The Life and Masterworks of Salvador Dalí. Eric ShanesЧитать онлайн книгу.

      On this trip to Spain Dalí was accompanied by an important English art collector, Edward James, who claimed descent from King Edward VII and who had built up a superb collection of Surrealist art after inheriting a fortune as a young man. Dalí had agreed to sell James his most important works, an agreement that would continue until 1939, by which time the collector had acquired over forty of Dalí’s best pictures. In 1935 James had also employed Dalí to redesign his house in Sussex in the Surrealist style, for which the painter suggested that the drawing room should recreate the feel and appearance of the inside of a dog’s stomach. The architect who supervised the project, Hugh Casson, worked out how to carry out such a request but the outbreak of World War II meant the project had to be shelved, although by that time several of Dalí’s other, less ambitious proposals for the house had been implemented.

      In the summer of 1936 Dalí visited London for the International Surrealist Exhibition being mounted at the New Burlington Galleries. He agreed to give a lecture there and requested a friend, the composer Lord Berners, to hire him a deep-sea diving suit in which to deliver the talk. When Berners telephoned a hire shop for such apparel he was asked ‘to which depth does Mr Dalí wish to descend?’, to which he replied ‘To the depths of the subconscious’. He was then told that because of such a requirement the suit would have to be fitted with a special helmet, instead of the normal one. But on this occasion Dalí’s flamboyant exhibitionism nearly killed him, for he had forgotten to request some means of obtaining air in his outlandish garb, and as a result he nearly suffocated before his companions on the lecture platform realised that something was amiss and freed him (the audience thought that it was calculated behaviour and enjoyed it immensely).

      Shortly afterwards, in mid-July 1936, the Civil War broke out in Spain. Dalí had anticipated the conflict in the Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War completed just a few months earlier, and later that year he painted Autumn Cannibalism; in both works food figures significantly, perhaps as a realisation of Dalí’s stated thinking that

      Dalí’s own response to the war was typically uncommitted, for again he fled Spain, although he was probably right to panic, for modernist artists such as himself – and especially those who had attacked the bourgeoisie and Catholicism, as he had done in Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or – were not safe there. Thus on 18 August 1936 Lorca was murdered by the fascists in Granada, although when Dalí heard the news he tried to make light of it by saying ‘Ole!’. Quite rightly, this use of the response to a successful pass in bullfighting would be thrown back in his face for the rest of his life. (Later he attempted to justify the glib remark by stating that he had uttered it in order to show how Lorca’s ‘destiny was fulfilled by tragic and typically Spanish success’.)

      When he was in London in the summer of 1936, Dalí visited The National Gallery where he looked carefully at Andrea Mantegna’s Agony in the Garden. Later he recreated the conjunction of cityscape and unusual rock structures seen in that work in paintings such as Sleep and Swans reflecting Elephants. And soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí visited Italy at the invitation of Edward James, who had rented a villa near Amalfi; from there he went on to stay with Lord Berners in Rome. It seems highly likely that on his way back to Paris (where he had settled after fleeing from Spain), Dalí stopped off in Arezzo and Florence to examine the works of Piero della Francesca, for he referred to them in print in 1937. The imagery of Piero’s linked renderings of the Duke of Montefeltro and his wife in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, later conditioned the exact form of Dalí’s 1945 portrait of Isabel Styler-Tas.

      My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture, 1945.

      Oil on panel, 61 × 52 cm.

      José Mugrabi Collection, New York.

      Napoleon’s Nose, Transformed into a Pregnant Woman, Walking His Shadow with Melancholia Amongst Original Ruins, 1945.

      Oil on canvas, 51 × 65.5 cm.

      The G. E. D. Nahmad Collection, Geneva.

      Dematerialisation of the Nose of Nero, 1947.

      Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 45.8 cm.

      Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres.

      The Angel of Port Lligat, 1952.

      Oil on canvas, 58.4 × 78.3 cm.

      Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida.

      The Dalís again visited America in December 1936, and it was on this trip that the painter received that supreme accolade of American culture, namely appearance on the cover of Time magazine. The compliment was certainly an indication of the fundamental ineffectiveness of his cultural subversion. That Christmas, Dalí sent the comedian Harpo Marx a harp strung with barbed wire which Harpo evidently appreciated. Subsequently the painter visited Hollywood to sketch out a scenario with the funnyman, a script entitled Giraffes on Horseback Salad, although this would never be made into a film.

      In the same year Dalí also began designing dresses and hats for the leading couturier to the haut monde, Elsa Schiaparelli, who had worked with Picasso and Jean Cocteau amongst others. Dalí was his usual inventive self as a designer, creating hats in the shape of upturned shoes, imitation chocolate buttons covered in bees, a handbag in the shape of a telephone and the like.

      Early in 1938 Dalí took part in the International Exhibition of Surrealism held at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in Paris, for which he concocted perhaps his most elaborate object, the Rainy Taxi, a Paris taxicab whose roof was pierced so as to admit the rain. The car contained a shop-window mannequin that was dressed in a sordid cretonne print dress decorated with Millet’s Angelus, over which two hundred live snails were free to roam. And later that year Dalí visited Sigmund Freud in London, where he made a small pen and ink drawing on blotting paper of the great Viennese psychoanalyst, a work that he later developed into some other fine portrait drawings. That autumn Dalí visited Monte Carlo to work with Coco Chanel, for whom he designed the ballet Bacchanale on behalf of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The painter called this entertainment ‘the first paranoiac ballet based on the eternal myth of love in death’, and in it he realised his intention, expressed to Lorca some years earlier, of creating a stage work around the persona and mind of the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Richard Wagner’s great patron. The ballet was choreographed by Leonide Massine and accompanied by Wagner’s music, and it transferred to New York towards the end of 1939.

      Dalí had revisited New York in February 1939 for a further exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery, and it was on this occasion that he was engaged by the Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue to design window displays, earning nationwide notoriety in the process. What the store had expected of Dalí is not known but what they got was a window revealing an astrakhan-lined bathtub filled with water and complemented by a mannequin wearing only green feathers and a red wig. Another window displayed a black satin bed supporting a mannequin resting her head on a pillow of live coals, over which stretched a canopy created out of a buffalo’s head, with a bloody pigeon stuffed in its mouth. Not surprisingly, the pedestrians who walked past this comely display began complaining as soon as it went on view early one

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