Dali’s ‘Madonna of Port Lligat’ Keeps Us Coming back for More!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Certain paintings, drawings, prints and other creations by Salvador Dali have something about them that’s a bit of a mystery to me. They’re works that not only grab ahold of me, but seduce me into coming back to them time and again, insisting that each time I return I discover something new.

Do you ever have this kind of experience with certain Dali’s? It’s really quite exhilarating! It’s art that not merely speaks to you, but almost literally reaches out, grabs you by the collar, and tenaciously draws you in with an ineffable sense of awe. Dali is just so damn exciting!

I’m having one of those experiences right now. As I write this.  As I again contemplate the extraordinary painting, The Madonna of Port Lligat of 1950.

At the time, the 46-year-old Dali considered it his greatest achievement to date. I loved the photo that ran in LIFE magazine when the immense canvas was delivered to New York’s Carstairs Gallery. It showed Dali with his hands clasped in utter self-satisfaction as he gazed up to watch the giant canvas being hoisted to the 6^th floor gallery; it was too large to fit on the stairs or elevator. Dali proclaimed it was all “like childbirth!”

What I love about a painting like this is how it can be enjoyed in whole or in part – on a kind of macro- or micro-level. The overall impact owes, in part, to its sheer size. It looked commanding indeed when I finally saw the original in the Dali: The Late Years exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2010 (though I lamented it was behind Plexiglas).

In more specific terms, the portrait of the auburn-haired Christ child – for which Juan Figueres, a 6-year-old from Cadaques, posed – is stunning. Close-ups of this central portion of the picture reveal spectacular detail in Gala’s embroidery and the Eucharistic bread seen through the transparent cut-out through both the chest of the Child and the Madonna.

The Christ child looking magnificent in auburn hair.

One detail that’s always intrigued me is the cuttlefish bones seen at left in The Madonna of Port Lligat. Cuttlefish are remarkable sea creatures that change colors and emit electronic-like changes in their appearance. In Dali’s world, those changes became, at the right side of the painting, angel wings from which the image of Gala morphs.

Studies for cuttlefish bones transforming into Gala.

As Dali’s first major Nuclear-Mystical work, everything in The Madonna of Port Lligat floats in space, representing then-new discoveries in nuclear physics – notably findings about the discontinuity of matter.

Nothing touches anything else.

Alas, Dali popularly symbolized his fascination with atomic physics and mathematics – in particular the logarithmic curve – via the horn of the rhinoceros. And here, in the cubicle at the bottom of the painting, is the first appearance of the animal, whose unique horn would be the basis of a recurring motif in many Dali works to follow.

Three other details in this large masterwork recall three other Dali paintings: the basket of bread to Gala’s lower left; the design to the right of the rhinoceros – the same as that seen in Dematerialization Near the Nose of Nero; and the dematerializing face to the right of that, seen in the 1967 work, Future Martyr of Supersonic Waves.

Taken as a whole, or examined in its seemingly endless details — such as the piece of hanging cork, seen here in Dali’s study for it —

The Madonna of Port Lligat is another giant achievement from the studio of Salvador Dali.

(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)

Dali Painted what he Saw, Not just what he Dreamed!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Everyone has their “thing” when it comes to Salvador Dali. Some love how mind-bending his paintings were. Not to mention his drawings, prints, and three-dimensional objects.

Others are fascinated by his scientific and mathematical mind. Many couldn’t get enough of his eccentricities, especially when they went public in what was invariably headline-making fashion.

Of the many “things” that make Dali irresistible to me is how you can discover certain elements in his pictures that were NOT the products of his fertile imagination, but actual things he saw in his daily life. Things that became important details within his surrealist – and sometimes not so surrealist – paintings.

Like any artist, surrealist Dali was a keen observer of his surroundings, and I find it interesting to look at some of what he saw converted into oil on canvas.

A great example is how Dali was inspired when he traveled in Italy and was taken by the deep perspective of the proscenium of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, created by architect Andrea Palladio. Witnessing this architectural work gave rise to Dali’s Palladio’s Corridor of Dramatic Surprise of 1938 and, a year earlier, Palladio’s Thalia Corridor.

Another Italian architectural wonder – the intricate and awe-inspiring interior of the Pantheon in Rome – informed Dali’s remarkable painting, Raphaelesque Head Exploding.

And the Bernini sculpture in Rome’s Piazza della Minerva square moved Dali to create his famous elephants sporting skyscraper-tall spider legs and carrying impossible obelisks or other objects on their backs.

The Church of Santa Maria in Cadaques was a great landmark for inspiration, resulting in a host of early canvases by Dali in his pre-surrealist days.

Speaking of Cadaques, that region, including Cape Creus and Port Lligat, was home to unending inspiration for Dali in the peculiar and distinctive rock formations of a largely craggy coastline. Most important is the rock at Cullero, which inspired Dali’s Great Masturbator head that appeared not only in his The Great Masturbator painting of 1929, but in many other works of his surrealist period.

Another popular natural fixture in Dali’s Spanish homeland are cypress trees, which appear in numerous Dali canvases. One in particular, My Cousin Carolinetta on the Beach at Rosas, was obviously inspired by an actual cypress tree growing within a boat, as you can see in the delightful photo here.

Cypress trees dominated the haunting painting, The Isle of the Dead, by the German artist Arnold Bocklin. This work inspired many artists, including Salvador Dali. Another artist’s work that inspired Dali to borrow a friendly element from it, was Ayne Bru’s Martyrdom of St. Cucufa. The resting dog in the early painting showed up in two of Dali’s: Myself at the Age of Six When I Believed I Was a Girl Lifting the Skin of the Water to See a Dog Sleeping in the Shade of the Sea…, and Dali, Nude, in Contemplation of Five Regular Bodies (not its complete title).

Another artist whose specific work moved Dali to paint a particular work was Pablo Picasso. His famed Guernica canvas inspired Dali to paint Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone. Notice the light bulb and anguished horse in the Dali quoted from the Picasso – both works making a statement about the horrors of war.

And then there is a disparate array of objects Dali saw in his everyday life that figured into his paintings. We’re talking such things as …

A CHESS PAWN, seen in Two Pieces of Bread Expressing the Sentiment of Love:

A COKE BOTTLE, appearing (years before Pop art was in vogue) in Poetry of America:

CAULIFLOWER, prominently seen in Nature Morte Vivante:

BREAD, beautifully captured in two versions of Basket of Bread:

WATERMELON, in Feather Equilibrium:

A FREIGHT TRAIN CAR, featured in The Perpignan Railway Station:

FLIES, flitting about in The Hallucinogenic Toreador:

CORK, hanging by a string in The Madonna of Port Lligat:

A SUNFLOWER, beautifully depicted in The Virgin of Guadalupe:

SAILING BOATS, found in such precise works as The Weaning of Furniture Nutrition:

The list could go on and on. I love seeing such objects becoming a part of a Salvador Dali painting. He was so much more than just a painter of melting clocks!

(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)

Music Strikes a Chord — and a Nerve — in Dali’s Work

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Salvador Dali was almost frustratingly contradictory. His so-called false memories, discussed in his Secret Life autobiography, added to his enigma, his living paradox.

When it came to music as an art form, Dali claimed it was woefully inferior to painting. The eye clearly triumphed over the ear, he believed. The transitory nature of music paled in comparison to the tangibility and permanence of painting, Dali insisted. And yet some of his works seem to celebrate music.

He himself was seen in at least one photograph, appearing to be playing the piano. And Dali was known to spontaneously break out in dance and song. I can confirm the latter, as, at one of my two meetings with him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, he suddenly began singing a song about the Virgin Mary!

While his early pre-surrealist canvases occasionally featured musical themes,

virtually all of the music-related compositions during his surrealist period depicted musical instruments in unnatural, sometimes sardonic states.

The piano figured especially frequently in Dali’s subject matter. Ironically, a grand piano connoted quite opposite impressions for the artist. On the positive side, young Salvador would take in, with his parents and sister, al fresco concerts the Dali family friends, the Pitchots, would perform on the cliffs of Cadaques.

Yet Dali’s strident father intentionally displayed on the Dali family grand piano a book on sexually communicated diseases, opened to especially grisly photographs.

Dali used a piano as the mode of display of his hallucinatory images of Lenin in Partial Hallucinations, Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Grand Piano. In Masochistic Instrument, a violin hangs limply in the hand of a naked woman, no doubt symbolizing Dali’s preoccupation with impotence.

A similar treatment of stringed instruments appears in Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra; and again in Daddy Long Legs of the Evening…Hope!

Dali found the piano a good source from which fountains of water sprang, including Necrophilia Fountain Flowing from a Grand Piano. And he overtly sexualized and perverted the instrument in works like Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano. He was gentler, as it were, in works like A Chemist Lifting with Extreme Precaution the Cuticle of a Grand Piano.

Music as a theme could sometimes also strike a more harmonious chord, most certainly evident in the delightful Spanish Dances in a Landscape, and in the trumpeting figures seen in one of the heroic ceiling panels Dali created for his Teatro-Museo Dali in Figueras, Spain.

Of course, music as subject matter informed many other Dali paintings, drawings, prints, watercolors – even sculpture. This would include, but certainly be not limited to, his Seven Lively Arts series, and stage sets for theatrical productions like Sentimental Colloquy and Café de Chinitas.

Music influenced Dali’s sculpture, too.

Most tragic were several paintings executed when Salvador Dali was gravely ill and in the final years of his prodigious career. He painted a number of variations of Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello. These works convey in dramatic fashion the inner demons and mental upheaval that positively consumed Salvador Dali in his last years.

Painted just before the music died.

Alas, Salvador Dali’s final painting, The Swallow’s Tail, features the F-Hole found in various stringed instruments.

The music died forever on January 23, 1989, when one of history’s greatest artists and geniuses went silent.

(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)

Look! Up in the Sky! It’s Salvador Dali!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

I once wrote that, had Salvador Dali painted nothing more than landscapes, his place in art history would still be assured. Of course, let’s be clear: Dali could have painted anything; his talent was beyond extraordinary.

Fortunately for lovers of landscape painting, Dali produced some remarkable ones – sometimes decked out in the regalia of mind-bending surrealism, on other occasions just cloaked in everyday clothes. Either way, he achieved undeniable beauty – especially in his skies.

Which is what I’m focusing on in this post: Dali’s skies. After all, he had some great inspiration in this regard: the skies over Port Lligat and Cadaques were a fountainhead of dazzling color and infinite form.

A cool place to start is with his quite beautiful and charming little painting of 1918, Old Man at Twilight. This was pretty inventive of 14-year-old Salvador, who actually glued stones to achieve a wonderful raised effect against gradations of dark blues, softer blues, greens and yellow.

Perhaps equally prominent is the sky – ablaze in orange and blue hues – in Portrait of My Father of 1921.

The pendulum swung in the opposite direction with a number of Dali paintings whose skies were essentially devoid of anything, not even clouds. These would include such works as Enigma of Desire: My Mother, My Mother, My Mother; The Great Masturbator; and The True Painting of the Isle of the Dead.

But we’d also have to include THE BIG ONE. Yeah, that one: The Persistence of Memory, Dali’s best-known work and what is easily one of the most famous paintings in history. But its sky is, well, unremarkable (yes, I hear you out there, saying, “But what should a sky look like in a dreamscape?” You make a good point).

Strange dual-color skies are found in works like Nostalgia of the Cannibal and Diurnal Fantasies, while clouds assertively dominate the sky in such works as Meditation on the Harp; Masochistic Instrument; Morning Ossification of the Cypress; The Specter and the Phantom; and Triumph of Tourbillon.

Around the mid-1930s or so, a greater number of Dali’s surrealist pictures were focused around landscape scenes, and his skies were often lovely. In this category I would mention, among many others: Paranoiac-Critical Solitude; The Chemist of Ampurdan in Search of Absolutely Nothing; Suburbs of a Paranoiac-Critical Town; Soft Construction with Boiled Beans – Premonition of Civil War; Honey is Sweeter than Blood; Landscape of Port Lligat; and The Sacrament of the Last Supper.

For whatever reason, Dali included a quite expressive cloud formation in his Portrait of Mrs. Jack Warner; the cloud almost seems to want to come alive.

Indeed, Dali put some very specific and unusual things up high in his paintings that included skies. I’m talking about works like his Portrait of John Theodoracopoulos, in which none other than Dali himself appears in the distant sky. Likewise, a portrait of Gala appears in the sky in both Gala’s Castle at Pubol and Battle of Tetuan.

Meanwhile, Dali’s iconic Christ of St. John of the Cross appears in the sun-saturated sky in Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea…, while a chair is seen hovering in the sky in The Chair stereoscopic painting.

Let’s close with a contrast: the very dark sky Dali chose for his painting, Poetry of America, and a rainbow in the sky of an otherwise somber painting, The Horseman of Death.

(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only.)

Titles of Dali’s Paintings often Intended to Confound

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

One of the fascinating, ingenious, and at times amusing aspects of the art of Salvador Dali is how he titled his works.

Some titles are so lengthy, verbose, and convoluted – or just impossible to remember – that alternative titles were adopted to abridge things and liberate writers like me from the laborious task of keystroking their names. Which I’m not sure anyone ever remembers with complete accuracy.

I think Dali chose his titles to further confound us. It added to the confusion he relished. It often injected the sense of humor he possessed, revealed cunningly in his work.

Let’s look at some of his interestingly titled works, spanning the humorous, the sexy, the naughty, the perplexing, the practical, and – to be sure – the long and confounding.

Speaking of long, the large masterwork of 1962, commonly shortened to Perpignan Railway Station (which was the site at which Dali claimed he had an ecstasy about painting in the third dimension), is actually titled:

Gala Look at Dali in a State of Anti-Gravitation in His Work of Art ‘Pop-Op-Yes-Yes- Pompier’ in Which One Can Contemplate the Two Anguishing Characters from Millet’s ‘Angelus’ in a State of Atavistic Hibernation Standing Out of a Sky Which Can Suddenly Burst into a Gigantic Maltese Cross Right in the Heart of the Perpignan Railway Station Where the Whole Universe Must Begin to Converge.

Its full title is the longest of Dali’s works.

Whew! Need to take a deep breath after that one! It’s Dali’s longest title.

One of his most widely reproduced and important works from his pure surrealism days was one whose title pointed out quite clearly the bizarre scene that was unfolding: Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone. This was Dali’s uniquely surrealist nod to Picasso’s iconic canvas, Guernica, and was mentioned by Merv Griffin when he introduced Dali as a guest on his show and wanted to amuse his audience with a bizarrely named Dali work.

Its title amused Merv Griffin.

Sometimes the titles of Dali works defied easy explanation. Three examples: Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of the Conical Anamorphoses; The Weaning of Furniture Nutrition; and Cardinal, Cardinal!

Why “Cardinal, Cardinal!”?

In the just plain naughty category, among many, we have to mention these three: Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity; Average French Bread with Two Fried Eggs without the Plate, on Horseback, Trying to Sodomize a Heel of Portuguese Bread; and Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano. These provocative titles speak for themselves.

But try saying these Dali titles without tripping over your tongue: Assumpta Corpuscularia Lapislazulina. That one’s a mouthful! Yet, when you break it down, you’ve got the assumption of the Virgin (Gala); a corpuscular pattern in the tiny cellular-like particles; and the blue hues of lapis lazuli.

Meanwhile, if Assumpta…is a mouthful, here’s a jaw-breaker: Galacidalacidesoxiribunucleicacid – mercifully also known as Homage to Crick and Watson.

Dali longest one-word title.

Then there’s a charming title, Two Pieces of Bread Expressing the Sentiment of Love. Aww!

There are also unambiguous titles: The Horseman of Death; The Dream Places a Hand on a Man’s Shoulder; Autumn Cannibalism; Metamorphosis of Narcissus; Sleep; Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach; Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire; Group of Women Imitating the Gestures of a Schooner; The Face of War, The Sacrament of the Last Supper; Christ of St. John of the Cross.

And ultra-puzzling titles: Barber Saddened by the Persistence of Good Weather; Honey is Sweeter than Blood; The Average Fine and Invisible Harp; Skull with its Lyric Appendage Leaning on a Bedside Table which Should Be the Exact Temperature of a Cardinal’s Nest; Masochistic Instrument; and, yes, even The Persistence of Memory – whose title no one has been fully comfortable understanding or explaining.

One of the most humorous titles is surely The Chemist of Ampurdan in Search of Absolutely Nothing.

And, since all good titles must come to an end – even though this one makes you wonder if it will ever end – we’ll close with a work commonly known as Apotheosis of the Dollar . . .

. . . but in actuality is titled:

Salvador Dali in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar in Which You Can See on the Left Marcel Duchamp Masquerading as Louis XIV behind a Vermeerian Curtain Which Actually is the Invisible but Monumental Face of ‘Hermes’ by Praxiteles.

The Dali difference is part of what makes him a continuing phenomenon, more popular and collectible than ever.

(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)

Dali’s Preparatory Studies give Insight into Masterpieces that Followed

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Everything Salvador Dali did was calculated. Well-thought-out. Purposeful. Deliberate. Carefully crafted.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the studies (a.k.a., preparatory sketches) he made in the process of creating masterpieces. In some cases the studies are mini-masterpieces in themselves. At least I think so, and I bet others share that view. We’ll look at some here.

Dali cared about exactitude. He was a scrupulously disciplined painter. He strove for perfection – the very thing he cautioned us never to worry about, because, he advised, we would never achieve it! But Dali tried. And his fine studies are part of the proof.

It’s possible, for some Dali collectors – whether their thing is paintings, drawings, prints, watercolors, or sculpture – to find the artist’s studies actually more appealing than the finished paintings themselves.

One example might be Dali’s truly superb study for the great 1936 oil, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans; Premonition of Civil War. While some studies are often swiftly rendered sketches simply to establish a general direction for the artist, this one is essentially a finished drawing in its own right.

Even smaller details – the figure’s gnarled foot, for instance – evolved from preliminary sketches of it in different forms and from different angles.

And there’s something wonderful about a drawing. A certain spontaneity about it that you obviously don’t get in a painting. Many collectors and aficionados like that. It gives us insight into how the artist was imagining what was to come. It’s a glimpse into his or her early vision. Here’s a study for Dali’s first version of Madonna of Port Lligat, alongside the finished oil.

In short, Dali’s studies illustrate how much he cared about approaching the perfection he knew no one could achieve.

One of Dali’s earliest visions was the double-imagery he achieved in what I believe is his first double-image oil painting: The Invisible Man of 1929. Look at how a 25-year-old Dali carefully constructed the linear perspective lines that would hold his vision together as he prepared to paint a quite complex and extraordinarily accomplished canvas.

Another exceptional study was the one Dali created for his 1954 Soft Watching at the Moment of First Explosion This is another case where the study itself is rather masterful. Similarly, his study for the painting Tristan and Isolde is, in itself, quite compelling in its sort of roughly hewn look.

Here’s the maestro’s great Metamorphosis of Narcissus with one of its pencil studies:

And look at the many studies Dali created during the process of developing one of his most ambitious works – a painting I keep coming back to as perhaps the single greatest of all the magic Dali performed on canvas: his 1970 Hallucinogenic Toreador. Just about all the key elements in this masterwork – from the Venus de Milos to the shape of the toreador’s face to the image of Gala and even down to the morphology of those plump flies – was first worked out in preliminary studies.

Unlike so many of the other artists working during Dali’s time, the Catalan master invested painstaking efforts to ensure that what came off of his easel were works truly worthy of being called masterpieces. Works that reached near-perfection.

(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)

Dali’s ‘Anti-Protonic Assumption’ a Mystical Masterpiece

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

I wish blogs could somehow give readers an actual tactile sensation of how certain paintings by Salvador Dali can make a person feel. I don’t know about you, but there’s something about certain Dali’s that stir my sense of awe, wonderment, and passion more than others.

It’s hard to describe, and even more so to understand, unless you’ve felt it yourself. Even then, such works can leave us with the unresolved mystery of just why we connect with them so strongly. And why, from a physical, tactile perspective, they can literally make the hair on your arms stand up! (That happened to a Dali expert recently; read further for the tingly details!)

One such work occupies this blog’s spotlight today. It’s a rarely seen, seldom considered, not widely exhibited, unique and spectacular little 1956 gem called Anti-Protonic Assumption.

This approximately 24 inch x 28 inch oil on canvas was painted when Salvador Dali was completely drenched with excitement and wonder over new discoveries about the nature of matter, thanks to hard-working nuclear physicists.

The title alone gives us an essential key to what this painting meant to Dali. According to a web source, an antiproton “is the antiparticle of the proton. Antiprotons are stable, but they are typically short-lived, since any collision with a proton will cause particles to be annihilated in a burst of energy” (italics mine).

Who better than Salvador Dali to express pictorially an antiprotonic “burst of energy”! Especially when he could wrap the idea around an image of his beloved wife, Gala, and his burgeoning belief that science was pointing more and more to the truths of Christianity.

And we see Gala not once, but twice in this painting, which hangs in the Morohashi Museum of Modern Art in Fukushima, Japan. (Ironically, the Morohashi owns another masterful Dali painting that also features Gala’s portrait twice: The Battle of Tetuan of 1962).

First, of course, in Anti-Protonic Assumption, we see Gala as the ascending Madonna figure, bursting with energy, her body explosively composed of hundreds of dazzling atomic-like particles. The form of those particles echo the outsized rhinoceros horn on the left side of her elongated, El Greco-like body, representing Dali’s obsession with the fact that the rhino horn is a naturally occurring logarithmic curve.

Detail of Anti-Protonic Assumption

Gala’s huge crown or halo adds sovereignty to an already exalted figure, at a time when Gala and Dali were still an inseparable pair. The crown here also relates to Dali’s fascination with a dramatic slow-motion film made with high-speed photography years ago of a splashing drop of milk, creating the same kind of crown effect.

The center of the crown above Gala also appears a bit like an oculus, with light streaming through – reminiscent of Dali’s Raphaelesque Head Exploding of 1951.

A comparison surely must be made between Anti-Protonic Assumption and Dali’s much, much larger 1952 picture, Assumpta Corpuscularia Lapislazulina.

Assumpta Corpuscularia Lapislazulina (detail)

The second appearance of Gala in Anti-Protonic Assumption is seen in the lower right. Her pose is quoted directly from the classic painting, Virgin of the Rocks (1483), by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks

Dali’s veneration of the Renaissance masters was well understood, and here he nods both to Leonardo directly and El Greco more subtlety in the elongation of the central figure of Gala.

“It is so detailed!” enthused Dr. Elliott King, a Dali expert and friend, who just returned from an eye-opening Dali adventure in Japan.

King with the “Queen”

King was talking about Anti-Protonic Assumption, adding: “It’s really lovely, and the blues and pinks are bright.” He noted there is slight impasto on the flowers coming out of the tomb/box. “It blew me away…seeing it in person was a surprise…it may be my new favorite painting.”

(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)

Dali’s Massive ‘Battle of Tetuan’ is a Jewel for Japan

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

My friend, Dr. Ellliott King – a widely respected Salvador Dali expert – has just returned from a very special trip to Japan, and now he finally got to check off a major bucket list item: seeing in the flesh the remarkable Dali masterwork, The Battle of Tetuan.

This gigantic 1962 oil on canvas is one of Dali’s most complex and powerful images, chockablock with references to history, numerology, and mystery. The surrealist touches are here, of course – the huge flying horse, the elongated Ghost of Vermeer of Delft leg, the appearance of a general’s arm brandishing a sabre.

The Battle of Tetuan was fought in 1860, near Tetuan, Morocco, between a Spanish army sent to North Africa and the tribal levies which at the time made up the Moroccan Army. The battle was part of the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859-1860.

Battle of Tetuan by Mariano Fortuny, to whom Dali’s version is in homage.

I recall several conversations with Elliott King about how I, too, saw Battle of Tetuan in person, back around 1992, at Christie’s auction house in New York City. It sold that night for upwards of $2 million.

Unfortunately, the painting was hung in an anteroom through which auction guests had to pass in order to enter the main room. The massive painting was hung on a left wall, and a very narrow passageway was set up between the wall and a guard rail. As a result, you had to look up, straining your neck in order to see the work. You actually got the feeling you were being trampled by all those horses!

This made it next to impossible to view the work properly, given the low and restrained vantage point. Many people filed down the entranceway to the auction space completely unaware that the great Dali picture was there at all.

Indeed, I didn’t realize it myself at first. When I did, I’d wished there’d been an opportunity to study it from a proper distance. I would rather have examined and enjoyed the painting all evening than attend the sales activity in the adjoining room (albeit I did get to meet singer/song writer Carly Simon, who was attending the auction).

Here we see a photo of Dr. Elliott King, his wife, and others at Japan’s Morohashi Museum of Modern Art in Fukushima, with the Battle of Tetuan as a dramatic backdrop. The museum owns a number of additional Salvador Dali paintings of exceptional importance, including Anti-Protonic Madonna.

I’ve yet to see Anti-Protonic Madonna in person. From the excitement Elliott has expressed in a brief Facebook note (he has not returned from Japan as of this writing), it is much more colorful and far more spectacular in the flesh than anyone can imagine from seeing simply a book reproduction.

Detail of Anti-Protonic Madonna

In an upcoming blog post, I hope to talk more about Dr. King’s trip to Japan’s world of Dali, and in particular his take on both Battle of Tetuan and Anti-Protonic Madonna.

Salvador Dali’s Full Plate of ‘Fried Eggs!’

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Sunny-side up! Fried eggs. They were a fetishistic obsession for Salvador Dali. They seemed to turn up everywhere. And like so many things in this genius’s life, there were multiple meanings and interpretations associated with these popular breakfast items throughout his surrealist feasts on canvas.

One suggestion is that the soft, gooey, gelatinous consistency of fried eggs reminded Dali of what he claimed was his vivid memory of his intrauterine days before the “traumatism of birth” (referencing a book of the same name by Dr. Otto Rank, which Dali loved). Dali’s description of his pre-natal existence appeared in his autobiography and was quoted by Orson Wells in the television documentary, Salvador Dali: A Soft Self-Portrait.

“Already at that time,” Dali wrote in The Secret Life, “all pleasure, all enchantment for me was in my eyes, and the most splendid, the most striking vision was that of a pair of eggs fried in a pan, without the pan…The eggs, fried in the pan, without the pan, which I saw before my birth were grandiose, phosphorescent and very detailed in all the folds of their faintly bluish whites….”

Another element in exploring the symbolism of Dali’s ubiquitous fried eggs was his lifelong fascination/fetish with the concept of the hard and the soft. In this case the relatively hard, protective shell watching guard over the soft interior egg.

This hard and soft motif was seen in his obsession with such items as lobsters, sea urchins, and crayfish – the latter of which he fancied served with a generous slathering of chocolate sauce!

One author advanced the belief that the sticky and slimy nature of fried eggs was reminiscent of milk and semen. Most anything is plausible, I suppose, especially knowing that sex was never far from the top of Dali’s mind!

There are at least two other theories we should consider, and they both pertain to Salvador Dali’s wife, Gala. One is that two fried eggs ineluctably resemble female breasts. This seems perfectly consistent with Dali’s normal interest in his wife’s bosom; its petite size made such an association perhaps all the more viable.

Finally, two other twin body parts sort of echo two fried eggs – on a plate or otherwise: Gala’s eyes.

Dali likened them to the image of fried eggs – further noting that her trenchant, piercing gaze could penetrate a stone wall.

(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)

Is the ‘Wounded Watch’ the Body of Dali Himself?

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

I sense there’s a tendency among Dali aficionados to focus only on the artist’s works up to 1970, the year he painted his last truly great and inspired masterpiece, The Hallucinogenic Toreador of 1970 (Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida). Dali’s post-1970 pictures – those works he still managed to produce during his increasingly tenuous physical and mental health – are, I fear, often overlooked.

If my hunch is correct, why is that?

I think a big reason is that this body of work has not been widely reproduced in books, much less examined to any serious degree. What’s more, they’re admittedly lacking in the sharp and precise detail, and vibrant color palette, that typified and added to the appeal of Dali’s earlier works.

But there are exceptions. And I’ll be spotlighting some of them in future blog posts.

I want today to consider a 1974 oil titled The Wounded Soft Watch. While so many of Dali’s works of the 1930s and well beyond were inscrutable, the works in his waning creative years seem far clearer and direct in their symbolism.

Is the wounded watch Dali himself?

Is there really any other way to interpret The Wounded Soft Watch than to see it as a metaphor for the impending physical failure of the artist himself? Although Dali still appeared in pretty solid shape at this point in his life (he was 70) – and indeed I myself was in his presence in 1974 at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, and he looked fit – it would not be much longer before his health began to slide.

Can we not, therefore, view the watch in the present painting as the body of Dali himself, wounded and requiring the help of four crutch-carrying assistants? Indeed, the watch itself has a kind of human-like shape to it, doesn’t it?

For Dali, of course, it was not enough to have just any four individuals rescue this limp watchman – this embodiment of the man who invented the concept; two of them had to be angels, one gallantly on horseback.

Meanwhile, the landscape is devoid of distractions. No vegetation. No other people. No buildings or rocks or surrealist props. The focus is intended to be entirely upon the wounded Dali soft watch…the wounded Dali watch…the wounded…Dali.

Is this interpretation plausible? You’ll have to decide for yourself. Admittedly, Dali wasn’t normally prone to discussing or acknowledging his physical deficits. He never wanted to show weakness of body, mind, or spirit.

And yet, in his final years, that wasn’t as true as in his younger days. His remarkable painting, Bed, Chair and Bedside Table Ferociously Attacking a Cello (1983), is an example: it lays bare the reality of Dali’s personal torment – and his awareness of it.

Dali’s personal torment, exposed.

In future posts, from time to time, I want to examine several other of the very last works of Salvador Dali. They should by no means be a life unexamined.

(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)