Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [116]
With so rich a lode of irrational fears fueling his art, Dalí placed a canvas beside his bed, staring at it before sleep and recording what he called “hand-painted dream photographs” when he awoke. He claimed he cultivated paranoid delusions deliberately to make himself a “medium” for the irrational, but that he could snap back to control at will.
Dalí differed from Ernst and Miró in that, instead of inventing new forms to symbolize the unconscious, he represented his hallucinations with meticulous realism. His draftsmanship is so skilled it almost has a miniaturist’s precision, but he distorted objects grotesquely and placed them in unreal dream landscapes. When Dalí attended a costume party where everyone came “as their dreams,” Dalí dressed as a rotting corpse. This recurrent nightmare often appeared in his work. His most famous, “The Persistence of Memory,” shows limp watches and a strange lump of indefinable flesh. Although metallic, the watches appear to be decomposing. A fly and cluster of jewellike ants swarm over them. “With the coming of Dalí, it is perhaps the first time that the mental windows have been opened really wide,” Breton said, “so that one can feel oneself gliding up toward the wild sky’s trap.”
Dalí, “The Persistence of Memory,” 1931, MoMA, NY. Doli used the techniques of realism for a surreal effect by distorting familiar objects and placing them in a hallucinatory context.
Magritte, “The False Mirror,” 1928, MoMA, NY. Magritte gave ordinary objects an irrational twist by juxtaposing elements of the absurd.
MAGRITTE. DREAM VISIONS. René Magritte (pronounced Mah GREET; 1898-1967), like Dalí, painted disturbing, illogical images with startling clarity. Magritte began as a commercial artist designing wall paper and fashion ads. In his Surrealist work, he used this mastery of realism to defy logic. He placed everyday objects in incongruous settings and transformed them into electric shocks, such as the flood of bowler-hatted gentlemen falling like raindrops or a piece of fried ham on a plate that is also an eyeball. These disturbing juxtapositions of familiar sights in unnatural contexts compel a new vision of reality beyond logic.
DALI: OFF THE DEEP END
An inventive self-promoter, Dalí became Mr. Surrealism more through publicity gimmicks than art. Who else but Dalí would lecture at the Sorbonne with his foot in a pail of milk or give a press conference with a boiled lobster on his head? “If you play at genius,” Dalí said, “you become one.”
At the 1936 London Surrealist exhibit, Dalí made a striking entrance with two white Russian wolfhounds. Wearing a diving suit topped by a Mercedes Benz radiator cap, Dalí began to lecture. Since the suit was bolted shut, no one could hear him. The seal was also nearly air tight, and Dalí began to gasp for breath, flailing his arms and begging the audience to extricate him. The spectators — thrilled with this exhibition of asphyxiation — applauded wildly until someone finally popped his lid off. All agreed the performance had been highly convincing.
PHOTOGRAPHY COMES OF AGE
In the Victorian era, photographers responded to critics who said their work was not art by imitating academic painting. Through darkroom gimmickry, they produced prettified, soft-focus scenes. Around the turn of the century, the tide of Modernism influenced avant-garde photographers to express their personal views of the world. They shook off their inferiority complex and concentrated on taut compositions and pure form.
Atget, “Luxembourg, Fontaine Corpeaux,” 1901-2, MoMA, NY. Atget was one of the first to record everyday objects as mysterious and evocative.
MAN RAY (1890-1977). A charter Dada and Surrealist artist was American photographer/painter Man Ray. One of the most inventive photographers of his day, he developed a technique around 1921 he called “rayographs.” In this method, he placed objects on photo-sensitive paper, then exposed it