Philippe Halsman:Dalí Atomicus
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

When window-shopping along Fifth Avenue, you might wonder about the intricate objects in the storefront displays. Walk over to MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art, NYC) and get an explanation, as described by Dalí, through his paintings and film.

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born in 1904 in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Named after his brother who had died nine months earlier, he was told by his parents that he was his brother’s reincarnation. His father was a lawyer with a disciplined approach to life, whereas his mother encouraged his artistic endeavors. It was a big blow to lose his mother at age sixteen and accept his aunt as his step-mother. Dalí had a troubled relationship with his father, and had issues about his sexuality until he met his wife, muse, and mental-stabilizer, Gala, in 1929.

In the 1920s, two events led to the development of his artistic style—Sigmund Freud’s writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery, and his affiliation with the Paris surrealists, whose emphasis was on man’s subconscious over reason. By self-inducing hallucinatory states with a process he described as “paranoiac-critical,” Dalí decoded the fantasies and symbols of his surrealist visions, and penetrated into the depths of the irrational and the subconscious. These hallucinatory images, as portrayed in his paintings between 1929 and 1937, made him the world’s best surreal artist. The surrealists criticized Dalí for his extravagance and addiction to money, nonetheless, his paranoiac-critical method provided them a tool to liberate intelligence and imagination from the realm of memory, dreams, and fears.

At age three, Dalí wanted to become a cook, and at age five, he wanted to be Napoleon. He continuously aspired higher to be the divine Dalí forever. He said, “Every morning when I wake up, I experience exquisite joy—the joy of being Salvador Dalí.”

Dalí studied art in Madrid, Barcelona and Paris. The young Dalí experimented with Cubism and Dada, revered Picasso and Miró, and later devoured influences from many classic styles of art like Raphael, Bronzino, Vermeer and Velázquez. With 2,500 art pieces to his credit, he employed extensive symbolism in his work, depicting a dream world where natural objects were juxtaposed, deformed or metamorphosed in bizarre and irrational ways. For instance, his famous work The Persistence of Memory (1931), also described as Soft Watches or Melting Clocks, alludes to Einstein’s theory that time is relative and not fixed—this sense is supported by other images in the piece, such as the wide expanding landscape with ants and flies devouring watches. His paintings have been interpreted to encompass recurrent father-son figures as well as depict sexual connotations. Some were obvious and some were obscured to avoid censorship. He said, “I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion, and I am trying to paint them honestly.”

The current Dalí: Film and Painting exhibit at MoMA explores Dalí’s pictorial and cinematographic iconography, identifies his distinct visual language, and credits his work as the source which led to a continuum of productions by future artists and filmmakers. He believed that film had two dimensions: the objects themselves which present the facts, and the photographic imagination as illustrated by the film’s aesthetic. In 1929, he created the French art-film written with Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou (an Andalusian dog), which is widely remembered for the surreal scene in which there is a simulation of the slitting of the eye-ball with a razor. This film represents Dalí’s way of unleashing his dream qualities into the real world, switching scenes and images, giving different directions to the viewer. His second production with Buñuel, entitled L’age d’or (The golden age), was performed at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930. Targeted by staged riots and protests by fascist and anti-Semitic groups, this film was banned for years. Dalí’s first exhibition in New York in 1934 created an immediate sensation, inspiring a special “Dalí ball.” He appeared, wearing on his chest a glass case containing a brassiere.

“How the hell do I measure viscosity in this environment!?”
	The Disintegration of the Persistence of Science, by Adria Le Boeuf

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí fled to France. World War II brought Dalí to the United States where he lived from 1940 to 1955. He produced his most well known US-made work: the psychoanalytic dream sequence, designed for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Spellbound (begun 1945). Hitchcock took advantage of Dalí’s expertise in depicting how repressed experiences can directly trigger neuroses. Disney hired Dalí for their cartoon production Destino to make dream-like flying figures. However, the project, too ambitious to accomplish during that time, was finally only completed in 2003 by Disney animators. Dalí returned to Europe in the 1950s, and painted many religious-themed works, continued to explore erotic objects and used themes centering on his wife, Gala.

The MoMA exhibit finishes with Dalí’s film: Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975) where he narrates an expedition in search of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Obvious to Dalí’s craziness, the whole imagery is based on microscopic uric acid stains on the brass band of the ballpoint pen on which Dalí had been urinating for several weeks. In this movie, Dalí narrates his motivation for the construction of the dome for the Dalí Theatre and Museum in his hometown of Figueres. This was his largest single project and his main focus through 1974.

Dalí had a fascination for natural science and mathematics. Inspired by Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, he wrote Anti-Matter Manifesto in 1958. He said, “In the Surrealist period I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg.” He was fascinated by DNA and the hypercube—an unfolding of a hypercube is featured in his 1954 painting, Crucifixion.

Dalí was a versatile artist who, apart from painting, contributed to theater, fashion, and photography. In cooperation with Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, Dalí designed a white dress with lobster print, a shoe-shaped hat, and a pink belt with lips for a buckle. The futuristic Dalí, with Christian Dior in 1950, created a special costume for the year 2045. Dalí created an enchanting ensemble of jewels “Dalí-Joies” such as The Royal Heart, crafted with gold emeralds and diamonds, in which the center beats like a real heart. With Man Ray and Brassal, Dalí photographed nature; and with Philippe Halsman, the Dalí Atomicus represents “a painter’s easel, three cats, a bucket of water and Dalí floating in the air.”

Dalí has many architectural achievements to his credit. His Port Lligat house in Cadaques, Dream of Venus surrealist pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair has a number of unusual sculptures and statues. He has written an autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), Diary of a Genius (1952-1963), and Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution (1927-1933). He also made several etchings and lithographs.

Dalí died of heart failure in Figueres at the age of 84, seven years after Gala’s death. The Gala-Salvador Dalí foundation currently serves as his official estate. Dalí remains with us, a self-proclaimed genius, multi-talented artist who is famous for his eccentricity and exhibitionism, whose wildly inventive imagination has left a strong impression on contemporary culture.

The exhibit in MoMA will continue through September 15 and the Gallery talks and the Lectures will continue through September 17, 2008. To view the online exhibit, visit http://moma.org/exhibitions/2008/dali/