Pyrenees Journal III: Capturing the Dalis

photograph by Hallie Cohen

Salvador Dali gave his beloved wife Gala the castle in Pubol,  which is now open to the public, on the condition that he was only allowed to visit her by appointment. Gala, who had initially been married to the poet Paul Eluard, was a fixture of a circle of surrealist poets, painters and filmmakers which included Louis Aragon, Luis Bunuel and Rene Magritte—all who been guests in Dali’s house in Cadaques the fateful summer of l929 when he and Gala first fell in love. This passage from Dali’s The Secret Life of Salvador Dali is quoted in an exhibition monograph: “She was to be my Gradiva who advances my victory, my wife.” Gradiva as the monograph explains was the heroine of a novel by W. Jensen “who carries out a psychologic cure on the main character.” Did Gala cure Dali? She was definitely a kind of perverse muse and her house with its curiosities looks a little like what Luis Bunuel might have provided for clients if he had decided to be a residential developer rather than a filmmaker. The back of a chair reveals a 3-D vista, a lion’s head sits above an armoire and the famous garden includes elephants with giraffe’s legs. No Dali house would be replete without a Cadillac and this one has a Cadillac Deville (Dali accentually created a Cadillac that rained inside which sits on the ground floor of the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres). And there’s a chess set in which all the pieces are fingers. The universe Dali inhabited was a perverse one and if you want Capturing the Friedmans surrealist style, the Gala house gives you a feeling for the existence in which the great artist was basically an absent figure in his own home, an eminence gris, who pulled the strings, while his wife cavorted with other men (as Dali pursued his own intimacies with the likes of Frederico Garcia Lorca and undoubtedly others). What is notably touching is the basement crypts designed with a hole through which the two corpses would be able to hold hands. But how did Gala attend to so many lovers in such a small bed?

Pyrenees Journal II: Spellbound

photograph by Hallie Cohen

What was more brilliant Alfred Hitchcock choosing to use Salvador Dali to create the dream sequences in Spellbound or Dali’s creation of these iconic sequences himself? The sequences if you recall are exemplifications of surrealist technique which is not surprising since the very structure of surrealism with its interests in humor, aggression and sexuality derive from the most primal elements of all dream life. And yes the dream in the movie helped to solve the crime. If you visit the Dali Theater-Museum in Figueres you will see amongst other things a citation of Dali’s book about Millet’s  “The Angelus." The three figures in Millet’s painting a peasant, his wife and child receive shall we say an unconventional interpretation. They’re father and daughter praying for absolution from the sin of incest. Dali was a believer in extreme subjectivity and he could be deemed a proto-deconstructivist to the extent that he believed that everybody will have their own interpretations of art and reality. He called his theory the "paranoiac critical method." Derrida was a Dali clone it turns out. For example, a nude of his beloved wife Gala hangs, in the central atrium of the museum You see the real Gala in his museum, but it’s like a hologram. If you attempt to photograph it an image of Abraham Lincoln appears. In one sense it’s just recycled impressionism. But the effect is like that produced by double and triple entendres in literature. Dali, as many of the works in the Theatre-Museum reveal, was a master of illusion. He was both the patient and doctor in a life long self-analysis and in fact tried (unsuccessfully) to interest Freud in his work. His self-portrait (which faces a famous portrait he did of Picasso) shows a face with hanging skin interspersed with crutches. Underneath that is a piece of bacon and a fly. perhaps one of the flies who escaped from “The Persistence of Memory”--where time literally flies. Perhaps Dali was saying he was as fragile and easily consumed as a piece of bacon. But memory is the constant   Dali might have resisted contemporary neuroscientific investigations into the reconsolidation of memory.  From the outside the museum looks like Disney World and in fact Dali’s 7 minute animation created with Disney is on exhibit too (Dali also shared an interest in cryogenics with Walt Disney). There are huge eggs on the roof, reflecting Dali’s obsession with birth, funeral bread exemplifying his fear of death and female Oscar statues which attest to his fascination with transexuality. Is it a monument like the museum Picasso created for himself in Barcelona or a playground? But that is the point. He was a clown who famously sported Velasquez’s moustache. His Velasquez sculpture with Las Meninas emblazoned on the artist’s forehead appears in another gallery and it’s interesting to note when you visit the Picasso museum in Barcelona that there’s an youthful copy of Velasquez’s portrait of Phillip IV with the famed Dali moustache or is it the other way around? And wouldn’t that be Dali’s point?