So Breton was impressed by Dalí and Dalí by Breton. They were friends. Dalí was making other friends in Paris, through his art and self-promotion and, of course, through his appearance. Gertrude Stein, for example, was charmed by Dalí’s looks, particularly his
‘most beautiful moustache of any European and that moustache is Saracen there is no doubt about that and it is a most beautiful moustache there is no doubt about that’.1His new friend in London, the very rich aristocratic collector and dandy Edward James – whom he had met through the Noailles – was delighted to begin collecting Dalí’s works, and entertaining him. But what was Breton, as leader of the Surrealists, to do about Dalí’s clearly reac-tionary beliefs, such as his admiration for Hitler? (Unabashed, indeed. It is the case, however, in his Vie secrète, Dalí shouts against being called ‘Itlerien’: ‘déjà la iene de l’opinion publique rode autour de moi’, he says, demanding ‘que ge me decide infin, que ge deviene ou Estalinien ou Itlerien, no! non! non! Et cent fois non! Jaller con-tinuer a etre com toujour, et jusqu’a ma mort Dalínien et seulement Dalínien!’2[‘Already the hyena of public opinion prowls around me . . . that I decide once and for all, becoming either Stalinian or Hitlerian, no! no! no! and a hundred times no! I will continue to be as always and until my death Dalínian and only Dalínian.’])
The group met to worry about all this at the opening of the Salon des Indépendants on 2 February 1932 in Paris, because of Dalí’s having sent to the salon The Old Age of William Tell and his
‘glorification of Hitlerian Fascism’, and then a special meeting on 5 February was convened. Dalí, up to his usual theatrics, kept taking off and putting on items of clothing because of his cold, and his act-ing and his rhetoric prevented his expulsion. In any case, upon his arrival in New York – prepared by a broadsheet he had decided on with Julien Levy: ‘New York Salutes Me’ – and given the success of his exhibition, he was now the obvious representative and by far the most famed one of Surrealism. At this point he was calling his way of looking ‘Concrete Irrationality’ – a perfect mix with the Paranoiac Critical Method – and referring to himself in the third person.
At the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, Dalí pronounced his famous speech ending with the claim: ‘The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad’. And lectured on Un Chien andalou (from the next showing of which, he found, Buñuel had removed his name from the credits!). And in January 1935, he lectured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on ‘Surrealist Paintings and Paranoiac Images’ with a large dose of Freud and the subconscious – you didn’t have to
under-Dalí and Man Ray photographed by Carl Van Vechten, Paris, 16 June 1934.
stand or interpret images, just simply put them down. And he was eventually to say that his own paintings were the handmade photo-graphs of his dreams. All this oneiric passion inspired the Dream Ball or the ‘Bal Onirique’ given by Caresse Crosby and Joelle Levy ( Julien Levy’s wife and the daughter of Mina Loy the writer and famous beauty). Dalí was dressed as a showcase holding a bra, in honour of Caresse Crosby’s invention of the garment. Gala wore a red cellophane skirt over a miniskirt, and on her head, a doll with a small lobster wrapped around its temples, an unfortunate choice at
Dalí with Gala and Edward James in Rome, 1930s.
this point, since it was around the time of the famous kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr, for which Bruno Hauptmann was convicted. And then the Dalí couple left for Europe.
Dalí was still occupied with reconciliation with his father, who, having undisinherited him, drew up first one new will, and then another, by which he would receive an eighth part of the estate.
Incidents from his youth recurred frequently in his paintings, for example, the death of his aunt Carolineta, who had died when he was ten, as did, of course, the spectacle of his father soiling his pants. The shame of the father was, in this and other cases, visited
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936, oil on canvas.
on his son, as Ian Gibson so frequently recalls. But for years, the painter’s obsession was tied up with his relation to Lorca, as Lorca’s was with him. Each found the other full of genius, with reason. In Cadaqués the Dalís remained, the painter working hard, as he always did, rising early, and working all day.
Among the texts on which Dalí worked was one for the Exhibition of Surrealist Objects held at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, in May 1935. For that exhibition wrote a text called ‘All Honour to the Object!’ and showed his Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket, full of glasses containing crème de menthe, supposed to arouse all sorts of fantasies. For the International Surrealist Exhibition of June–July 1936, arranged by a group of surrealizing sorts – includ-ing David Gascoyne, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, a close friend of Picasso, as well as, on the French side, Breton, Éluard, Man Ray and, for Spain, Dalí himself – he exhibited his Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, dealing with self-mutilation and cannibalism: a pure delight later titled Premonition
The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 1933, a photo collage reproduced in Minotaure, 3/4 (December 1933).
of Civil War. Breton gave his talk on ‘Limits, not Frontiers, of Surrealism’, and Dalí gave his on ‘Authentic Paranoiac Fantasies’.
He was continuing to publish in Surrealist journals like Minotaure, in which his article ‘The Spectral Surrealism of the Pre-Raphaelite Eternal Female’ in the eighth issue may have inspired Herbert Read’s laudatory remarks on the painter’s interest in the Pre-Raphaelites. His fascination in the topic of, the representation of, and the context of masturbation caused no less comment, this from Georges Hugnet. Never one for under-dressing, Dalí prepared himself by appearing in a diving-suit (to plunge into the unconscious, of course), and then – alas, got stuck in it.
A can-opener was improvised out of a billiard cue to pry it off him, but the anecdote remains rich material for the imagination, Dalí claiming to have almost perished from asphyxiation. Very good publicity.