The Life and Masterworks of Salvador Dalí. Eric Shanes
remained under his tuition for about two years, and freely admitted he learned much from his teacher. And in December 1918 Dalí exhibited his first pictures publicly, in a show shared with two other painters that was mounted in the municipal theatre in Figueres, a building that would later become a museum devoted solely to his own works. A local art critic wrote that
The person who has inside him what the pictures at the Concerts Society reveal is already something big in the artistic sense… We have no right to talk of the boy Dalí because the said boy is already a man… We have no right to say that he shows promise. Rather, we should say that he is already giving… We salute the novel artist and are quite certain that in the future our words… will have the value of a prophecy: Salvador Dalí will be a great painter.
Self-portrait, 1923.
India ink and pencil on paper, 31.5 × 25 cm.
Collection of the Estalella brothers, Madrid.
This was very heady praise for a boy of fourteen, and it was true: he was a great painter in the making.
Over the next couple of years the little genius continued to broaden his horizons. He helped bring out a local student magazine that appeared mostly in Spanish rather than Catalan so as to reach a wider readership. To this Dalí contributed illustrations and a series of articles on great painters, taking as his subjects Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, El Greco, Durer, Velásquez and Goya. He widened his reading and thereby assimilated advanced views on politics, culture and society, in 1921 even claiming to be a communist. Naturally he rebelled against paternal authority, but who doesn’t? And he discovered the joys of masturbation, as well as the self-loathing that usually accompanied it in an age of anxiety about all things sexual. This was especially the case in Spain where sexual ignorance was endemic and sexual guilt was universally promulgated. In order to get aroused the youth did not necessarily fantasise about women: towers and church belfries could just as easily help him rise to the occasion (which is surely why there are so many towers and belfries in his art). He worried intensely about the smallness of his sexual organ, and his sexual anxiety made him ‘the victim of inextinguishable attacks of laughter’. He also realised that ‘you have to have a very strong erection to be able to penetrate. And my problem is that I’ve always been a premature ejaculator. So much so, that sometimes it’s enough for me just to look in order to have an orgasm.’ It appears probable that never in the history of art has such an avid masturbator and voyeur become such a great painter, and certainly no artist has ever admitted to these predilections as openly as Dalí would do in 1929 and thereafter.
Asensio Juliá (1760–1832) [formerly attributed to Francisco de Goya (1746–1828)], The Colossus (Panic), c. 1809.
Oil on canvas, 116 × 105 cm.
Museo del Prado, Madrid.
In February 1921 Dalí’s mother, Felipa Domènech, died suddenly of cancer of the uterus. She was just forty-seven years of age. Dalí was exceedingly pained by the loss, stating later that
With my teeth clenched with weeping, I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death and destiny with the swords of light that some day would savagely gleam around my glorious name.
In November 1922 Dalí’s father would remarry, although he had to obtain a papal dispensation in order to do so, as his new bride, Catalina Domènech, was the sister of his dead wife.
In September 1922 Dalí was accompanied by his father and sister to Madrid in order to apply for admittance to the leading art school in Spain, the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. The boy had long wanted to devote himself to art, and although his father harboured the usual reservations about such an uncertain career, clearly he was relieved that his unstable son had some set target in mind. The entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts involved spending six days drawing a cast of Jacopo Sansovino’s Bacchus, and although Dalí failed to make his drawing to the required size, his facility was such that the dimensions of his work were ignored and he was granted a place.
Dalí was not to prove happy with the tuition he would receive at the San Fernando Academy, mainly because impressionism was still the prevailing artistic mode there and it was a style he had already worked through and exhausted. Instead, he took an interest in more advanced visual thinking, such as Cubism, while equally being attracted to traditional artistic techniques, which unfortunately were no longer being much taught at the Academy because of the prevailing taste for the loose painterly techniques demanded by an impressionistic approach. But if the San Fernando Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving made only a passing contribution to Dalí’s artistic development, his choice of accommodation in Madrid gave him much more creative stimulation, for he stayed in the Residencia de Studia, or University Hall of Residence. This was not just a place to eat and sleep but was far more like a college in itself, with activities taking place on all kinds of intellectual levels. Dalí’s sojourn in the Residencia coincided with that of some of the most brilliant emergent minds in contemporary Spanish culture. These included Luis Buñuel, then a philosophy student and later to be an outstanding film director with whom he would collaborate; and the finest modern Spanish poet and playwright (and arguably the greatest poet of the twentieth century), Federico García Lorca. At first Dalí was somewhat distanced from his more advanced fellow students in the Residencia by his assumed, defensive haughtiness and bohemian way of dressing, but when his modernist sympathies were discovered he was readily admitted to the circle of Buñuel and Lorca, with whom he became firm friends by early 1923.
Dalí’s dissatisfaction with the San Fernando Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving moved onto a new plane in the autumn of 1923 when, along with five other students, he was rusticated for a year for supposed insubordination. He had supported the appointment of a progressive artist to the post of Professor of Open-Air Painting, and when his favourite failed to obtain the job, in protest he had walked out of the meeting at which the news of the failure was announced; this was followed by a vociferous student protest, for which it was assumed that Dalí’s walkout had been the starting signal. Dalí thereupon returned to Figueres. Soon afterwards, in May 1924, he unwittingly found himself in further trouble with authority because of the political leanings of other members of his family; as a consequence, Dalí was imprisoned without trial in Figueres and later transferred to the provincial capital of Gerona before being released.
Portrait of Maria Carbona, 1925.
Oil on cardboard, 52.6 × 39.2 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal.
Penya-Segats (Woman by the Cliffs), 1926.
Oil on wood, 26 × 40 cm.
Private collection.
The Spectral Cow, 1928.
Oil on laminated panel, 49.8 × 64.4 cm.
Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.
Fried Eggs on the Plate without the Plate, 1932.
Oil on canvas, 60 × 42 cm.
Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida.
By this time Dalí had experimented with various artistic styles. Picasso was one influence, Derain another, while in 1923 Dalí had painted pictures of groups of nudes in the open air that were heavily indebted to pointillism and the flowing, linear style of Matisse. By the autumn of 1924, when Dalí returned to Madrid and his formal studies, he had also begun to assimilate more recent developments in Cubism and Purism. Yet simultaneously he started exploring a highly detailed representationalism, and here too the influence of Picasso – in the form of the latter’s neo-classicism of the late 1910s and early 1920s – is apparent. And Romantic painters of an earlier period such as Caspar David Friedrich also made their mark upon him.