Exquisite Corpus

Salvador Dalí, <i>My Wife, Nude, Contemplating her own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture</i> (1945), oil on panel

Salvador Dalí, My Wife, Nude, Contemplating her own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture (1945), oil on panel

Slicing up eyeballs, lobsters and the rest of Dali's oeuvre.

by Robin Rice and Susan Hagen

When he was 15, Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) prophesied that he would study in Madrid and Rome, "and when I return, I will be a genius and the world will admire me. Or maybe I will be despised and not understood, but I will still be a genius, a great genius I'm sure I will."

The current exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art illuminates the achievements of the much-admired, occasionally despised and misunderstood genius. A staggering 249 paintings, drawings and other items reveal a dedicated artist with a complicated, original mind and uncanny hand-eye coordination.

In the night, a pair of dreaming "paranoiac-critical" spirits (Susan Hagen and Robin Rice) wafted through the tall PMA galleries sampling the lingering whispers of the ghost of Dalí, as well as echoes of countless audio tours and hysterical laughter arcing over ghosts of daytime crowds. In order to better understand Dalí's life and work, we allowed our impressions to coalesce into a "plasticity of emptiness" and made an exquisite corpse (see sidebar) of overheard comments (in italics), Dali's words (in bold) and a few unavoidable facts. We made our exquisite corpse at Robin's kitchen table from four pages of text, which we had cut into strips and placed in piles. Using randomly drawn cards to determine the sequence of the text, our process revealed subtle connections between the echoes of the past and the present.

Artists and poets of America! If you wish to recover the sacred source of your own mythology and your own inspiration, the time has come to reunite yourselves within the historic bowels of your Philadelphia, to ring once more the symbolic bell of your imaginative independence, and, holding aloft in one hand Franklin's lightning rod, and in the other Leautreamont's umbrella, to defy the storm of obscurantism that is threatening your country!

—"Declaration of the Independence
of the Imagination and the Rights of
Man to His Own Madness," 1939

<i>Lobster Telephone, black and red</i> (1936), multimedia

Lobster Telephone, black and red (1936), multimedia

The two most subversive things that can happen to an ex-Surrealist in 1951 are, first, to become a mystic; and second, to know how to draw.

—"Mystical Manifesto," 1951

The theories of Sigmund Freud, translated into Spanish in 1922, became a template for Dalí's lifelong obsession with the subconscious and sexuality. The landscape of Spain becomes the landscape of the mind in Accommodations of Desire (1929), in which lions, women, a father figure, sexuality and suppressed desires are served up like oysters on the half shell.

A little boy darts between slow-moving adults. "Daddy! I'm all done!" Grabs his father's hand and tries to lead him out of the gallery (the wrong way). "You wanna know which one I like?" The father follows his son to a painting. "This one!" It's The Great Masturbator. The father's response is inaudible as he tries to lead the boy away quickly.

In the gift shop, a man with a male companion looks at a display of ties. "I need another tie." He selects dripping watches on a red ground with some satisfaction. "This would be a nice one."

There is a very small thing placed on high in some spot.
I am pleased, I am pleased, I am pleased, I am pleased.
The sewing needles plunge into small nickels soft and sweet.
My girlfriend has a hand of cork full of Parisian fine lace.
One of my girlfriend's breasts is a calm sea urchin, the other a swarming wasp's nest.
—"Poem of the Small Things," 1928

Young woman, pointing: "Ha ha. Look at the boobs up in the sky."
Her friend: "I want to know what's going on here. Oh. They're growing. It's decaying. Oooh. The testicles are writhing. This is a total non-real dream scene."
Woman: "I'd want to wake up after a dream like that."
But the friends part cheerfully, reminding one another to "Enjoy!"

A child is not enjoying the audio tour and begs, "Mom, get the sound to stop!"

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), completed in 1936 just after the Spanish Civil War started, features a hideously distorted figure in the shape of Spain tearing itself apart. Dalí refused to take sides in the war. He left Spain and lived in the U.S., becoming a superstar with his picture on the cover of Time magazine. Later, he returned to Spain and met the dictator Franco. A similar neutrality toward Hitler is explored in The Enigma of Hitler, with its dark, gloomy colors and melting telephone.

"You said you didn't see why there would be long lines!"

At the age of 22, Dalí was expelled from his Madrid art school for insubordination. Fortunately, he'd already begun a successful professional career. His student works include The Basket of Bread, 1926, inspired by Zurburán's crisp realism, and Venus and Sailor, c. 1925, inspired by Picasso's chunky figuration. His early mature work translates influences of Bosch and El Greco into an enameled, mannerist smoothness.

"This is from Spain. Oil," a woman informs a man in a wheelchair.

Dalí was officially kicked out of the Surrealist group in 1939 because of his slick workmanship, self-promotion and (mostly) his refusal to condemn fascism.

It's easy to forget that Dalí, along with the rest of the Surrealists, laid the groundwork for much postwar American art.

In the 1950s, Dalí was fascinated by the atomic bomb and related discoveries in physics. He dubbed his contemporaneously reawakened interest in religious themes "Nuclear Mysticism." In Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubicus), 1953-1954, the figure of Christ is suspended on a cross-like grid of floating cubes.

"Soooo good! … Damn! So incredible. So detailed. You can even see his eyebrows. Amazing!"

"Isn't that sort of a Monet style?"

"Is that in Spanish?"

In New York, Dalí experimented with many art forms: theatrical sets and costumes, birth control pill ads, poetry, novels, essays, an opera libretto, fashion design and films. He made a Chess set (an homage to Marcel Duchamp), the Mae West Lips Sofa, the Venus de Milo with Drawers (inspired by a masochistic short story) and a Lobster Telephone.

Dalí tweaked the Surrealist's "automatic" technique of producing art without conscious thought with his "paranoid-critical" method, a structured approach to finding subconscious connections between seemingly unrelated things.

The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not at all mad.

"I like these kinds of techniques."

"He really likes to work tiny."

In 1929, Dalí met Gala Éluard, then married to the poet Paul éluard. They became inseparable lifelong companions and married in 1934. The adulterous liaison caused a break in Dali's troubled relationship with his father. He reconciled with his family in 1935.

"This has sand."

Small boy: "There's a chair, Dad. What the … ? A lipstick chair! A fish — no, a crab — phone."

With Luis Buñuel, Dalí made the influential Surrealist film Un Chien andalou (1929).

One of Dalí's last projects, in the early 1970s, dealt with holograms. The First Cilindric Crono-hologram: Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain is a rotating, moving 3-D portrait.

The first galleries record the development of the precocious youth experimenting with styles and theories like a postmodernist. In his early work, the Mediterranean light of Dalí's native Catalonia manifests itself through the rosy glow of a self-conscious Impressionism.

I believe the moment is drawing near when, by a thought process of a paranoiac and active character, it would be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion and thereby contribute to a total discrediting of the world of reality.

—"The Rotting Donkey," 1930

Salvador Dalí Through May 15, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and The Parkway, 215-684-7860