons of its anatomy to protect the soft, nutritious delirium of its interior and keep it sheltered from all profanation, shut up like some solemn, hieratic vessel which should be left vulnerable only to the highest form of imperial conquest in the noble war of decortication: that of the palate.'
Dali then goes on to establish a comparison between the skuIls of little birds, with their savoury brains, and shellfish, even speaking in this context of the armour painted by Paolo UcceIlo:' '" and he did it with a charm and mystery worthy of his truly birdlike nature, to which he owed his name.'
In Dali's systematic arrangement of eatables, the shellfish or the crustacean combines and comprehends the softness of the fried egg and the hardness of the crust or stale hunk of bread. It is, therefore, the eatable 'of the perfect palate,' the most substantial of all foods. Besides, it is an eatable which, unlike fried eggs or bread, contains the idea of combat, cutting up and weapons (since its tasting comes only after the armour of the carapace has been dismantled, almost as when a telephone receiver is taken to pieces).
That is why the figures of the gluttonous cook and Napoleon, the man of blood, are associated in Dali's imagination; and also why, at the limits of the eatable, we are suddenly confronted with bloodthirsty hunting: The Tunny Catch, painted in 1966-67, is the canvas that best represents this border area. Of this picture, one of the largest and most ambitious ever painted by Dali, Robert Descharnes has said: 'In this great canvas, painted in Portlligat, the artist has brought together all his tendencies: Surrealism, 'Quintessential Pompierisme,' Pointillism, Action Painting, Tachisme, Geometrical Abstraction, Pop, Op and Psychedelic Art; [it is] comparable in importance to the great Persistence of Memory.'
In the explanation he himself gives us of this picture, which is subtitled Homage to Meissonier and was inspired by a description of tunny fishing delivered by his father with a 'Homeric' intonation, as also by an engraving by a dull, academic Swedish artist that hung in his father's office, Dali relates his painting to the cosmology of the Jesuit theologist Teilhard de Chardin: 'I realized then that it is, in fact, this very limitation and contraction of the cosmos and the universe that makes energy possible (...). The Tunny Catch, therefore, is a biological spectacle par excellence, since according to my father's description the sea -- which is a cobalt blue that ultimately turns absolutely blood-red -- is the superaesthetic force of modern biology. All births are preceded by the marvellous spilling of blood, blood is sweeter than honey, blood is sweeter than blood. And in our time it is America that holds the privilege of blood, for to America has fallen the honour of producing Watson, the Nobel prizewinner who was the first to discover the molecular structures of deoxyribonucleic acid.'
Descended from Cannibalism in Autumn, but with more abundant and more sharply contrasted stylistic correspondences, in its crudity and baroque character The Tunny Catch -- a sadomasochistic orgy of blood -- brings to mind the description given by a certain friar, one Geronimo de la Concepcion, in a book entitled Emporio del Orbe (1690), in which he is speaking of the tunny-fishing grounds off the Cadiz coast, where thousands of tunny fish used to be driven inshore to be killed, chopped up and salted. The sight of this bloodstained spectacle inspired Fray Geronimo to comment, with ill-concealed relish:
'So pleasurable is the spectacle, whether in the strength of the brutes, in the variety of harpoons and nets with which they are caught and killed, or in the way they stain the sea blood-red, that no bullfight could hope to equal it.'
At'the opposite pole to the bloodstained butchery of tunny fishing in Dali's imagination are those hard (though softened in the cooking), eatable, ordinary everyday beans, which constitute one of Dali's favourite dishes. Indeed, he even gives the recipe for them to the readers of his secret autobiography: 'They must be cooked with ham and bolifarra (a Catalan sausage), and the secret consists in adding to this mixture a little chocolate and a bay leaf.'
Although the shellfish, as we have seen, is the 'canonical eatable' in Dali's imagination, the 'fundamental eatable' is bread. The 'revelation of bread,' and of its aesthetic-symbolic potentialities, came to the painter one day early in the thirties when, .after a meal at which he had eaten to satiety of a dish of beans, he began to look, idly but pertinaciously, at a piece of bread. Unable to take his eyes off it, he tells us, he picked it up, kissed it at one end, sucked it to make it soft, stood it vertically on the table (like the famous egg of Columbus) and there and then decided 'to make surrealist objects with bread.'
When he returned to Paris, his motto was: 'Bread, bread, always bread, nothing but bread.' This bread of Dali's, however, was not to be the soft bread of charity, nor yet (at least not to begin with) the transubstantiated food of the Christian communion; it was 'a ferociously antihumanitarian bread, it was the bread of the revenge of imaginative luxury against the utilitarianism of the rational, practical world, it was the aristocratic, paranoiac, refined, Jesuitical, phenomenal, paralysing, hyperevident bread that the hands of my brain had kneaded during those two months in Portlligat.'
This denaturalization of surrealist bread -- its transformation into a luxury for the palate and an aristocratic revenge -- reminds me of the use Dali made of milk in an object of symbolic functioning (a 'thinking machine') in the year 1932, a use which was violently opposed by the communist poet Louis Aragon, then an active member of the Surrealists, on the grounds of certain moralistic and supposedly humanitarian considerations which had nothing to do with the matter being discussed, however respectable they may have been from the viewpoint of moral principles and in the field of social economy. Aragon, in fact, quite seriously and to everybody's astonishment, said: 'I am totally opposed to Dali's project; glasses of milk are not intended for the manufacture of surrealist objects, but for the children of unemployed workers.'
The operation of eating, its material and its complements constitute the basic nucleus of relationships in which we must place Dali's personality as an artist with, of course, the nuances proper to his particular case. Painting is, in this sense, cooking. Looking at a picture is eating. The taste for art is the counterpart of hunger and the gastronomic palate. Eatables and their principal utensils are thus the models for the specific pictorial product, a spiritual and sensorial fruit par excellence, which Dali, after the fashion of Vermeer, will leave to ripen slowly until it reaches the golden point of maturity.
Not only painting, but also poetry, was seen by Dali in the guise of eatables. During the time he spent in Madrid in the twenties, when he and Federico Garcia Lorca were inseparable friends, the Catalan painter's favourite word was 'eating.' The impression the poetry of Lorca made on Dali's spirit could not have been more 'eatable.'
'Lorca had a tremendous impact on me,' Dali tells us in his autobiography. 'The phenomenon of poetry, in its entirety and "in the raw," suddenly arose before me in physical shape, confused, with bloodshot eyes, viscous and sublime, vibrating with a thousand fireworks and flames of subterranean biology, like all matter endowed with the originality of its own form. I reacted by immediately adopting an attitude rigorously opposed to the "poetic cosmos." I said nothing that could not be defined, nothing of which the "outline" or "law" could not be established, nothing that could not be "eaten" (this was already my favourite word). And when I felt the incendiary, communicative fire of the poetry of the great Federico rising in frenzied, riotous flames, I tried to quench those flames with the olive branch of my anti-Faust premature senility, while I prepared the grills of my transcendental prosaicness, upon which at daybreak, when only the glowing embers of Lorca's initial fire were left, I would come to cook the mushrooms, chops and sardines of my philosophy (...) to satisfy for another hundred years the spiritual, imaginative, moral and ideological hunger of our age.'
The poetry that Dali personifies in Lorca is eatable, no doubt, but in Dali's way of thinking it is, above all, the fire that the artist will use to cook his artistic result. We might say, in other words, that the relationship between poetry and art is analogous to the one between fire and the food that is cooked with its help. In the artist's job, therefore, there are two essential moments: that of the incendiary fire, which is communicative and anarchical, and that of the 'laws' of cooking, i.e. the moment of the specific, definable materiality of the work. Thus, in the human eatable we have the harmonization of the most ancient impulse of the organism and the most precise legislation of the understanding. The eatable is not only a function of the blind organism but is also, though without losing that character, a function of the creative, civilizing intelligence. To paraphrase a well-worn phrase, we may assert without irony that Dali was a cook before he was an artist or, which comes to the same thing, that he has never ceased to explore the eatable roots of art and of aesthetic apprehension. This and no other is the basis of the praise Dali lavishes on saliva and dribbling. 'Yes, when I'm asleep or when I'm painting, I dribble with pleasure,' he says. And then he adds: 'It cannot be denied that every good painter dribbles. It comes from the concentration of his attention and from the satisfaction afforded him by the visions that pass before his eyes ...' But the painter's dribbling is paradoxical; it belongs to the canonical order of the 'crustaceans,' for it is a fluid which is transformed at the corner of the mouth into 'a veritable quarry of scales or flakes, rather like those of mica.' Dali, as Gilbert Lascault has said, lets himself be fascinated by the idea of a sort of dry and to some extent geometrical saliva, the paradigmatic expression of which would be the 'quintessential dribbling of the spider.' Dali, undoubtedly, is on the side of the spider's saliva -- as against that of the dog. He is on the side of a saliva that is thread, line, exactitude.
I must point out, however, that Dali's painting is not only eatable but also, and more particularly, a convertible eatable.