Painting Gallery #7

Note: a painting with a highlighted title includes an analysis.
Surrealist Composition, 1928
• oil on canvas
• 75.5 x 62.5 cm
• private collection
    Dalí gave this picture its title in 1964. Here the diagonal construction is again used. The visible material in the picture would seem to place it with the works painted in 1927 such as Blood Is Sweeter Than Honey in that series which Lorca called "Apparatus Forest." Inaugural Gooseflesh is painted in the same style but as an afterthought; it is the result of the works of this period and of the paintings done at the same time in 1928 such as Bathers with the gravel collage. The composition is already the product of a hypnagogic image similar to that which Dalí repeated often in his Surrealist works -we see an example of it in Portrait of Paul Eluard - little rodlike cells in suspension above an oblong object. Dalí has given an explanation of it in his book Le Mythe tragique de L'Angelus de Millet. "In 1929, for the first time, one of those very clear images appeared to me, most probably following many others, although I cannot find any antecedent for it in my memory. This happened in Cadaqués when I was in the act of pulling violently at the oars, and it consisted of a white shape illuminated by the sun, stretched out at full length, cylindrical in form with rounded extremities, showing several irregularities. This form is Iying down on the maroon-purplish-blue soil. All its periphery is bristling with little black rodlike cells appearing in suspension in all directions like flying sticks." Dalí continues, "The numbering in the pictures probably corresponds to my unconscious interest in the metric system. In June 1927 I had written an article, 'The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian,' which appeared in L'Amic de les arts, about which Lorca had said that it was the most poetic text he had ever read. In this article I explained how one could measure the suffering of Saint Sebastian just as with degrees on a thermometer, each arrow being a sort of gradation adding and measuring the amount of suffering. It was at the same time that Lorca wrote in his 'Ode to Salvador Dalí,' 'A desire for forms and limits overwhelms us. The man who measures with the yellow yardstick comes.' At that time I was preoccupied with all the systems of weights and measures, and numbers were appearing everywhere I was already preoccupied with the metric system, the numerical division of worldly things."
Unsatisfied Desires, 1928
• oil, seashells, and sand on cardboard
• 76 x 62 cm
• private collection
    This picture was painted in Cadaqués during the summer of 1928. Dalí sent it along with another work, Female Nude, to the Salon d'Automne which was held at Maragall's Gallery in Barcelona. The directors, frightened in advance at the probable reactions of the public to the obviously sexual allusions contained in the paintings, preferred to withdraw them.
    "Then," Dalí relates, "in protest I gave a lecture at the Sala Pares which triggered a frightful scandal because I had insulted all the painters who were doing twisted trees. This was the first of three scandalous lectures that I was to give in Barcelona. The second took place a few years later at the Atheneo, where I thoroughly insulted the name of the founder of the society who organized the lecture-a man whose memory was respected throughout all Catalonia-by calling him the great pederast and the great hairy putrified man.... Afterwards, I wasn't able to continue to say very much; everyone threw chairs and broke up everything. The police had to protect me so that I could leave and get as far as the car. The third one was a lecture given with Rene Crevel during the Surrealist era at a place where the anarchists met called the 'Popular Encyclopedia.' They had put a loaf of bread on me head just like that in Retrospective Bust. I spoke about sex, about testicles, about everything, to such a point that an anarchist got up and said: 'It's intolerable that you should use such obscene language in front of our wives, because we are accompanied here by our wives!' It was Gala's turn to stand up, and she replied: 'If he says this in front of his own wife, which I am, he can say it in front of your wives.'
    "It is one of the first pictures of the period when I used the gravel from the beach of Llaner as collage; I used to go rather to Sortell near the Pichots' house to fish for gobies or other things. I picked up cork floats, a little here and there, at random." These pictures with the gravel and the cork floats were the beginning of a series which Dalí considered the most important before Surrealism: canvases which were practically white with only a few ideographic signs and feathers glued on them, such as Fishermen in the Sun.
The First Days of Spring, 1929
• oil and collage on panel
• 49.5 x 64 cm
• The Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida
    The year of 1929 was a particularly tumultuous one for Salvador Dalí. When Dalí painted this work in the early Spring of 1929, he was experiencing great amounts of stress, produced by the rapidly deteriorating relationship he had with his father. The senior Dalí was very disappointed in his son's choice of profession, his increasingly strange behavior, and his general disregard for all things deemed traditional.
    Both the reader and Dalí are definitely through the looking glass now. Gone are the calm summer days on the slopes and hills of Cadaqués, being softly reproduced in the soft tones of the light inspired Impressionists. Here we see Dalí as he had only been hinting at in the several years proceeding this work. Here, Dalí has given himself over completely to his paranoid critical inspirations, and paints in stunning detail, the intrepid thoughts of his innermost self.
    In the very center of the painting is a small, collaged picture of Salvador as a young child of about 4 years. Around it are a variety of objects that are best described as things from a 'hand painted dream photograph' as Dalí liked to say. Sigmund Freud, and his theories of psychoanalysis play a paramount role in understanding this work and Dalí's experiences at this point. This painting actually starts what is referred to as Dalí's Surrealist Period, even though he did not officially join the Paris group of Surrealists until later in the year.
    The scene itself is set upon a vast, stretching stepped plane which immediately suggests Freudian sexuality. The small collage of Dalí in the center of the work represents the Freudian importance of childhood, and Dalí's subscription to this belief.
    To the left, seated with his back to the scene, is a figure that can be interpreted as Dalí's own father. Because of their increasing estrangement, Dalí feels that his father is abandoning him in his own search for identity. However, farther off in the distance and only barely visible standing on the topmost step is another figure. It is the image of a man , holding the hand of a small boy standing next to him. This figure represents Dalí's desire to heal the rift between himself and his father, while at the same time knowing that this may never happen.
    To the far right of the picture, an old man is being offered something from a young girl, while over in the near middle of the painting, a doctor is 'analyzing' his patient. Both of these figures represent taboo relationships, and have explicit sexual themes.
    In the foreground, starting from the left, there is a disturbingly hermaphroditic couple seated in front of another painting, a weird apparatus adorned with a red fish and blue veins, and finally a series of intricate boxes adorned with a detailed collage of objects. All in all, they represent other deviant sexual themes, as well as the through the looking glass quality of Dalí's hand painted dream photographs that would become his trademark and propel him to great heights in the name of Surrealism.
The Enigma of Desire: My Mother, 1929
• oil on panel
• 30 x 52 cm
• (former Edward James collection) Folkwang Museum, Essen
    This great composition, among the first works of the Surrealist period, is one of the most important. Dalí painted The Enigma of Desire in Figueras just as he was finishing The Lugubrious Game.
    "I did it at the same time as The Great Masturbator", he relatess "immediately after summer. My aunt had a large dressmaking workroom and it was there that I did all these pictures. The Great Masturbator was taken from a chromo that I had which depicted a woman smelling a lily. Naturally the face is mixed with memories of Cadaqués, of summer, of the rocks of Cape Creus." The Enigma of Desire was the first work sold by the Goemans Gallery during Dalí's first one-man exhibition there in 1929; the Viscount of Noailles bought it together with The Lugubrious Game. Just as he was painting this canvas, Dalí found a religious chromolithograph on which he wrote, "Sometimes I spit with pleasure on my mother's portrait," commenting that what he did then "had a quite pschoanalytical explanation, since one can perfectly well love one's mother and still dream that one spits upon her, and even more, in many religions, expectoration is a sign of veneration; now go and try to make people understand that!"
    In the baroque appendage that elongates the visage, we recognize the geological structures of the rocks of the region near Cape Creus eroded by the wind, mixed with the fantastic architecture of Antonio Gaudi, "that gothic Mediterranean," whose work Dalí had seen as a child in Barcelona.
    The second part of the title, My Mother, My Mother, My Mother, was inspired by one of Tristan Tzara's poems, "The Great Lament of My Darkness," which appeared in 1917. Dalí considers The Enigma of Desire to be one of his ten most important paintings. The little group on the left depicts Dalí himself embracing his father, with a fish, a grasshopper, a dagger, and a lion's head.