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Salvador
Dalì (1904-1989)
Dali showed precocious gifts in the local Catholic schools in
Figueras, Spain where he
was born, as well as at the National School of Fine Arts in
Madrid where he studied art.
He exhibited decided megalomania and impressed everyone as a
troublemaker; he was expelled from school more than once and served jail
terms for anti-government activities.
While a student he met poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who later was
murdered during the Civil War; he also wrote the script for the film, Un
Chien andalou with Luis Bunuel before joining or even meeting the
Surrealists. Despite bizarre activities and outlandish statements, the sum total of his work, including his writings, represents much more than eccentricity, narcissism and slick posturing. Thus the tendency to dismiss Dali is not completely fair, considering his early articles in Catalonian and Spanish vanguard magazines during the 1920s, which are serious and without his familiar pretension. In 1927 he discovered Surrealism in the art magazines; it was a revelation and he painted Blood Is Sweeter Than Honey, which featured images that continued to obsess the artist. In the 1920s-30s Freud's theories became so common as to be taken for granted by the Surrealists. Freud used the psychoanalytic device of free association to trace the symbolic meaning of dream imagery to its source in the unconscious; Dali applied the same method to his pictorial imagery.
Based on psychoanalytic studies of paranoiac dementia, the artist
consciously charged his paintings with psychological meaning
which he called his "paranoiac-critical method," using
countless symbols of persecution mania, sharp instruments (castration),
sexual fetishes, and phallic images, many taken directly from case
histories of paranoia in Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia
Sexualis, as well as from Freud's works. Paranoia is a mental
disease characterized by delusions and projections of personal conflicts
ascribed to the supposed hostility of others. Dali's work imitates
paranoiac conditions, because while the paranoiac is able to find proof
of persecution, Dali only simulated the illness.
He used "paranoia" less in the psychiatric sense than
the etymological meaning, para-[alternate] + mind;
thus his "paranoiac-critical method" became a forced
inspiration as his paintings submitted to the caprice of dream and wide-awake
calculation. His images,
based on readings in psychiatry, eventually began displacing experiences
drawn from his own psyche.
The long-venerated Newtonian cosmos, shattered by Einstein's
special theory of
relativity, had to be discarded and replaced in the early part of
this century; "at rest" was no longer a reality as the
philosophical perception of
time shifted from an absolute to an eternal state of becoming.
Much discussion gave rise to questions about when time began,
will it exist forever, and had it always existed.
Philosopher Henri Bergson quipped: Time is nature's way of
preventing everything from happening at once.
The Church thought of time as eternity, citing Thomas Aquinas's Summa
theologiae where he
compares completeness, perfection, and infinity, to God.
The deep perspective in Persistence suggests time past,
with the viewer deserted and lost in infinity. Interestingly, Salvador
("Saviour") Dali's anti-clerical bias is reflected in his use
of Christian and Freudian images in the painting; and as if to emphasize
the reality of his hallucinations, his surreal iconography is placed in
the landscape of the bay at Port Lligat on the Costa Brava, his home and
studio. Although he
describes the origin of the soft watches as derived from dreaming of
Camembert cheese, Marcel Jean, in his History of Surrealist Painting,
says they symbolize impotence: montre not only means
"watch" in French, but is also the imperative form of the verb
montrer, "to show".
A sick child must show his tongue to the doctor, montrer la
molle, which sounds the same as la montre molle "soft
watch". Usually we
think of these bent watches as referring to Einstein's theory in which
our world is becoming a spatio-temporal continuum; the world's
concept of time and space was certainly changing.
The three open and vulnerable watches (past, present, future?)
are within orthogonals which point to the top center of the painting
(heaven?). According to
Freud, menstrual periodicity transforms the concept of time into a
feminine symbol, and the fourth watch, closed, hard and impregnable, has
been diagnosed as a feminine symbol.
Certainly this watch in the foreground is a vital red, while the
middle ground watch is softened to orange and the background timepiece
is a lifeless gray. Could
the hands on the flaccid watches refer to the traditional medical-scientific
sign for male?
Ants usually suggest putrefaction and decay; the rigid watch is
attacked by scavenger ants,
indicating the inorganic is becoming organic and
vulnerable. However,
since the watch is closed and red with life, time is
unattainable and the ants attack without success, implying
triumph over death and decay via procreation or immortality.
In Christian doctrine, ants signify provident man, the one who
chooses the true doctrine and rejects heresy.
The fly, on the other hand, has long been considered a bearer of
pestilence and evil (Lord of the Flies, or Beelzebub, is from Ba al-z'
bub, lord + fly, a god
of the ancient Philistines, averter of insects).
In Christian symbology, the fly symbolizes evil. The amoeba or fetal image suggests the primordial beginnings of life, and like a lost soul in infinity, is stranded on a barren beach with its life-giving water (holy water?) in the far distance. This fetal image, usually interpreted as a self-portrait, appears in several other paintings, including The Great Masturbator. The soft tongue, similar to the limp watches, is a well known Freudian symbol for the penis; Dali, in his Secret Life of Salvador Dali, makes public his anxieties about sexual dysfunction. Trees, tall and erect, are male, according to Freud; but this tree is scrawny and lifeless. The extending phallic branch, with its post-coital watch, points to rock formations which in actuality are the granite outcroppings above the Bay of Cullero near Dali's home. "Geology has an oppressive melancholy," stated the artist, "this melancholy has its course in the idea that time is working against it." Again, the rock is a symbol of Christian steadfastness, and suggests the antithesis of the biological objects which are subject to the laws of change and disintegration. According to medieval Christian legend, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil withered when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Thus the dead tree in Giotto's Lamentation, della Francesca's Resurrection, and Michelangelo's Fall and Expulsion, all refer to original sin, otherwise known as Freud's Oedipus Complex. The cubes on the left may possibly have some reference to Cubism, although again, they are symbols of stability in Christian iconology. Ants, the fly, yielding watches, fetus, open horizon, all suggest the transitoriness and impersistence of time. Realism dominates Dali's work because the visual logic of the picture makes itself felt in the sense that the dreamlike emphasis can be conveyed only when the objects are neither stylized nor abstracted, but factually rendered. Only in this way can the iconology be realized and the "irrationalism" of Dali express itself. It is interesting that the irrationalism and hyperbole of Surrealism, and especially of Dali, are not very highly regarded in the art world today, while abstraction continues to grow and hold our attention. Even Freudian dream theory is now challenged; many neuroscientists and psychiatrists argue that dreams do not stem from unacceptable hidden desires and fears but actually are caused by spontaneous electrochemical signals in the brain which we cannot help investing with meaning. But Dali continues to fascinate. Bibliography: This paper was written with the help of a Release-Time Research Grant from Long Island University, the Brooklyn Campus.
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