Maniac Eyeball (39 page)

Through him, I imagine myself without Gala and am shattered by retrospective terror. I did not do a single one of those illustrations but that haunting idea had me beside myself.

But the fact is I never read Dante. I dreamt about him, and then Gala, looking at the drawings I had made, placed them in the text. The best story of that kind that I know is the one about the great Dante specialist, who had spent his whole life studying the great poet, to the neglect of his family, his pleasures, and his children. Finally, he lay dying. The family gathered around his bed, to hear his immortal last words. He murmured, “Dante bores the shit out of me.” And died, a free man. I will never have that problem.

In 1963 as a Dantesque antidote I did the
Galacidalahcidesoxy-ribonucleiqué,
which is one of my most angelic and transcendental pictures in which science and heaven form Gala’s arch of triumph. I published
Le Journal
d’un Génie
(
Diary Of A Genius
) and
Le Mythe Tragique de
l’Angelus de Millet
(
The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus).

Tokyo, and then New York, with the four floors of the Gallery of Modern Art, were preparing huge retrospectives of my work.

When I did
Salvador Dalí en train de Peindre Gala,
Partici pant á l’Apothéose du Dollar dans lequel on peut
aussi Apercevoir sur la gauche Marcel Duchamp déguisé en
Louis XIV, derriere un Rideau à la manière de Vermeer qui
se Trouve actuellement être le Visage In visible mais
Monumental de l’Hermès de Praxitèle
(
Salvador Dalí
Painting Gala, Taking Part In The Apotheosis Of The Dollar
In Which One Can Also See On The Left Marcel Duchamp
Disguised As Louis XIV, Behind A Curtain In The Manner Of
Vermeer Which Happens Presently To Be The Disappearing
But Monumental Face Of Praxiteles’ Hermes
) business picked up. I was one of the kings of the world in terms of celebrity, rate of income, and the importance of my art and ideas. The rain of dollars was unabated. My chamberlain, Captain Moore spent most of his time writing up contracts and laying out five-year plans of work for me.

This was also the time when the sun of the Perpignan station illuminated me. My fate became imperial. The youth of painting was catching up with me. In 1936, I had done my
Smoking Aphrodisiaque
and the first thinking-machine that was the glorious earliest work of Pop Art; my
Esclave de
Michel Ange
(
Michelangelo’s Slave
) and
Lilith
showed that in this field no one could top me. But I was already turning my attention to holograms, the three-dimensional images made with lasers, carrying on the research and painting of
La
Pêche Au Thon
(
Tuna Fishing
), that transcend and sublimate all current revolutionary experiments, but within beauty and tradition so as to integrate all types of violence and the most extreme eroticism.

The Bible, the poems of Mao Tse-tung and Apollinaire, Casanova’s
Memoirs,
making jewels, designing fashions, doing photographic jigsaws, all held my attention, inspiring my verve and my hand. My determined eye made Dalínian signs of all values, which thus became gold.

I thought the time had come to make a break by organizing in the halls of the Hôtel Meurice in 1967 a tribute to Meissonier to announce the return to the hierarchy of values against negation, automatism, nihilism, skepticism. Enough of experimentation: Now for discipline, technique, and style!

And it happened that everyone was becoming aware that the pontiff of pompier art – whom I had always pitted against Cézanne – had invented a kind of painting that perfectly expressed the latest discoveries in physics and was more Einsteinian than any current work. Once more I proved to be right.

I had lived in the flesh and in my work an exemplary story for the men of my time. In that perspective of exchange, my fate took on the aspect of a universal myth. I, Dalí, disowned and driven out by my father, at the foot of my olive grove, among my fishermen, lived my passion to the full, like Christ. Imagining in my transports my assumption with my double – my mother – my Gala – all of them reinvented by my love and my will power – having transcended my existence of rotting flesh into the essence of life, entirely reconstructed by my own creation, I had now but heroically to assume my immortality, looking without blinking, eyes wide open, at Velázquez’ Christ, the symbol of my dead brother whom my genius kept in a state of anti-gravitation, like one of the planets in the constellation over which I held sway.

“DON QUIXOTE IS A KIND OF MADMAN, THE MOST FETISHIST ON EARTH, WHO INTENDS TO POSSESS THE RAREST THINGS IN THE WORLD. SO I FELT THAT EACH OF MY ILLUSTRATIONS FOR
DON QUIXOTE
SHOULD BE THE RAREST OF THINGS THROUGH THE MEANS USED TO MAKE IT. EACH ELEMENT OF THESE LITHOGRAPHS MUST INVOLVE AN ELEMENT OF EXACERBATED QUIXOTICISM.”

Chapter Eighteen: How To Judge Picasso, Miró, Max Ernst, And A Few Others

It was his uncle Salvador who, by blowing the smoke of his cigar up the nose of the stillborn “blue” baby, brought him back to life: in this way, Picasso was born twice. I think that all his life something in him remembered that death and resuscitation. And that in his case – as in mine – a certain image of the body, his own body, never quite shaped up. One does not die with impunity before be ginning to live!

He always seemed to be afraid of suffocating and liked to go about naked to the waist, with the wind on his chest. The impression of quiet strength that he gave was merely an appearance. He was rather on the lookout, like those bulls that come into the arena think ing they have a lot of space, only to find themselves surrounded. His art had the aggressiveness of a lunge of the horns. In attacking the human figure and everything he could identify with it, minotaur, owl, rooster, bull, he “vented his anger” and acted the decoy of freedom. The slightest obstacle infuriated him.

There are as many periods to his art as there are women he loved. He was a lover. But he felt cramped. He became enraged. He broke off, in order to start again: propulsions and repulsions like the waves of the sea make up an incessant motion that is the rhythm of his genius.

He was sadistic the better to enjoy existence by breathing in the pain of others. He once said his happiest memory was of when two women – one he no longer loved and the other he did not yet love – fought over him. He had brought on the scene by painting one in the other’s clothes, and did nothing to try to separate them.

It has been claimed (as by Professor N. N. Dracoulides in his
Le Cas Picasso
[
The Picasso Case
]) that the blue of his most famous period reflects the profoundly depressed mood of the time he was living in Paris with Max Jacob in a small room in which they had to share a bed.

Picasso painted at night while Max Jacob slept, and slept during the day when his roommate was at work. Max at the time was a deliveryman for his uncle’s bookshop. But one day he just dumped the books in the gutter so as to get done earlier, and was himself given the heave-ho. The two of them even thought of committing suicide by jumping off their balcony. Picasso got hold of himself first. In order to go back to Spain, he tried to sell some of his paintings. No one wanted them. Vollard sneered. Finally, the wife of his color dealer, Mme. Besnard, paid him sixty francs for a
Maternité au Bord
de la Mer
(
Seaside Maternity
), the same one that was sold in 1971 for half a million dollars. Enough to make you see red!

But if the blue of that period reflected anything, it was cer tainly not the price of a tube of ultramarine! Picasso may have burned some of his drawings to keep warm, but he was too much the painter to put to canvas any color that betrayed his vision. It was the phoenix blue-baby reflecting that blueness in the depths of his despair: I prefer this explanation which brings things back to the arcana of creation, the roots of metamorphoses. Picasso said, “Art is the child of rejection and suffering, and I paint as others write their autobiographies.”

Picasso is doubtless the man I have most often thought about after my father. He was my beacon when I was in Barcelona and he was in Paris. His eye was my criterion. I have come across him at all the high points of my reign.

And when I left for America, once again he was there: without him, I would have had no ticket. I thought of him as the apple-crowned boy thought of William Tell taking aim.

But he was always aiming at the apple, not at me. He radiated prodigious Catalan life. When the two of us were together, the spot at which we were must have become heavier and the noösphere assumed special density. We were the highest contrasts imaginable and conceivable. My superiority over him lay in my name being Gala-Salvador-Dalí and knowing that I was the saviour of modern art that he was bent on destroying while his name was simply Pablo. I was two and predestined. He was so alone and desperate that he had to become a Communist. He never ceased cuckolding himself.

I am often asked what will remain of Picasso’s work. What a question! All that will help to bring out the children of my own genius – when the harassed, tortured eye turns away from Picasso’s paintings, it comes to ineffable delight by simple exposure to my own. Catalonia conceived us at the same time, as heirs to the noblest of traditions, and Picasso preceded me into the world the better to set me off from the most classical delirium of the creative virtuosity of imperial masterpieces to drawings quantified by energy, which in a mechanical and mediocre universe were to have the noble task of transmuting into gold and beauty the emptiness of modern paint ing – leading to Gala-Salvador-Dalí.

Some say, “Why, Picasso never copied a photograph!” All my life I have of course used photography. Years ago I already stated that painting was merely color photography done by hand, made up of hyperfine images the only importance of which was that they were conceived by a human eye and created by a hand. All the great works of art I admire were done from photographs. The inventor of the magnifying-glass was born the same year as Vermeer. This has never been fully appreciated. And I am convinced that Vermeer of Delft used an optical mirror in which the subjects of his paintings were reflected so he could trace them.

Praxiteles, most divine of all sculptors, copied bodies precisely without the slightest subjective deformation. Velázquez, likewise, reflected reality with total chastity.

The day I planned to do a painting to the glory of St. James, I happened to bump into the Vicomtesse de Noailles, who had just bought a book on Santiago de Compostela and showed it to me. Opening it, I was immediately struck by the shell-shaped architectural vault that is the palm tree of the famous shrine which I decided to reproduce. I also looked until I found a photograph of a horse buck ing and traced it in the same way.

Exact copying of nature is no scandal, provided the painter doing this is capable if he wishes to do as well as or even better than the camera. The only scandal would lie in dissembling and pretending to have created a work one has not done.

Praxiteles said that all the beauty of a work of art lay in the bit of clay the sculptor who faithfully copied his model had neverthe less left between the nail and flesh of a finger.

If you be an artist, copy, keep copying! Something will be left of it. Something more always grows out of it.

One of Louis XIV’s sculptors was one day ordered by the king to make a medal. To flatter him, and in view of his admiration for Roman bas-reliefs, the artist decided faithfully to trace an extant Roman medal, yet his hand, in spite of himself, because he was the Sun-King’s man and not a contemporary of Caesar, added lines, small differences of touch, imponderables which slightly modified the subject. And art historians know that it was these slight modifications that gave birth to Louis XIV style.

Today, such a phenomenon is hard for us to understand, for we live in a violent period; our contemporaries like only brutal things and are unable to appreciate shadings. The only important and decisive thing in art is the touch of the painter’s brush or the sculptor’s finger. The brushstroke is the only imponderable, the angelic manner of self-expression.

Today’s abstract painters, a Mathieu for example, do their painting with terribly amplified brushstrokes, on an enormous scale. We must remember that one stroke of the artist’s brush is the equivalent of a tragedy by Sophocles.

No need to deform, contort, or cheat on reality to express one’s art. Neither Praxiteles nor Vermeer cheated in this. Yet they communicated the most sublime and complete of feelings and ideas.

Every time a painter manipulates reality, that is, does some thing other than to photograph the outside world, it is because he has a very feeble viewpoint on nature. He has a caricatural eye, and wants to give it predominance over beauty. The work is therefore aesthetically less important.

The painter’s hand must be so faithful that it can automatically correct a photograph’s deformations of natural elements. Every painter must have ultra-academic training.

Only on the basis of that can something else, in a word: art, become possible.

I divine what the new painting will be, which I call quantified realism, that is, taking into account what physicists call the quantum of energy, mathematicians chance, and we artists imponderable and beauty. Tomorrow’s picture will be the expression of the most faithful reality, but one will be able to feel that it is pulsating with extraordinary life corresponding to what is called the discontinuity of matter.

Velásquez and Vermeer were divisionists in their time. They intuited modern angst. Today, the most talented, most sensitive painters merely communicate the angst of indeterminism. Modern science tells us nothing actually exists. We see scientists arguing over apparently virgin photographic film about the existence of matter. So there is nothing abnormal about some painters making their pictures out of nothing. But that is only a transitional phase. The great painter must know how to assimilate the nothingness into his picture. And that nothingness is what will give life to tomorrow’s great art.