Eric Shanes - The Life and Masterworks of Salvador Dalí

Author: Eric Shanes

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shanes, Eric.

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

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

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84484-818-8

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

2. Dal, Salvador, 1904-1989.

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

N7113.D3S52 2010

709.2--dc22

[B]

2010013560

Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

Salvador Dal, Gala-Salvador Dal Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA

All rights reserved.

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

ISBN: 978-1-78310-782-7

Eric Shanes

T he Life and M asterworks of

Salvador Dal

For Ruth Ornadel Tomkins,

who has always relished the surreal

M y ambition is to give the world of the imagination the same degree of objectivity and reality as the everyday world. What Surrealism revolutionises above all is arts themes, and to express these I use the same means as always. Its the themes, derived from Freudianism, that are new.

Salvador Dal, 1934

Self-Portrait with the Neck of Raphael, 1921.

Oil on canvas, 41.5 x cm .

Dal Theatre-Museum, Figueres.

Contents

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) , Saturn d evouring o ne of h is s ons, 1821-1823.

m ural transfer red to canvas, 143.5 x 81.4 cm .

Museo del Prado, Madrid.

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

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

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

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

o il on canvas, 55.5 x cm .

Muse dOrsay, Paris.

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

Dal received his primary and secondary education in Figueres, first at a state school where he learned nothing, and then at a private school run by French Marist friars, where he gained a good working knowledge of spoken French and some helpful instruction in taking great artistic pains. The cypress trees visible from his classroom remained in his mind and later reappeared in many of his pictures, while Jean-Franois Millets painting