SURREALISM
Salvador Dali
ART LESSON 17: The aim of the lesson is to teach you to view the world from quite an unusual perspective.
Study the following texts and be prepared to answer any question on the content.
1. a) Dealing with the fantastic, Surrealist painting may take a number of distinct forms, each of which, however, is recognisable through the irrational approach and the construction of unreal, unworldly, mysterious figures, either painted extremely meticulously, or constructed in near abstract shapes.
Watches draped over withered tree stumps, animated but dismembered figures, dream evocations, unreasonable and often erotic associations of objects in irrational scale, near abstract symbols of sexual reference – these are elements in the form of art that is known as surrealism. For the majority of people such material is not proper to art, but it is the nature of surrealism to introduce different subjects and some measure of its success that it has managed to achieve its acceptance. Part of the reason for this no doubt lies in the fascination that human nature seems to have for the turned-over stone, the weird, the half-realised, the dangerous, the unexpected and feared. It is attracted, even mesmerised, in a mood of cautious revulsion – and convention suggests it should not be interested and discourages acknowledgement of the desire.
b) The still life and figure drawing occupy an important place in Dali’s work. But the crucible in which he transforms being and things, thus creating the most astonishing oneiric fresco of the contemporary epoch, is the landscape, the landscape of Cadaqués. It has always exercised a tremendous influence over painters and writers. The secret emotional power of this particular place lies in its own geological structure. The town rises from the bottom of an enclosed bay, surrounded by terraced hills where grapes and olives used to be cultivated. Turned towards the east, the site is like a true natural amphitheatre which shows to advantage in any light. Its twilights with their distressing nostalgia hang heavy over the most beautiful of Dali’s Surrealist paintings.
c) Dali’s output from 1930 to 1934 is particularly indicative of the method he used to systematise his obsessions. He called this system the “ paranoiac-critical method ” and gave the following explanation to it: “Paranoiac-critical activity: spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.”
The faithful transcription of dreams has always played a major role in Dali’s work. The painter had studied psychoanalysis and the works of Freud before joining the Surrealists. To dream is easy for him because of his Mediterranean heritage. A siesta, to him, has always opened the doors of a pre-sleep period, the instance when one forgets the presence of one’s body. Dali’s demonology owes a great deal to his reveries. They have given birth to heterogeneous elements which he then brings together in his paintings without always knowing why. In the works of the Surrealist period, Dali treated those elements of disparate appearance with absolute realism which emphasised the proper character of each one of them, making an exact copy from a document, a photograph, or the actual object, as well as using collage. He increased the effect produced even more through the use of techniques stemming from the precision of Vermeer to the blurred shapes of Carrière. Once he had given an emotional autonomy to his protagonists he established communication between them by depicting them in space – most often in a landscape – thus creating unity in the canvas by the juxtaposition of objects bearing no relation in an environment where they did not belong. This spatial obsession derives from the atmosphere of Cadaqués, where the light, due to the colour of the sky and the sea, seems to suspend the course of time and allows the mind through the eye to glide more easily from one point to another.
D) The Madonna of Port Iligat (1950) marks the beginning of a new period in his work. At the same time, it is the first picture so large, it is the first of the religious paintings, and it heralds the corpuscular epoch. The whole composition is arranged around the Eucharistic bread visible through a hole in the centre of Jesus’ body, the point of intersection of the diagonal lines indicating the middle of the painting.
2. Do two of the following your choice!
a) Describe a religious painting by Salvador Dali.
b) Describe a Dali still life or figure drawing.
c) Describe a Dali landscape.
d) Describe a picture transcribing a dream.
3. Previously an accomplished abstract painter, Magritte was led to alter his art by a fortuitous encounter with the work of De Chirico that was further abetted by a visit to the surrealists in Paris. He then began to project visual conundrums and puns in a scrupulously exact and “banal” technique. The false mirror confounds inner vision with the external environment by locating its cloudscape within the eye, thus preserving the surrealist faith in the “omnipotence of dreams” and the human image-making faculty, which in this case usurps the facts of the real world. It joins what Leonardo noted as the “clarity” with which we see things in dreams with a boldness and simplicity held over from Magritte’s abstract paintings.