Maniac Eyeball (40 page)

I believe the artist is the true cosmologist of the world and the painter the most compelling of artists because he is dominated by the eye – the highest organ in the hierarchy, the one that dominates situations in all ways.

It is very important for an artist to have a developed sense of the cosmos. I am much more important as a cosmic genius than as a painter. My painting is but one of the means for me to express my cosmic sense. My delirium and lucidity are more important than my painting.

How Dalí Remembers His Relations With Picasso

 He had a feel for adjectives, but few ideas. He listened to me and gratified me with answers full of modifiers. His whole brilliance lay in his skill as plagiarist and stager-as-jewel-setter. When all was said and done, Picasso was a duettist. He always needed a partner: Ingres, Delacroix, Velázquez, and others I forget. But he was a eunuch, a caricaturing imitator who tore down and made fun of what he could not outdo.

When the magazine
Minotaure
was coming out, he and I played a game of working together on a picture that each of us redid five times. The point was to react to each other’s work. I thus saw his work processes close up. And Picasso then kept the original: he did not like incriminating evidence left around. All he knew how to do was to distort as he copied.

Picasso’s great discovery was Cubism, and at that he took it straight out of Catalan sculpture; it is the pictorial transposition of a position of a sculptured volume found in Catalan churches. A flattening of a three-dimensional object. Cubism was the holography of 1912.

No one at the time understood the plastic significance of this appeal, but Picasso kept at it despite the loneliness and his friends’ jibes; mainly, because he wanted to go through with what he had started. He was very stubborn. For instance, he admired Juan Gris, who was a real painter. He often visited him in his studio and Juan Gris then walked him back home, but then Picasso walked him back again so he could go back into the studio and see him paint and understand how he did his grounds. But he was not patient, nor painter, enough to do as well.

In his whole painting life, Picasso never did anything but projects. He had to do the same subject a hundred times, for he never knew which was the right one. Others had to make the choice for him. The only thing he never pulled off was a real painting.

Not one masterpiece! But a prodigious quantity of satires. He was a barbarian. Whence his success in a period interested only in immediate effect. His work was a great cymbal clap.

Each year, I sent him a postcard to remind him of an old story he had told me. In Cadaqués there was a contralto who had posed for a photographic postcard, holding Samson’s head. Her underarms had tufts of hard black hairs that titillated us greatly – they were blacker and harder than Samson’s. One day when her lover wanted to fuck her, she refused and went out on the balcony shouting, “In July, do not have women or snails.”

Picasso never replied, but I knew he always enjoyed my annual card and this reminder. But those around him stood between us. If he had answered me, they probably would have called him a traitor to the cause. He was the prisoner of his political system, which after all was on the base level of the mob. He got his inspiration from the blood and sweat of the people. Nothing sublime in him – just always the need to make Judy O’Grady laugh or cry! He was gifted, but not skillful. The only positive thing to be said for him was that he was cleverer than Cézanne – who is really lower than low!

What Dalí Sees As The Key To Painting

The day I discovered the key to art I fell to my knees and thanked God. With both knees on the ground! And hands together! Leonardo da Vinci agreed with Euclid that the egg was the most perfect of shapes; to Ingres, the sphere was ideal; Cézanne put his faith only in the cube and cylinder.

The truth lies not in any shape but in a geometric locus that is the same for all curved shapes of the human body: I discovered this golden rule at the rounded point of the heaven swept cone of the rhinoceros horn. You can find it for yourself. The point is to apply this inquisitorial mathematics with an implacable rigor that alone can give rebirth to great painting.

I think the time is past for painting algae in the manner of Matisse, that lugubrious kitchen chef for the bourgeois heirs to 1789. A painter of hairs on the soup! I invite the world to a gastronomical and aesthetic revolution: softness, viscousness, gooeyness, against the straight line, the acute angle, the sign disincarnate. A painting of desire and erection. A painting of error and holiness. A painting of the sublime!

Geometry is always Utopian and bodyless. I have often proclaimed: “Geometers rarely get a hard-on!” Many good craftsmen strayed into painting: Kandinsky, for instance, who would have fared admirably as a manufacturer of enamel-headed canes.

Cézanne is the finest expression of this decadence. He was truly unable to imitate the masterpieces and all of his admired tech nique is merely proof of his inability. His apples are made of cement. The paradox is that what is least admirable is most admired: nullity! What a symbol for a period! On the pretext of the academic being detestable, the worst in the class was made a hero! He opens the door to the ethics of shit! Newness at whatever cost – and art becomes just a latrine! The logic of this search for newness leads to the glorification of total shit of which Cézanne is the high priest.

Meissonier was the last painter who knew how to paint. After him came the period of disaster. (Thank God nothing but documents will remain of those two scourges, modern art and Russian Communism.) Accepted to the Salon at nineteen, Meissonier began an extraordinary career, the high points of which were the sale of his
1814
for three billion old francs and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s telegram of condolences to the President of France when the painter died.

What a success his existence was! What an exploit his painting which turned minute faithfulness to detail into a golden rule allowing him to assimilate the complexness, the density, and the tragedy of his time.

I see only his pupil Detaille to rival him. Received by all the sovereigns of Europe, mobilizing entire armies as extras so as to get the feel of reality when he did his sketches, calling in President Jules Grévy, Detaille was great enough so that it can be said that without him salon painting would have gone out of existence. And his sense of micro-structures was carried forward by the Cubists.

The eight hundred paintings of Gustave Moreau are in the studio-museum he willed to the State, where dreamy adolescents fall under their spell. At the end of the nineteenth century, beauty and love were conveyed by him, and will be for a long time to come. Surrealism owes him a great deal.

In Boldini I like the sensuality that lets him undress a woman with a biting stroke and makes his graphicness one of the revelations of modern painting.

I like Millet’s erotic cannibalism, which recurs in my work. But what I don’t like is just as clear.

The art of painting could have done without all German painting, and especially the work of Max Ernst; quite incapable of grasping what the phenomenon of beauty is, he is merely a good illustrator. Dürer – one of the rare Germans to know how to draw – is but a pale reflection of the Italian Renaissance.

Braque used to say, “I like the rule that keeps emotion in check.” Which Juan Gris felicitously corrected into, “Let us like the emotion that keeps rule in check.” Braque is the French petit bourgeois of good taste, perfectly suited as a house painter, imitator of fake marble.

He was lucky in that nature took a hand in finishing his work, and his collages, for example, would be less successful without the flyshit that quantifies them.

Miró is a Catalan peasant, very gifted as are all Catalan peasants, but quite incapable of “murdering painting” as he set out to do. He might have been successful as a society painter because he looked good in evening dress, but he stuck to folklore and that hurts his standing.

Léger is the worst of all; even Braque is better than this flat foot, for he at least is sometimes pleasing.

Soutine belongs to a filthy family of drunks.

Moore, compared to Praxiteles’
Hermes,
is the village idiot, his work a sculpture of holes.

On the other hand, I admire Marcel Duchamp who was first to paint mustaches on the
Mona Lisa,
to underline her ambivalence. Is she the Oedipal portrait of Leonardo’s mother, or the shell-game image of his prattboy? Duchamp posed the question properly with his phonetic caption for the mustachioed Gioconda:
LHOOQ
(pronounced:
Elle a chaud
au cul
, or:
Her arse is in heat)
.

I like De Kooning, the colossus straddling the Atlantic with one foot in New York and the other in Amsterdam, whose paintings suggest the geological dreams of earliest ages and the cosmic happenings that record the adventures of the planet.

But today, fake culture sneaks in everywhere. One day at the St. Regis in New York, I met André Malraux. We discussed the his tory of art. I told him Oriental art was nothing and ought to be passed over in silence, which would be a great savings.

He retorted that Oriental art was just as important as Occidental.

“Let’s take a closer look,” I said. “I’ll name you three Western masterpieces and you name me three masterpieces of your art of the East.” And I enumerated Velázquez’
Las
Meninas,
Raphael’s
Madonna,
and Vermeer’s
View of Delft.

“Your turn.”

He told me there was a fragment of a Chinese horse’s head, of he could not remember which dynasty, that he said was sublime. But what horse? What work? What dynasty? What fragment? How? Why? By whom?

Nothing. A total poverty of culture.

For the same reasons, I vomit on Monsieur Le Corbusier’s infamous architecture. What leaden heaviness in that Protestant masochist who depersonalized the house! With delight, I compare to his work that of Buckminster Fuller, with the anti-gravity structures that breathe with the breath of life.

The sublime structures of our time are those of the American Fuller who conceived the first monarchic structures of modern architecture, since he resurrected the Louis XV ideal of Ledoux, who had made the first completely spherical houses and domes. This work was interrupted by the nefarious French Revolution, which destroyed the legitimate aspirations of the aristocracy and in its place installed the bourgeoisie, until the day when Fuller came along with the lightness of his structures, almost as wispy as the dandelion seeds on the cover of the
Petit
Larousse.
One puff and they fly away...

Emilio Piñero, in Spain, also invented structures which Fuller has said he would not know how to solve, because their lightness is so molecular and alive. They are based on tensions that develop on their own, sheaves connected by cables; undo the cables, and they all spread out and become rigid. This is quasi-living cellular architecture.

I hope that the Europe of separate countries will be covered by drawings and architecture conceived by Piñero and Fuller. Countries are spherical structures that will stretch, as De Gaulle used to say, from Brittany to the Urals! Karl Marx was completely wrong about everything. Historically he is the greatest cuckold of mankind. He predicted that we would live through a class struggle, which has been proven wrong, as we know, since soon there will be no more classes, though there may be a race struggle – Blacks, Whites, Chinese, and Japanese. Marx’s mistake will be seen by the acceptance of Fuller’s and Piñero’s architecture in the USSR, when that country changes its regime.

Architecture is the demonstration that a period has reached a certain level of knowledge of structures, that is, architecture must sum up all structures, from quantum physics to biology. There is much talk today of structuralism, but architecture is what creates moral structure and ethics.

Mankind’s greatest drama on this earthly globe was the time when the Bay of Biscay opened and the continents separated. The Perpignan area stood its ground, and thanks to that there was Velázquez, Vermeer, and Europe. But for that sacred region, we would be in Australia with the kangaroos.

If everything held, it was because of the Perpignan region. When the Bay of Biscay opened, there were anti-gravitational anom alies that caused the eels’ breeding patterns to be changed and distended. These colossally migrating fish through all the phenomena followed the same paths for millions of years. The same goes for men, and the best pilgrimage is to Santiago de Compostela. Men, grass hoppers, eels go along certain paths and fight certain battles without knowing why. It would seem that human blood merely follows ancestral ruptures despite the ruptures between continents. Great architecture tries to reconcile us with the universe.

To me, the criterion of great art is that it produce an equivalence of the hazel color of Gala’s eyes, to the extent that her eyes are anti-reality. I believe in the discrediting of reality, and the artist’s role is to systematize confusion by imposing his obsession on others. The point is to use the elements of the outside world to illustrate the determinations of the mind. To create the “reality” of the double image is proof of the proper application of the paranoiac-critical method. Ruse and skill, taking advantage of the slightest coincidences of shapes and colors, can transform the image of a goat into a horse, a cloud, a woman, and the acceleration of desire gives this creative power infinite capability.

What is reality? What is simulacrum? There is neither osmosis nor comparison between the two. The presence of simulacrum is gratuitous but compelling and everything is interchangeable. Shit, blood, and death conceal treasures.

Einsteinian relativity does not exist only in the domain of physical geometry but also in the world of ideas and poetry. Paranoiac-critical delirium alone is able to give us the feel of the disharmony of the real. An artist is judged on this vision of the world.