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Art of the 20th Century
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Art Styles
in 20th century Art Map
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If You Act the Genius, You Will Be One!
1910 - 1928
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Self-portrait
1921
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"Painters, do not fear perfection. You will never achieve it!
If you are
mediocrities, you may try as you will to paint terribly
badly, but people
will still see that you are mediocre."
Salvador Dali
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Salvador Dali at the
age of 8.
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Every morning when I awake," wrote the artist of the soft watches and
burning giraffes, "the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador
Dali..." The Catalo-nian artist, so famous and so rich, was prolific not
only in his art. He talked nonstop too; and his favourite topic was how to
be a genius. "Oh Salvador," he concluded, "now you know the truth: that if
you act the genius, you will be one!"
Had he lived during the Renaissance, Dali would have been recognized
sooner as a genius; his copious talent might indeed have been considered
normal. In our own age, though, which he felt was growing increasingly
stupid, Dali represented a constant provocation. Today he is ranked
alongside Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp and Malevich as one of the Modernist
greats, and the general public quite clearly loves his art as well; so
that it is difficult to grasp why he should still be seen as so
provocative (not least by intellectuals), and why certain quarters should
still incline to damn him as a lunatic. It may be that (as with Leonardo
da Vinci) no one cares to gaze too deep into so searing a mirror. Dali
himself declared: "The sole difference between myself and a madman is the
fact that I am not mad!" Just as the only artist to have remained an
Impressionist from the start of his career to the close (while the rest
shifted to Cubism, Pointillism or Fauvism) was Monet, so too the one true
Surrealist, the most constant of them all, was Salvador Dali. And he
remained a true Surrealist even when he avowed: "The mills of his mind
grind continuously, and he possesses the universal curiosity of
Renaissance man."
In his foreword to Dali's Diary of a Genius, writer Michel Deon
observes: "It is tempting to suppose we know Dali because he has had the
courage to enter the public realm. Journalists devour every syllabic he
utters. But the most surprising thing about him is his earthy common
sense, as in the scene where a young man who wants to make it to the top
is advised to eat caviar and drink champagne if he does not wish to fret
and toil to the end of his days. What makes Dali so appealing is his roots
and his antennae. Roots that reach deep into the earth, absorbing all the
'earthiness' (to use one of Dali's favourite notions) that has been
produced in four thousand years of painting, architecture and sculpture.
Antennae that are picking up things to come, tuned to the future,
anticipating it and assimilating it at lightning speed. It cannot be
sufficiently emphasized that Dali is a man of tireless scientific
curiosity. Every discovery and invention enters into his work, reappearing
there in barely changed form." One might say that Dali was typical of his
age: he had grasped how to make himself a star.
Man, said Blaise Pascal, is "half angel, half animal". His whole life
long, and throughout his work, Dali was as obsessed with sexuality as he
was with the quest for the absolute. When he saw the shaven armpit of a
woman for the first time, he declared, he was looking for heaven, just as
he "was looking for heaven when he poked a rotting hedgehog with a crutch.
Sexuality and death are close companions in Dali.
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Self-Portrait
1922
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A Cook or Napoleon
The six-year-old Salvador
wanted to be a cook, and insisted that he must be a female mistress of the
cuisine. We can relate the wish directly to one of the salient
characteristics of the true Catalonian, in Dali's pithy definition: " I
know what I'm eating. I don't know what I'm doing." At the same time, he
produced his first picture: the six-year-old, dressed at that age in
sailor costume, painted a landscape. Aged seven, he decided
he wanted to be Napoleon instead. In the drawing room on the third floor
of his parental home there was a small keg in the image of the French
emperor, which contained the mate tea his family were in the habit of
taking at six in the evening. "Napoleon's image, reproduced on the mate
keg, meant everything to me," Dali wrote in The Secret Life of Salvador
Dali; "for years his attitude of Olympian pride, the white and
well-fed strip of his smooth belly, the feverish pink flesh of those
imperial cheeks, the indecent, melodic, and categorical black of the
spectral outline of his hat, corresponded exactly to the ideal model I had
chosen for myself, the king. [...] I would in turn sip the tepid liquid,
which to me was sweeter than honey, that honey which, as is known, is
sweeter than blood itself - for my mother, my blood, was always present.
My social fixation was sealed by the triumphal and sure road of the
erogenous zone of my own mouth. I wished to sip Napoleon's liquid! [...]
Thus I frantically established hierarchies in the course of a year; from
wanting to be a cook I had awakened the very person of a Napoleon from my
impersonal costume of an obscure king." Dali famously declared that since
boyhood his ambition had grown ever greater, till all he could aim for was
to be Salvador Dali.
Dali insisted in the Secret Life that he had
"intra-uterine memories". These were visual memories of the life before
birth, and he claimed: "It was divine, it was paradise." Dali held it was
the source of "that perturbation and that emotion" which he had felt
throughout his life when confronted with the "ever-hallucinatory image" of
two fried eggs: "The fried eggs on the plate without the plate, which I
saw before my birth were grandiose, phosphorescent and very detailed in
all the folds of their faintly bluish whites." His intra-uterine memories
provided Dali with the essential foundations of his lifelong pursuits: "It
seems increasingly true that the whole imaginative life of man tends to
reconstitute symbolically by the most similar situations and
representations that initial paradisaical state, and especially to
surmount the horrible 'traumatism of birth' by which we are expulsed from
the paradise, passing abruptly from that ideally protective and enclosed
environment to all the hard dangers of the frightfully real new world,
with the concomitant phenomena of asphyxiation, of compression, of
blinding by the sudden outer light and of the brutal harshness of the
reality of the world [...]"
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Landscape Near Figueras
1910
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Landscape Near Ampurdan
1914
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Dutch Interior (copy after Manuel Benedito)
1914
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Head of Athene
1914
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Cadaques
c. 1917
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River Landscape
1916
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Untitled - Landscape with Animals
c. 1916
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View of Cadaques with Shadow of Mount Pani
1917
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Boat
1918
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Vilabertrin
1913
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Let All the Bells Ring!
Expelled from his intra-uterine paradise, Salvador
Felipe Jacinto was born on 11 May 1904 in Figueras in the province of
Gerona. His father, Don Salvador Dali y Cusi, then aged forty-one, was
from Cadaques in the same province of Gerona; he had a notary's practice
in Figueras, and lived at 20 Calle Monturiol. His Barcelona-born wife Dona
Felipa Dome Domenech was then thirty. The place of her son's birth was to
enter art history: time and again, the artist Salvador painted the beloved
flatland of Ampurdan, in his eyes the loveliest landscape in the world,
and a leitmotiv in his early pictures. The Cataloman coastal strip from
Cape Creus to Estartit (with Cadaques midway) afforded Dali both the
natural scenery and the unique Mediterranean light of many of his most
famous works; and in the crags and cliffs, torn by the elements, he found
the originals of the morphological curiosities - the vast realm of
fossils, bones, and anthropomorphic projections -that were to keep his
creative imagination in thrall. From the very outset, he scarcely painted
a landscape, portrait or abstract composition that was not unmistakably
Catalonian in character, through its distinctive rocky landscape, in which
anthropomorphic shapes counterpointed the human figures Dali painted.
Dali's oft nightmarish visions were not the product of innate
psychological disturbance;
rather, they drew directly upon happenings and facts he had observed and
remembered.
In the Secret Life, Dali waxed ecstatic on the
subject of his own birth: "Let all the bells ring! Let the toiling peasant
straighten for a moment the ankylosed curve of his anonymous back, bowed
to the soil like the trunk of an olive tree, twisted by the tramontana,
and let his cheek, furrowed by deep and earth-filled wrinkles, rest in the
hollow of his calloused hand in a noble attitude of momentary and
meditative repose. Look! Salvador Dali has just been born! [...] It is on
mornings such as this that the Greeks and the Phoenicians must have
disembarked in the bays of Rosas and of Ampurias, in order to come and
prepare the bed of civilization and the clean, white and theatrical sheets
of my birth, settling the whole in the very centre of this plain of
Ampurdan, which is the most concrete and the most objective piece of
landscape that exists in the world."
Why did Dali's parents name him Salvador? The artist
himself, needless to say, roundly declared that he was destined to save
art from the threat of the isms -from Dadaism, from academic Surrealism,
from abstract art. Salvador, the saviour of art.
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Portrait of Lucia
1918
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Duck
1918
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Still Life
1918
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Couple Near the
Fortress
1918 |
Portrait of Hortensia, Peasant Woman of Cadaques
1919
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Playa Port Alguer De La Riba, D'en Pitxot
1918-1919 |
Cadaques - Garden of Llane
1919
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Punta es Baluard de la Riba d'en Pitxot, Cadaques
1918-1919
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Port of Cadaques (Night)
1919
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Vilabertrin Church Tower
1918-19
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The Anti-Faust
Dali was a tireless observer of all that surrounded him.
His particular attention was given to Lucia, his old nurse, who filled his
head with stories, and his grandmother. "Lucia and my grandmother were two
of the neatest old women," he recalled, "with the whitest hair and the
most delicate and wrinkled skin I have ever seen. The first was immense in
stature and looked like a pope. The second was tiny and resembled a small
spool of white thread. I adored old age!"
Once he came to write his Secret Life, Dali was
elaborating that childhood adoration in characteristic fashion: "I became,
I was and I continue to be the living incarnation of the Anti-Faust. As a
child I adored that noble prestige of old people, and I would have given
all my body to become like them, to grow old immediately! I was the
Anti-Faust. Wretched was he who, having acquired the supreme science of
old age, sold his soul to unwrinkle his brow and recapture the unconscious
youth of his flesh! Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow
with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step
become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my
soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and
esthetic forms of an architecture, let me just learn everything that
others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply
in my skin! [...] In each of Lucia's or my grandmother's wrinkles I read
this force of intuitive knowledge brought to the surface by the painful
sum of experienced pleasures [...]"
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Still Life: Pomegranates
1919
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Cadaques
1917-1918
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Evening Ball at
the Patio of Mariona
1919
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