of attitude began to come over the artist, one that would eventually lead to an alteration in the direction of his work.
Early in 1935 Dalí lectured in Hartford and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it was during these talks that he made the much quoted claim that ‘the only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad’. And before the Dalís sailed back to Europe, Caresse Crosby organised a farewell fancy-dress party, the ‘Dream Betrayal Ball’ or ‘Bal Onirique’, at a fashionable New York restaurant. Dalí wore a pair of spotlit breasts supported by a brassière for this event, but for once the other participants appear to have outdone him in the surreality of their costumes. Indeed, Gala nearly caused a scandal because her headdress sported the effigy of a baby’s corpse, possibly in an allusion to the kidnapped Lindbergh baby that had been murdered a few months earlier. Confronted with this act of calculated offensiveness by a reporter, the Dalís denied it, although later they privately confessed their intention.
In the summer of 1935 Dalí published an important essay, ‘The Conquest of the Irrational’, in which he outlined his aesthetic, stating that
My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialise the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision. – In order that the world of imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident, of the same consistency, of the same durability, of the same persuasive, cognitive and communicable thickness as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality. – The important thing is what one wishes to communicate: the concrete irrational subject. – The means of pictorial expression are placed at the service of this subject. – The illusionism of the most abjectly arriviste and irresistible imitative art, the usual paralysing tricks of trompe-l’oeil, the most analytically narrative and discredited academicism, can all become sublime hierarchies of thought, and the means of approach to new exactitudes of concrete irrationality.
Unfortunately, what Dalí excluded from this cogent statement of aims was the possibility that the visual academicism would take over from any need to find something new to say.
In September 1935 Dalí had his last meeting with Lorca when the poet passed through Barcelona. The painter had written to Lorca suggesting that they should collaborate on an opera which would bring together King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Leopold Sacher-Masoch, but the poet was evidently unresponsive. And although Lorca was overjoyed to see Dalí again – they had not met since 1927 – he was puzzled by the painter’s marriage, for as he later told a friend, Dalí could never be sexually satisfied by any woman when he hated breasts and vulvas, was terrified of venereal disease, and was sexually impotent and anally obsessive.
Tristan and Isolde (design for the ballet Mad Tristan), 1944.
Oil on canvas, 26.7 × 48.3 cm.
Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres.
The Eye, design for Spellbound, 1945.
Oil on panel.
Private collection.
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
When a war breaks out, especially a civil war, it would be possible to foresee almost immediately which side will win and which side lose. Those who will win have an iron health from the beginning, and the others become more and more sick. The ones [who will win] can eat anything, and they always have magnificent digestions. The others, on the other hand, become deaf or covered with boils, get elephantiasis, and in short are unable to benefit from anything they eat.
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.
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