The Life and Masterworks of Salvador Dalí. Eric Shanes
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Back in Madrid Dalí resumed his friendship with Buñuel and Lorca. On the creative level the relationship between Dalí and Lorca would prove especially important, for it would strengthen their mutual attraction to Surrealism. However, the sympathy between them also led the homosexual Lorca to fall in love with Dalí. Being perhaps bisexual but more usually asexual, Dalí could not return his affections in the same way. However, on two occasions probably in 1926, and surely in the spirit of sexual experimentation, Dalí did passively allow Lorca to try making love to him. The experiment was unsuccessful. Apparently Dalí had no regrets and later commented that ‘I felt awfully flattered vis-a-vis the prestige. Deep down, I felt that he was a great poet and that I did owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí’s asshole.’
In early April 1925 Dalí and Lorca went to stay just outside Cadaqués, about twenty-five kilometres to the east of Figueres on the Mediterranean, where the Dalí family had long had use of a summer villa. There Dalí introduced his friend to the widow of a local fishermen, Lídia Noguér Sabà, who bordered on the harmlessly lunatic but who had always thrilled Dalí with her freewheeling associationism, something that would soon become one of the cornerstones of not only his own art but also that of his friend. Lorca was delighted with the local landscapes, the food, the Greek and Roman ruins, and the enthusiasm with which he was received by Dalí’s father and sister.
In November 1925 Dalí held his first one-man exhibition, at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona, showing seventeen, mostly recent paintings that ranged stylistically across the visual spectrum from Cubist semi-abstraction, as in the Venus and Sailor, to a low-keyed realism, as in the Figure at a Window. The show was well received by the critics, although some of them were understandably puzzled by the stylistic diversity of the pictures.
Surrealist Horse-Woman-Horse, 1933.
Pencil and pen on paper, 52.6 × 25 cm.
Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida.
Gradiva, 1933.
Pen and India ink on sandpaper.
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.
In April 1926 Dalí received an overwhelming testimonial to his talents through the publication of Lorca’s Ode to Salvador Dalí, a poem that has been called ‘perhaps the finest paean to friendship ever written in Spanish’. And later that month Dalí, accompanied by his stepmother and sister, at last visited Paris for the first time. They also went on to Brussels. The trip was paid for by Dalí’s father who was delighted at the success of the Dalmau Gallery exhibition the previous autumn. In Brussels, Dalí was attracted to Flemish painting, with its microscopic attention to detail, while in Paris he again met up with Buñuel. The family took an excursion to Versailles, visited the studio of Jean-François Millet in Barbizon, and explored the Grevin waxworks museum. Yet without doubt the high point of the entire trip was Dalí’s visit to Picasso, which was arranged by another Spanish artist living in Paris. As Dalí later recalled:
When I arrived at Picasso’s [studio] on Rue de la Boetie I was as deeply moved and as full of respect as though I was having an audience with the Pope.
‘I have come to see you,’ I said, ‘before visiting the Louvre.’
‘You’re quite right,’ he answered.
I brought a small painting, carefully packed, which was called The Girl of Figueres. He looked at it for at least fifteen minutes, and made no comment whatever. After which we went up to the next storey, where for two hours Picasso showed me quantities of his paintings. He kept going back and forth, dragging out great canvases which he placed against the easel. Then he went to fetch others among an infinity of canvases stacked in rows against the wall. I could see that he was going to enormous trouble. At each new canvas he cast me a glance filled with a vivacity and an intelligence so violent that it made me tremble. I left without in turn having made the slightest comment.
At the end, on the landing on the stairs, just as I was about to leave, we exchanged a glance which meant exactly,
‘You get the idea?’
‘I get it!’
By the time Dalí visited Picasso he had for some years been assimilating elements from the latter’s art as viewed in reproduction, such as the stylisation of figures in pictures of the Blue and Rose periods, the manifold spatial dislocations and ambiguities of Cubism, and the strain of neo-classicism that emerged in 1919. It must have been rewarding, then, to see large numbers of original works by Picasso from all these phases of his career. And one picture in particular, if seen, would have linked to Dalí directly, for Picasso’s Three Dancers of 1925 (London, Tate Modern) alludes to the recent death of Ramon Pichot, whose silhouette is descernible against the window on the right. Naturally, the influence of Picasso upon Dalí continued for some time after the 1926 visit to the Rue de la Boetie, and it derived from the elongated figures, flat shapes, crisp silhouettes and bright colours visible in Picasso’s Cubist style of the mid-1920s (all of which elements are visible in The Three Dancers). But simultaneously Dalí continued to develop the strain of realism that had previously emerged in his work. Clearly, he was still searching for his true self.
The welcome that Dalí had received in Paris led him to think of moving there. In order to do so he evolved a crafty, long-term strategy that involved engineering his own expulsion from the San Fernando Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. As he later stated,
The motives for my action were simple: I wanted to have done with the School of Fine Arts and with the orgiastic life of Madrid once and for all; I wanted to be forced to escape all that and come back to Figueres to work for a year, after which I would try to convince my father that my studies should be continued in Paris. Once there, with the work that I should take, I would definitely seize power!
By being ‘forced to escape all that’, Dalí surely meant his need to overcome a seemingly insuperable obstacle, namely that if he obtained his academic degree his father would expect him to support himself by teaching for a living, rather than maintain him financially in Paris. And with his talents how could he fail to win his degree?
Dalí found a typically outrageous way of solving the problem. In mid-June 1926, when he was summoned for the art history component of his final examination, he refused to be examined, stating that ‘none of the professors of the school of San Fernando being competent to judge me, I retire’. The ploy was successful, for the professors were infuriated, and eight days later Dalí was expelled from the institution without obtaining his degree.
Geological Destiny, 1933.
Oil on panel, 21 × 16 cm. Private collection.
Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops Balanced on her Shoulder, 1933.
Oil on panel, 6.8 × 8.8 cm.
Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres.
Dalí’s father was shattered by the expulsion, which closed an official career in Spain to his son, although he grudgingly allowed the younger Salvador to return once again to Figueres where the boy embarked on his plan to ‘work for a year’. A show of the results was held at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona at the very end of 1926 when twenty paintings displayed an even wider range of styles than had been apparent in the works exhibited in the previous show. Once again Dalí was a huge success, with his pictures drawing a largely enthusiastic response from the press. But in his long-term planning to ‘work for a year’, Dalí had forgotten to take into account the Spanish army, and from February 1927 he had to spend nine months performing his compulsory military service, although the duties do not appear to have been too irksome. During that time Dalí managed to finish only a few pictures, but he did design the sets and costumes for the premiére of Lorca’s Mariana Pineda which opened in Barcelona on 24 June, and he also contributed drawings, poetry and prose to the highly esteemed Sitges journal L’Amic de