Who did Dali put on the telephone receiver in one of his sculptures, options? A. Petryakov

On May 11, 1904, a son was born into the family of a wealthy Catalan notary, Salvador Dalí i Cusi. By that time, the couple had already experienced the loss of their beloved first-born, Salvador, who died at the age of two from brain inflammation, so it was decided to give the second child the same name. Translated from Spanish it means "Savior".

The baby's mother, Felipe Domenech, immediately began to care for and pamper her son, while the father remained strict with his offspring. The boy grew up as a capricious and very wayward child. Having learned the truth about his older brother at the age of 5, he began to be burdened by this fact, which further influenced his fragile psyche.

In 1908, the Dali family welcomed a daughter, Ana Maria Dali, who later became a close friend of her brother. The boy became interested in drawing from early childhood, and he was good at it. A workshop was built for Salvador in the utility room, where he spent hours alone to create.

Creation

Despite the fact that he behaved provocatively at school and did not study well, his father sent him to painting lessons from local artist Ramon Pichot. In 1918, the first exhibition of the young man’s works took place in his native Figueres. It featured landscapes inspired by Dali's picturesque surroundings. Until his last years, Salvador will remain a great patriot of Catalonia.

Already in the first works of the young artist it is clear that he is mastering the painting techniques of the Impressionists, Cubists and Pointillists with special diligence. Under the guidance of art professor Nunens, Dali created the paintings “Aunt Anna Sewing in Cadaqués,” “The Twilight Old Man,” and others. At this time, the young artist became interested in the European avant-garde; he read the works of. Salvador writes and illustrates short stories for a local magazine. In Figueres he gains some fame.

When the young man turns 17, his family experiences a great loss: his mother dies of breast cancer at the age of 47. Dali’s father will not stop mourning for his wife until the end of his life, and the character of Salvador himself will become completely unbearable. As soon as he entered the Madrid Academy of Arts that same year, he immediately began to behave defiantly towards teachers and students. The antics of the arrogant dandy caused outrage among the Academy professors, and Dali was expelled from the educational institution twice. However, staying in the capital of Spain allowed the young Dali to make the necessary contacts.

Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Buñuel became his friends; they significantly influenced the artistic growth of El Salvador. But it was not only creativity that connected the young people. It is known that García Lorca was not shy about his unconventional orientation, and contemporaries even claimed his connections with Dali. But Salvador never became homosexual, even despite his strange sexual behavior.

Scandalous behavior and lack of academic art education did not prevent Salvador Dali from gaining worldwide fame just a few years later. His works of this period were: “Port Alger”, “Young woman seen from the back”, “Female figure at the window”, “Self-portrait”, “Portrait of a father”. And the work “Basket of Bread” even ends up at an international exhibition in the USA. The main model who constantly posed for the artist to create female images at this time was his sister Ana Maria.

Best paintings

The artist’s first famous work is considered to be the canvas “The Persistence of Memory,” which depicts liquid hours flowing from a table against the backdrop of a sandy beach. Now the painting is in the USA at the Museum of Modern Art and is considered the master’s most famous work. With the assistance of his beloved Gala, Dali exhibitions begin to take place in various cities in Spain, as well as in London and New York.

The genius is noticed by the philanthropist Viscount Charles de Noeil, who buys his paintings at a high price. With this money, the lovers buy themselves a decent house near the town of Port Lligata, which is located on the seashore.

In the same year, Salvador Dali takes another decisive step towards future success: he joins the surrealist society. But here, too, the eccentric Catalan does not fit into the mold. Even among the rebels and disturbers of traditional art, such as Breton, Arp, de Chirico, Ernst, Miro, Dali looks like a black sheep. He comes into conflict with all participants in the movement and ultimately proclaims his credo - “Surrealism is me!”

After coming to power in Germany, Dali began to have unambiguous sexual fantasies about the politician, which found expression in his artistic work, and this also outraged his colleagues. As a result, on the eve of World War II, Salvador Dali breaks off his relationship with a group of French artists and leaves for America.

During this time, he managed to take part in the creation of Luis Bonuel’s surreal film “Un Chien Andalou,” which was a great success with the public, and also had a hand in his friend’s second film, “The Golden Age.” The young author’s most famous work of this period was “The Riddle of William Tell,” in which he depicted the Soviet leader of the Communist Party with a large exposed gluteal muscle.

Among several dozen paintings from this time, which were exhibited at personal exhibitions in the UK, USA, Spain and Paris, one can highlight “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, or Premonition of Civil War.” The picture appeared just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, along with “Exciting Jacket” and “Lobster Telephone.”

After visiting Italy in 1936, Dali began to literally rave about the art of the Italian Renaissance. Features of academicism appeared in his work, which became another contradiction with the surrealists. He writes “Metamorphoses of Narcissus”, “Portrait of Freud”, “Gala - Salvador Dali”, “Autumn Cannibalism”, “Spain”.

His last work in the style of surrealism is considered to be his “Dream of Venus”, which appeared in New York. In the USA, the artist not only paints, he creates advertising posters, designs stores, works with and helps them with the art design of films. At the same time, he wrote his famous autobiography, “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Written by Himself,” which instantly sold out.

Last years

In 1948, Salvador Dali returned to Spain, to Port Lligat, and created the canvas “Elephants”, personifying post-war pain and devastation. In addition, after this, new motifs appear in the work of the genius, which draw the viewer’s gaze to the life of molecules and atoms, which is manifested in the paintings “Atomic Leda”, “Splitting of the Atom”. Critics attributed these paintings to the style of mystical symbolism.

From this period, Dali also began to paint canvases on religious subjects, such as “Madonna of Port Lligata”, “The Last Supper”, “Crucifixion or Hypercubic Body”, some of them even received the approval of the Vatican. In the late 50s, at the suggestion of his friend, businessman Enrique Bernat, he developed the logo for the famous Chupa Chups lollipop, which became an image of a chamomile. In its updated form, it is still used by production designers.

The artist is very prolific with ideas, which brings him a considerable constant income. Salvador and Gala meet the trendsetter and remain friends with her for the rest of her life. Dali's special image with his invariably curled mustache, which he wore already in his youth, becomes a sign of his time. A cult of the artist is created in society.

The genius constantly shocks the audience with his antics. He repeatedly takes photographs with unusual animals, and once even goes for a walk around the city with an anteater, which was confirmed by numerous photographs in popular publications of that time.

The decline of the artist’s creative biography began in the 70s due to the deterioration of his health. But still Dali continues to generate new ideas. During these years, he turned to the stereoscopic technique of writing and created the paintings “Polyhydras”, “Submarine Fisherman”, “Ole, Ole, Velasquez! Gabor! The Spanish genius begins to build a large house-museum in Figueres, which is called the “Palace of the Winds”. The artist planned to place most of his paintings there.

In the early 80s, Salvador Dali received many prizes and awards from the Spanish government; he was made an honorary professor at the Paris Academy of Arts. In his will, which was made public after Dali's death, the eccentric artist indicated that he would transfer his entire fortune of $10 million to Spain.

Personal life

The year 1929 brought changes to the personal life of Salvador Dali and his relatives. He met the only love of his life - Elena Ivanovna Dyakonova, an emigrant from Russia, who at that time was the wife of the poet Paul Eluard. She called herself Gala Eluard and was 10 years older than the artist.

After their first meeting, Dali and Gala never parted again, and his father and sister were horrified by this union. Salvador Sr. deprived his son of all financial subsidies from his side, and Ana Maria broke off creative relations with him. The newly-made lovers settle on the sandy shore in Cadaques in a small shack without amenities, where Salvador begins to create his immortal creations.

Three years later they officially signed, and in 1958 their wedding took place. For a long time, the couple lived happily until the discord in their relationship began in the early 60s. The elderly Gala longed for carnal pleasures with young boys, and Dali began to find solace in the circle of young favorites. For his wife, he buys a castle in Pubol, where he can only visit with Gala’s consent.

For about 8 years, his muse was the British model Amanda Lear, with whom Salvador had only a platonic relationship; it was enough for him to watch his passion for hours and enjoy her beauty. Amanda's career destroyed their relationship, and Dali broke up with her without regret.

Death

In the 70s, Salvador began to experience an exacerbation of his mental illness. He is extremely exhausted by hallucinations, and also suffers from an excess of psychotropic medications that doctors prescribe to him. Doctors, not without reason, believed that Dali suffered from schizophrenia, which was complicated by Parkinson’s disease.

Gradually, senility began to deprive Dali of the ability to hold a brush in his hand and paint. The death of his beloved wife in 1982 completely devastated the artist, and for some time he lay in the hospital with pneumonia. After 7 years, the old genius’s heart can’t stand it, and he dies from myocardial failure on February 23, 1989. Thus ended the love story of the artist Dali and his muse Gala.

Being a big fan of abstract art and surrealism in general and the work of Salvador Dali in particular, I dreamed of visiting this museum for many years. And then it happened.
A little about the museum itself:
In 1960, the mayor of Figueres, R.G. Rovira turned to Dali with a request to donate his painting to the museum of his hometown. The artist, without hesitation, exclaimed: “Not a painting, but a whole museum!” The idea of ​​creating a theater-museum, as well as the basic concept of its content, belongs entirely to Dali himself. The museum complex consists of the building of the old municipal theater, as well as part of the medieval city walls and the Galatea tower (the artist's last residence, named after his wife Gala), which are decorated with giant "Humpty Dumpty". The Museum took 14 years to build. All the necessary work required most of Dali’s fortune, considerable by that time, as well as subsidies allocated by the Spanish government and donations from many of his friends. Since reporting was compiled only on expenditures of public money, the total amount spent remained unknown. The opening of the museum took place on September 28, 1974.
Here is how the artist himself spoke about this place:
"...My whole life has been a theater, so there is no better place for a museum..."
"...Where else, if not in my city, should the most extravagant and fundamental of my works be preserved and live for centuries? What remains of the Municipal Theater seems to me very suitable for three reasons: firstly, because I am, first of all, a theater artist; secondly, because the Theater is located opposite the church in which I was baptized; and thirdly, it was in this theater, in its foyer, in 1918, at the age of 14, that I first exhibited my works. paintings..."
"...I want my museum to be a monolith, a labyrinth, a huge surreal object. It will be an absolutely theatrical museum. Those who come here will leave with the feeling that they have had a theatrical dream..."

A geodesic dome rises above the stage of the theater-museum, which over time has become a symbol of both Figueres and the museum. Its construction was entrusted to Emilio Perez Pinheiro in January 1973. To achieve this, the architect used a glass and steel structure, inspired by the work of American designer Richerd Fuller. By the way, Dali’s body is walled up in the floor right under the dome, not far from the entrance to the women’s toilet, as he bequeathed. The artist wanted people to be able to walk around the grave after his death.

During 1984, the walls of the building were gradually covered by Dali with loaves of peasant bread.

And not by chance. Bread was often used by the artist in his works. Dali himself said this:
"...Bread has become one of the long-standing objects of fetishism and obsession in my works, it is the number one to which I have been most faithful..."

Iron sign near the entrance to the museum.

The entrance to the museum is located in Piazza Gala and Salvador Dali.

Opposite the main facade there is a monument to the genius of Catalan thought Francesc Pujols, a friend of the Dali family; the artist had a special interest in his philosophy. On the pedestal of the monument is inscribed the philosopher’s statement: “Catalan thought is always born anew and lives in its simple-minded gravediggers.” The composition of the monument is also interesting: the rhizome of a century-old olive tree, in it there is a figure in a white Roman toga, crowned with a golden egg-head, resting on his hand, in a pose similar to Rodin’s “The Thinker”. Above the figure is a hydrogen atom. The sculptural group also includes a marble bust of a Roman patrician with a small bronze head of Francesc Pujols himself, reminiscent of another family friend, Pepito Pichot.

Warriors with (again) bread loaves under the roof of the building.

A female figure with a loaf of bread and a crutch (another frequently used and significant object in the artist’s figurative world). The holes in the solar plexus illustrate Dali's idea that information is contained in empty space.

The “diver symbolizing a dive into the subconscious” above the entrance is a reference to the outfit Dali wore at the opening of the World Exhibition of Surrealism in London in June 1936 and nearly suffocated.

Immediately after entering we enter the courtyard with its main composition - “Rainy Taxi”.

As the legend describes, the composition owes its appearance to chance. Dali was walking through the city one day. It was cold and rainy. Soaked to the skin. And happy people drove by in warm, dry taxis. And then he had the idea to restore justice and change this world, change it so that it would rain on those who were in the taxi, and it would be warm and cozy around. This is how the idea for the masterpiece of the great Catalan - “rainy taxi” arose. If you throw a coin into the slot, the umbrella closes, and it starts to rain inside the car, which pours on a couple of mannequins in the back seat, the driver and the grape snails crawling on them. When the second coin is thrown, the umbrella opens and the rain stops.

On the hood of the Cadillac, Dali placed a sculpture of the mythological Queen Esther (a symbol of justice and revenge) by the Austrian sculptor Ernst Fuchs.

"Esther" pulls Trajan's Column with chains from car tires - a reference to the famous Roman Trajan's Column and a tribute to the Roman emperor from the Antonine dynasty (Latin: Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus), in whom the artist had a strong interest.

The whole time I was looking at the sculpture, a verse from Laertsky’s song “Chemical Faculty of Moscow State University” was spinning in my head, namely: “Hefty women are playing hockey on the grass...”
Yes, Dali’s work evokes interesting associations. That's why I love him.

The entire structure is crowned with a boat that belonged to Gala and a black umbrella.

Under the boat you can see Michelangelo's "Slave" painted black, Dalianized with a car tire.

Drops of water under the bottom of the boat - condoms filled with paint - are not a random detail. According to Dali, on this boat Gala hunted young men hiding from the artist’s already middle-aged muse.

On both sides of the entrance are the lanterns of the Parisian metro in the Art Nouveau style designed by Hector Guimard.

In the recesses of the window openings of the stalls there are mannequins stylized as priests of Ancient Egypt, alternating with charred beams remaining from the burnt building of the old theater.

Grotesque (as the artist himself called them) monsters between the central windows of the courtyard, created by Dali with the assistance of Antoni Pichot from animal skeletons, washbasins, snails, stones from Cape Creus, felled branches of plane trees from the Rambla in Figueres, fragments of gargoyles from the burnt neighboring church of St. Peter , an old dish found in a municipal park and drawers of old furniture from the Figueres City Hall, which, according to Dali, always store information.

"Venus Velata" by Olivier Brice.

Architectural mystifications begin already on the first floor of the museum: upon entering a building that appears to be three stories from the outside, the visitor finds himself in a five-story building. This effect was created by making the first floor of the museum multi-level.

Set design for the ballet "Labyrinth".

Hands from "The Creation" are part of an installation dedicated to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel.

ABOUT bottom of the greatest illusions of El Salvador - "Nude Gala looking at the sea." When creating this painting, the digital method was used for the first time in fine art.

Let's move a little away from the picture...

and more... What do we see? At a distance of 20 meters, the painting “transforms” into a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

Amadeu Torres and Teresa Marek - "El Pol y La Pusa" (Louse and Flea). The sculpture is dedicated to two street musicians from the artist’s childhood playing the organ. Dali turned their harmonium into such a surreal object.

I don’t know what this composition is called, but the octopus comes to mind.

Old electric pole.

"Galarina." This painting, like many of the artist’s other works, depicts Dali’s wife, muse and model - Russian emigrant Elena Ivanovna Dyakonova, known throughout the world as Gala (with emphasis on the second A).

A crocodile with a lantern and a one-legged mannequin with a crutch.

The previous installation with a crocodile evoked such an association in me :-)

Sculpture "Stool-mane ken".

A mask invented by Dali with a hat with drawers built into the crown. In this outfit he appeared at the Rothschild family masquerade ball. The mask has four faces: two are variations of the Mona Lisa portrait, one with a mustache, the other with a goatee, the third face with a portrait of Helen Rothschild, and the fourth is an empty space intended for the face of the owner of the mask.

“Otorhinological head of Venus” is either a monster or a deity, with an ear instead of a nose and a nose instead of an ear.

Portrait of the scandalous Hollywood star Mae West. To see it, you need to climb up the ladder and look at the sofa-lips, fireplace-nostrils and picture-eyes standing separately from each other in a special lens with a wig at the edges, suspended between the camel’s legs.

"Retrospective female bust against a background of pheasant carcasses." A loaf on your head, ants on your face and ears of corn like a necklace.

An anthropomorphic face with baby doll pupils, a headless doll instead of a nose, hair made from corn cobs and a heavy picturesque stone on the top of the head.

I don’t like taking pictures of paintings, but here, perhaps, an exception to the rule can and should be made. A little-known side of Dali's work, the theme of Jews and Israel is presented on the second floor of the museum in a series of 25 lithographs entitled "Alia" (1968), "Song of Songs" (1971), "The Twelve Tribes of Israel" (1973), and "Our Prophets" ( 1975).

“Aliyah” - Drawing of a young man with his curly head thrown back, his torso entwined with the banner of Israel with the blue Star of David.

"Scenes of the Holocaust" - a swastika over the dead and the Star of David as a symbol of hope in the skies.

Apparently something connected with 40 years in the desert...

A ship flying a six-pointed star flag arrives at the Palestinian coast.

Proclamation of the Declaration of the Creation of Israel in 1948.

"Ben Gurion Proclaims Declaration of Independence."

"Menorah".

"Circumcision"

A distinctive lamp in a modernist style with the head of the blindfolded goddess Fortune rising on a spiral of teaspoons suspended from the ceiling.

Installation with two cases of a gift edition of Dali's book "Ten Recipes for Immortality". Immortality, as the artist believed, is the ultimate goal of any alchemical search.

Looking at the shadow on the wall from "Newton with a Hole in the Head", I remembered the movie "District No. 9"

“The Persistence of Memory” or “The Fluidity of Time,” as it is sometimes called, is one of my favorite works by Dali. A reproduction of this painting has hung in my home for many years. A tapestry of the world-famous flowing clock is on display in Figueres, while the original is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By the way, the idea to paint a soft, flowing clock came to Dali one day when, while at home, he put a piece of Camembert cheese under the lamp and after a while he saw how the cheese melted and spread...

A gilded gorilla skeleton in the bedroom instead of a bedside table.

The bed was brought from France, or rather from the legendary Parisian brothel "Le Chabanet" and may have belonged to Castiglioni, one of the favorites of Napoleon III.

A figure with the head of Christ and a printed circuit mounted in the middle.

Dali's Venus de Milo. What distinguishes it from the original is the “collection” of boxes installed by the artist into the body of the statue.

Ceiling panel "Palace of the Wind".

We leave the museum building and immediately see one of the three monuments to the French painter Jean-Louis Ernest Meyssonnier (an artist whom Dali admired) rising on tires. The sculptures were created by Antonin Mercier in 1895 and “tweaked” by Dali.

The theme of eggs is revealed not only on the walls and tower of the museum. Here is such an interesting composition in one of the windows. A gift from artist Rafael Duran - a “cardboard giant’s head” with doll heads instead of pupils, teeth made from toys and a TV set mounted in the forehead stands on supports made of eggs.

"Television Obelisk" by Wolf Vostel, one of the largest German sculptors of the second half of the 20th century. This sculpture is a kind of monolith of fourteen televisions, completed with a female head. In 1978, Dali and Vostel signed an agreement on the exchange of works between their museums.

And finally - one more "Newton with a hole in his head and an apple-ball hanging from a pendulum", seeing off visitors to this wonderful theater-museum of Salvador Dali in Figueres.

Undoubtedly, the name of Salvador Dali is known throughout the world. And this is primarily due to his own merit: Dali was an artist, sculptor, writer, and director. He had his own unique view of the world and was a prominent representative of surrealism.

Surrealism is a movement in art, its homeland is France, the distinctive feature of which is a combination of paradoxical forms and illusions. It also has this concept: combining dream and reality. This direction has many followers, including Salvador Dali.

His work was greatly influenced by his muse and also his wife, Gala. It was she who was often depicted by the artist in his canvases. Many also remember the sculptures of the great Spaniard.

Among them is a telephone receiver with a lobster located on it. The lobster itself is made of plaster, and the phone is real. In this sculpture, Dali wanted to show a protest to the whole world against the development of technology. He believed that technological communications alienate people from each other.

The exhibition itself was first presented in 1936 at the London Exhibition of Surrealist Art. In total, the sculpture was made in five versions and can now be viewed in various museums around the world: in Australia, in Liverpool, and so on.

Camille Goemans could be pleased: almost all of Dali’s works from his personal exhibition were sold out. Including “The Gloomy Game” with a character who shocked the public and shit himself, which ended up in the collection of the de Noailles couple. In this, and in other works by Dali of 1929, one can see not only an attitude towards interpreting one’s complexes and fears through the prism of psychoanalysis, but also the first attempts to use the invented creative method, which he called paranoid-critical. It is difficult to explain in a nutshell what it is, but the approximate essence is that with its help you can try to systematize “the most delusional phenomena and conditions,” put them under the control of the mind and, with the help of analysis, decide whether to allow or not allow them into the field of art. In other words, to conquer a dangerous disease and use it as a vaccine, sublimating it in creativity. However, we will not delve into the jungle of the subconscious, we will try to proceed from the principle of necessary and sufficient, as far as the volume of the narrative about the life and work of our hero allows us, bearing in mind that in the dark forest of psychoanalysis, and even in the fog that Dali let in there, it is not difficult and get lost.

Let us dwell only on the most powerful work of that period, called “The Great Masturbator”. There are other translations into Russian: “The Great Onanist” and “The Great Masturbation”. So if any of these names appear in the texts, you can be sure that they are talking about the same thing.

On this large canvas (110x150), the composition is dominated by the phantasmagoric head of a dreamer with his nose buried in the sand, with a grasshopper clinging to his face, whose abdomen is being devoured by the ubiquitous ants. It must be said that Dali did not lose his fear of grasshoppers even in his adult years - so, while living in America on the estate of Caress Crosby, he always drank coffee on the porch of the house, and not on the lawn, like everyone else, afraid of meeting this vile insect.

From the dreamer’s head to the upper right corner of the canvas, to the lower part of the male torso in tight underpants with clearly marked male genitalia, a female head crawls out; her nose and lips are as close as possible to male nature. A hint of oral sex, as Gibson suggests? It seems, but we already talked about this in the previous chapter. Under the grasshopper attached to the dreamer's face is an embraced couple. We can assume that this is Gala and Dali on the beach of Cadaqués. Dali himself said that the outline of this head was inspired by one of the ugly stones of Cape Creus, and the female image came to him from a postcard where a girl smells a lily. She is also depicted here in an erotic refraction: a huge tongue or something similar to it, attached to the woman’s neck, is writhing towards the flower. The woman herself with a fly on her shoulder is like a sphinx - on her face, as well as on the man’s thigh, there are cracks, as if these are not fully animated sculptures of an insane modern Pygmalion, and it is completely unclear whether the characters turn to stone, passing into the state of sculpture, or, on the contrary, they come to life, throwing off their already unnecessary clay form.

More likely the latter. This painting was painted shortly after meeting and stormy declaration of love with Gala and symbolizes the transition to a new frontier, so to speak, of the artist’s erotic worldview. He admitted that here he reflected “the feeling of guilt of a creature completely deprived of life due to active masturbation.” Dali did not sell this work and did not part with it until the end of his life.

So, the meeting with Gala became a turning point in the fate of our hero. Arriving with his head shaved, as a sign of a break with his family, to Paris from Cadaques, he met not only with her, his dream come true and longed-for ideal, but also with the ghost of his glory. The name of Dali became known in the cultural capital of Europe both as one of the creators of “Un Chien Andalou,” which enjoyed enormous audience success, and as a painter who managed to make quite a splash with his exhibition. The surrealists accepted him into their ranks with open arms. Andre Breton wrote an introduction to the catalog, where he said that “Dali opened our internal floodgates” and his work “helps us understand what is hidden behind the shell of objects, sharpens sensitivity to the subconscious... conceals a huge charge openly aimed at evil ".

And evil, in the understanding of the surrealists, is a philistine bourgeois society. But here’s what’s curious: representatives of this most hated class willingly consume the cultural values ​​produced by the rebels. Paintings by Picasso, Miro, Arp, Ernst, Margrit, Dali, as well as many others, replenished the collections of, one might say, the pillars of this society - tycoons, financiers, wealthy aristocrats. The books of Eluard, Breton, Aragon, Tzar and others ended up on the shelves of their libraries. Yes, and they devoured the Andalusian Dog. With giblets. And it must be said frankly that without the money of patrons of the arts, such as the de Noailles couple and others like them, surrealism would hardly have been able to bloom so wildly. In this contradiction, as the classic wrote, between labor and capital, the powers that be took the right position. They did not at all want the red dawn in the East to ignite the furious noon of revolution in Europe.

The surrealists really enthusiastically welcomed social renewal in Russia and naively believed - at least Breton did - that a combination of surrealism and dialectical materialism was possible. “Youth and hope of the world” - that’s what they called communism. Breton and Aragon joined the French Communist Party on January 6, 1927, the day of Epiphany. Later, Picasso would also become a member of the PCF. Other members of the movement rejected any political recruitment as an encroachment on individual freedom. The young Dali joined the movement during the difficult time of the split and at first fanatically collaborated with Breton, supplying articles and other materials to his magazine and giving lectures, including in his homeland, Barcelona. The gifted speaker enthusiastically smashed the so-called sublime feelings and propagated the slogans of the surrealist revolution; among them, in addition to the hackneyed ones, like automatic writing and the power of chance, communism also appeared, for some reason next to African art, and Trotsky stands next to the Marquis de Sade, whom Dali called “a model of morality, like a pure diamond.”

And yet, in Dali’s theoretical works of that time, disagreements with Breton had already begun. In particular, the founder of surrealism and his faithful associates tried to free the subconscious, give it an anarchic principle, hence automatic writing, recording dreams, etc. Dali advocated that the unconscious should be only an object of the creator, that it should be controllable, and this is where his paranoid-critical method flowed.

Conflicts began to arise on a purely ideological level. Surrealism of the late 20s was stubbornly aimed towards politics. The art rebels looked with hope and faith to the East, where freedom was finally triumphant over the ruins of the broken bourgeois system. The most ardent admirer of communism was Louis Aragon, who visited Russia in 1930 at the congress of revolutionary writers. His speech with attempts to introduce the ideas of surrealism with its cult of the subconscious into the general context of proletarian culture did not meet with approval; moreover, he was forced to engage in self-criticism and recognize Freudianism as an idealistic ideology, a type of Trotskyism.

Dali continues, both in his work and in life, the line of pure surrealism: shocking, scandalous lectures and witty ideas like a thinking machine - a rocking chair with mugs of hot milk. Aragon generally disliked Dali; he was terribly annoyed by the eccentric antics of the Spanish artist, and the idea of ​​a thinking machine infuriated him. Milk, he yelled, must be given to the hungry children of the proletariat. Dali remarked to this that he had no acquaintances named Proletariat.

On the pages of “Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution” in December 1931, Dali published the already mentioned essay “Dreams,” where he describes his childhood onanistic experiences. The object is the mythical Dullita, who turns into the real Julia, the adopted daughter of Repito Pichot, who in the finale takes on the image of Gala.

This opus so outraged the leaders of the French Communist Party that they called party members Aragon, Sadoul and others on the carpet to give explanations about the appearance of such a disgusting text in their press organ and made them seriously understand that such surrealism is incompatible with the ideology of the communists.

Breton, however, continued to defend Freudianism, and when an article with attacks against the “pseudo-revolutionary surrealists” appeared in L'Humanite, he accused the orthodox of puritanism and a complete lack of understanding of the value of the destructive contribution to the cause of the revolution that art innovators make with their shocking activities. Dali's individualism grew stronger, of course, not without the influence of Gala. Dali before and after Gala are different people. His complexes and timidity seemed to have hidden somewhere. He also changes in appearance: he becomes elegant and respectable - shaved, combed, fine suits with ties replace sweaters and all sorts of robes in which he sported before. He becomes fully accustomed to high society, and if he behaves unusually there, it only serves his popularity; he not only invades the world of the rich as an extravagant artist living on philanthropic donations, but also feels on an equal footing with them. His ideals and worldview crystallize into an unshakable conviction that he has been chosen since childhood. Living at the top is his destiny, and he will achieve it at any cost.

Gala also supports him in this, who also considered success to be the main thing in life. Fearing that the squabbles, scandals and troubles that arose among the surrealists because of her baby Dali could affect the image of the artist and cause unnecessary rumors among the elite, she asks her husband Eluard to resolve such conflicts.

But Dali’s antics are becoming simply intolerable, and his connections with the powers that be are outrageous for many.

The surrealists' patience was overflowing with Dali's dangerous and irresponsible conversations about Hitler, his next obsession. Of course, he had no sympathy for the Nazis, their views and policies did not appeal to him, our hero understood perfectly well that in the event of Hitler’s victory over Europe, artists like him would only have a place in the crematorium. The Nazi leader interested Dali not as a politician and demagogue, but as a person with a sick psyche; he saw in him “a complete masochist, obsessed with the obsession of starting a war, in order to then heroically lose it. In essence, he planned to carry out one of those unmotivated shares that were so highly rated in our group..."

Later, in 1937, he will paint the painting “The Mystery of Hitler,” where he depicts a telephone receiver hanging on a branch with a chewed microphone and a drop falling from the part of the receiver that is applied to the ear. A drop is about to fall into a plate containing a torn photograph of Hitler, beans and a bat. Chamberlain's umbrella also hangs on a branch. This was the artist’s brilliant prediction of the collapse of Nazism. Another riddle - "The Riddle of William Tell" - was written earlier, in 1933. This is a huge canvas measuring two by one and a half meters, where in the image of William Tell is none other than the leader of the world proletariat Lenin with a hypertrophied buttock, so large and elongated that it required the famous Dalian crutch as a support. I remember once again how amazed I was by the reproduction of this work when I first saw it in my youth (see the first chapter). The communist surrealists were not only amazed by “The Mystery of William Tell,” but also outraged so much that they decided to destroy it right at the exhibition in the Grand Palace, dedicated to the half-century anniversary of the Salon of Independents, where the group decided not to exhibit, and Dali disobeyed. To their chagrin, the painting hung so high that it could not be removed. Enraged by all this, they issued a resolution on February 2, 1934, on the opening day of the exhibition, branding Dali as a counter-revolutionary and an accomplice of fascism. The resolution also included a proposal to exclude the obstinate artist from the group. For this purpose, a trial was scheduled for the fifth day of February, where the culprit and defendant appeared with a thermometer in his mouth and wrapped in warm clothes - he had a sore throat. He looked like a clown, and despite the seriousness of the event, many, including Breton, could not help but laugh when Dali took off his coat and unwound his scarf, then put it on again and constantly measured his temperature. In the literature about Dali, one of the curious moments of this collection is often cited. Dali said to the leader of the Surrealists: “Breton, I dreamed that I had you in the ass.” To which he seriously replied: “I don’t advise you to do this.”

The trial lasted a long time, almost until the morning. What charges were brought against the disgraced artist? The minutes of the group’s meeting at that time are unknown to us, but there is a long letter from Breton to Dali, written before the trial. In it, Breton demanded from the obstinate man answers to the following questions: why Dali is pleased by the failures of his friends; why does he praise academic art and vilify modern art, while the fascists do the same, and artists are forced to emigrate from Germany, their art is recognized as degenerate in the Third Reich, and the like. There were questions about the “Riddle of William Tell” and about the artist’s too close contacts with the so-called “society”. Dali responded equally extensively, on eight pages. To the first question, he answered that the Marquis de Sade, his authority in the field of morality, advised taking pleasure in the mistakes of friends. As for academic art, only with the help of classical technique can one convey dreams, visions, daydreams and other images of the unconscious, and he does not protest against all modern art - after all, he is a contemporary, how can he protest against himself? Tanguy, Ernst, de Chirico, Margritte - yes, they are ours, but Mondrian, Vlaminck, Derain, Chagall and Matisse irritate him with their stupid intellectualism, they know nothing about painting, surrealism and Freudianism. As for his alleged passion for fascism, this is pure misunderstanding. His paintings and books in Nazi Germany would have met the same fate as his German colleagues; he is by no means a fan of Hitlerism, but he is obliged, as an artist and researcher, to dig and get to the bottom of fascism.

He probably said the same thing at the meeting, in any case, many years later he writes in the “Diary of a Genius” that then he convinced those gathered of the artist’s right to any creative experiment, and as a surrealist, a member of the movement that proclaimed unlimited freedom , may well consider himself free from any “aesthetic or moral compulsion.” In the end, he has the right to “grow Lenin three-meter buttocks, season his portrait with jelly from Hitlerism, and if necessary, then stuff it all with Roman Catholicism. Everyone is free to be themselves and give the opportunity to others to become what they please, in all their manifestations and symptoms, intestinal disorders and phosphene hallucinations - even a moralist, even an ascetic, even a pederast or a shit-eater." Dali beat his opponents with their own trump cards. And he was once again convinced of how right Gala was when, back in the memorable summer of 1929 in Cadaques, she advised him not to get involved with the surrealists, since among them he would experience all the same prohibitions and complexes as in the family - they are like that he is a bourgeois, like his father. But then he firmly believed in the sincerity of the programs and slogans of surrealism and did not heed it.

When Dali came to Paris after breaking up with his family, Gala met him as her closest and dearest person. She made the final decision to be with him, seeing in him someone who would outshine all these Parisian celebrities, because he was made of that fertile material from which a great man could be molded. She wanted the same from Paul Eluard, then from Max Ernst, but these people did not live up to her hopes, they turned out to be of a smaller scale, perhaps, than Dali - this fireworks of ideas, completely crazy at first glance, but concealing an unusually rich potential. In addition, he knew how to infect those around him with his ideas; high-frequency currents beat around him, as if around a generator, and people were drawn to him, despite his supermanic obsession with himself. Soon after Dali arrived in Paris, Gala dragged him south to the resort of Carry-le-Rouyer near Marseille. The artist was then possessed, like an obsession, by the idea of ​​a painting with an invisible man. Why did this particular plot excite Dali at that time? Did he want to hide, disappear, become invisible to the all-seeing eye of his father, who cursed and anathema him? At the subconscious level, this could be so. He never finished the film, but he experienced all the delights of carnal love, which he admitted in letters to Buñuel, who at that time began filming their common brainchild, the film “The Golden Age.”

Dali writes to his friend not only about the delights of love, he constantly returns to the script, advises adding this and that, supplies invented scenes with drawings, suggests new plot twists and even the idea of ​​tactile cinema - if fur appears on the screen, the viewer he must feel the fur with his fingers, if he sees and hears the splash of water, he must feel the water, and so on. The idea is ingenious, but it is still not in demand in mass cinema; in a home cinema, if you have servants or other technical means, this is possible, but still it is still a utopia.

Letters to Galya from Eluard also come here. He cannot believe that she is leaving him, and constantly returns in letters to her divine body, created for love, describing all its seductive parts, including the most intimate ones, while admitting that he masturbated while imagining her.

But Gala only occasionally answers him, and only because she still needs him, but her choice is final, she has no regrets, no nostalgia, she is all focused on the future, she has truly become Gradiva, walking ahead. Yes, “there is no past for a woman.” This is from Bunin:

I wanted to shout after:
“Come back, I have become close to you!”
But for a woman there is no past:
She fell out of love and became a stranger to her.
Well! I'll light the fireplace and drink...
It would be nice to buy a dog.

And it’s time, it’s time, dear reader, to look at Gala through the eyes of her chosen one, the brilliant painter Salvador Dali, who painted her countless times. She was a character in many of his works, appearing there in various outfits and images, including the Virgin Mary and even Jesus Christ. In 1978, he painted two almost completely identical canvases (for the sake of the stereoscopic effect, one canvas had to be viewed with the left eye, and the other with the right), where Gala is crucified on a cross located parallel to the ground, raised to a silent height. We see her naked in the immortal masterpiece “Atomic Leda”, worthy of the brush of the masters of the high Renaissance, where the artist raised the beauty of his Goddess and Inspirer to the ideal. She appears in his paintings either with a lobster on her head, or with an airplane on the tip of her nose, or as a half-witch, half-witch reflected in the mirrors, omniscient and as if extracting her omniscience from the mysterious, magical Through the Looking Glass created by the artist; then we see her from the back in the work “My Naked Wife Contemplating Her Own Flesh, Turned into a Staircase, Three Vertebrae, Columns, Sky and Architecture,” one of the best works of world painting in the nude genre.

But, dear reader, the portrait of the artist’s wife, created in 1945 and called “Galarina”, in consonance with Raphael’s “Fornarina,” deserves special attention. The portrait was created according to the canons of the high Renaissance, and Dali said that he worked on it like his beloved Vermeer; He created this masterpiece for six months, spending a total of five hundred and forty hours at the easel.

Nothing here distracts the viewer from the image - Gala has no jewelry on, except for a ring and a bracelet, and she is dressed in a golden satin blouse, her left breast is bare, but all the viewer’s attention is directed to her face and hands.

The long-fingered left hand, hugging the right forearm, carefully crafted by the artist, is full of life and energy - such a hand, if it takes something, will never let go. Such hands, strong and confident, with a powerful Mount of Venus, are created to take and rule with them - these are not the hands of a spoiled soft woman given into the power of a man - no, these are the hands of a predator.

The close-set eyes seem to be watching the viewer, no matter from which side you look. This is an amazing effect, and it’s hard to say how Dali achieved it, but what’s also amazing about her eyes: they are, as it were, screened, not letting anyone else’s gaze in, concealing the world of the female soul hidden behind them and those mysterious forces that reveal divine intuition. . And Gala owned it, she was even able to predict the date of the start of World War II. Many considered her a sorceress and a witch. Perhaps she possessed a bit of that magical dark knowledge, being to a certain extent a medium, but she used it only in a narrow space called Gala and Salvador.

Together they formed a single and inseparable whole. It was an alloy from which, like, say, bronze, it is no longer possible to isolate copper and silver separately. Dali's inner world, filled with deep creative fantasy, prone to metamorphosis, mystifications and tragic complexes of childhood, was very attractive to Gala, whose dark and mysterious soul found there, in Dali's rich imagination, familiar signs, symbols and states. Moreover, with her sometimes blind submission to any whims of genius, she called to creative life the still dormant images of Dalian’s irrepressible fantasy, she constantly convinced her husband of his superpowers, never allowed him to forget that he was a genius, the only super-artist on the planet who had no equal.

Many researchers of Gala’s life, in particular Dominic Bona in her book “Gala, Muse of Artists and Poets,” talk about her great life risk when she decided to throw in her lot with a young Spanish provincial artist, although promising, but known only in among representatives of radical artistic movements of that time. After all, then it was difficult to imagine that this introverted young man, on the verge of mental illness, would be able to rise to the very heights of life and creativity. Gala, from the point of view of everyday logic, took a very big risk, leaving Eluard, who, although he had squandered his father’s millions with her, was still a wealthy bourgeois, to the son of a provincial notary, who was also deprived of an inheritance. But Gala foresaw, she knew that Dali was not an ordinary person, but a genius, who, from birth, was endowed by the Creator with something that was denied to most. She read it as if from mysterious tablets, using her gift of guessing the future to a certain extent. But let's look at her portrait again. The right eye, under the straight eyebrow, located below the left, seems empty and lifeless, it looks like an agate pebble or an olive, but the left one beckons and calls to itself, it is full of young and inexhaustible life, it does not have that painfully motionless secret that shackled right eye, but together they produce a surprisingly attractive feeling of power and strength, and the power is not tyrannical, cruel, but the self-confident force of female attraction, which comes through invitingly in every line of her face, full of unknown intrigue, wide cheekbones, with a strong-willed chin and predatory wings of the nose . With this portrait, Dali told everything he knew about his wife, what he guessed in this secretive soul, hiding from everyone and from him, who had the magical gift of subjugating herself with the sweet power of female power, to which the artist was subdued, admitting that he felt the joy of feeling to be a slave of this woman... And at the same time, when looking at this portrait, despite the warm golden color, a feeling of muteness, constraint and lifelessness arises. Gala, as if in the legend of King Midas, seems like a gilded statue, not fully solved, never revealing all its secrets... But we left our heroes in a modest hotel in the south of France, where Dali worked on “The Invisible Man”, and Gala read and told fortunes on the cards, which told her that from a certain person they would receive money that they badly needed. And so it happened. Viscount de Noailles sent a check for twenty thousand francs towards the artist's future work. This could not have been more opportune, because the Goemans gallery closed, the reason for which was the owner’s divorce proceedings, and Buñuel temporarily took charge of the gallery. Gala immediately rushed to Paris to demand money from Goemans for Dali's works sold at the exhibition, and she succeeded.

Thus, they ended up with the amount that Dali decided to spend on buying a home in Cadaques. He did not want to live anywhere except his native land, dear to his heart, with which he was connected by too many things. Here he first felt like an artist and became stronger in his spiritual chosenness; he spent many enchanting hours contemplating the great chaos of nature on the rocks of Cape Creus; here the friendship with Lorca grew stronger and filled with creative mutual enrichment, and here, finally, he met his fate, the enchantress Gala, Gradiva, who saved him from madness. So, he had the idea to use this money to buy a tiny fisherman’s house in the farthest corner of Cadaques, in a village called Port Lligat, from the sons of the half-crazy Lydia, nicknamed Clever Girl. From "The Secret Life":

“Lydia’s sons lived in Port Lligat, from where it’s a fifteen-minute walk to Cadaqués. There, right by the sea, stood their pitiful shack with a collapsed roof, hung with fishing gear. There, right behind the cemetery, a parched, rocky, alien landscape begins - another such not on earth. In the morning, clear and strict, it glows with some kind of wild, bitter joy, and at dusk it swells with a painful, burning melancholy. The olive trees, shining and soaring in the morning, turn gray at sunset, filling with heavy lead. The morning breeze wrinkles the waves with a smile. In the evening, the sea at Port Lligat becomes a lake, reflecting the heavenly drama of sunset." What prose, eh! What wonderful prose, poetic, close to Lorca. I quoted this passage with pleasure and envy. What a great writer Dali would have made if he had only taken up literature! In Barcelona, ​​from where they intended to go to Cadaqués, Dalí and Gala went to a bank to cash a check. There, as Dali writes in The Secret Life, “... I was amazed that the cashier addressed me extremely politely: “Welcome, Señor Dali!” If I had known that I was known throughout Barcelona, ​​I would have accepted this as due and, probably, was delighted by such evidence of my popularity, but I had no idea about it and was scared. Turning to Gala, I whispered:

He knows me, but I don’t know him!

Gala got angry - again these childhood fears, this provincial clumsiness! I signed the back of the check, but when the cashier held out his hand for it, he said that I wouldn’t give the check, and explained to Galya:

When I bring the money, then I’ll give you the check!

What, he'll eat your check, or what?

Maybe he'll eat it!

Why on earth?

And with such a thing that I would eat it in his place!

I wish I could eat it! Your money won't go anywhere!

They can’t get away, but what’s the point? Anyway, we won’t see any mushrooms or game for dinner today!

The cashier looked at us with an impassive look - he could not hear what we were talking about (I prudently took Gala aside). Finally she convinced me. I went up to the cash register and, looking at the attendant with a contemptuous look, threw the check through the window:

Please!

I still haven’t gotten used to the dull abnormality of the people who populate the world - after all, I have to deal with them! Normality baffles me. I know: “What can happen, never happens.” Very correctly noted. In the world, everything happens the way it happens. And a person is not free to make a single amendment to the program of his own destiny.

Salvador showed up in his native Cadaqués with his companion in March 1930 and bought for 250 pesetas from Lydia’s sons a house with an area of ​​twenty-one square meters, without electricity or water. Having learned about his son’s plans to settle in Port Lligat, the notary Dali Kusi was furious and tried as best he could to prevent this. Gala and Salvador were not even allowed into the hotel, and they had to rent a room in a boarding house, where Dali's former maid arranged for them.

They hired a carpenter to repair dilapidated housing and, having explained what needed to be done, went to Barcelona to give a lecture, and when they returned to see how things were going, they had an unpleasant conversation with the gendarmes, who were acting at the instigation of their father. At the notary, as we say, everything was captured. For Salvador it was simply a nightmare; he could not imagine his life anywhere outside his homeland and was completely discouraged by this turn of events. But still, he firmly decided to build a house in Port Lligat, and Gala supported him in this, although it is completely unclear why she, a Parisian spoiled by comfort, wanted to settle in this outback, where only a dozen fishermen lived.

Dali's father was also firm in his intention not to allow his son to live here with this, as he called her, "la madame." He even wrote a letter to Buñuel, where he openly threatened his son with physical harm if he decided to build a home here.

The lovers were forced, at the insistence of the gendarmes, to leave Cadaques and go to Paris. Dali was terribly annoyed that the location shooting of “The Golden Age,” which was supposed to begin on the rocks of his native coast in April, would take place without him.

Buñuel did not face the wrath of the Figueres notary, so he, as planned, went to Dali’s homeland with a film crew, which included Max Ernst, who played the leader of the robbers in this film. The director took local fishermen into the crowd, dressing them in bishop's robes, and all this film fuss created a lot of noise in Cadaques.

Before leaving, Buñuel filmed Dali's father with his wife Catalina, Salvador's aunt. A lover of theater and cinema, knowing that Buñuel’s film had anti-clerical sentiments, the old atheist happily posed for the camera. Thanks to Buñuel, we know what this man who tyrannized the artist looked like in real life. At that time he was fifty-eight years old. In these documentary footage, Dali's father voluptuously eats sea urchins, smokes a pipe in a wheelchair, and tends to the garden. It is clear that this man is used to power, he has a tough character, and he will not let anyone offend, even the closest person. We also see his wife. She is twelve years younger than him, but looks almost the same age, and in her gaze there is nothing but fear.

In Paris, Gala fell ill with pleurisy, and to improve their health they went to Malaga, Picasso’s homeland, to live at sea for several weeks. In a tiny fishing village called Torremolinos, there stood on a cliff directly above the sea a strange house, built long ago by some eccentric, romantically obsessed Englishman. It was converted into a hotel, where Gala and Dali settled. Torremolinos turned out to be a paradise - the sea, the fiercely scorching sun and the coastline overgrown with bright red carnations. Here Gala, again, did not embarrass herself with any clothes, walking around in only a short red skirt with her breasts bare. The locals were indifferent to this, but the poets and writers who visited Dali were shocked by the free behavior of the mistress of the great, as the Malaga press called him, the Catalan artist.

They tanned there until they were black and, very satisfied with their vacation, returned to Paris, stopping for a couple of hours in Cadaques to see how the house was being renovated. They intended, despite their father's dissatisfaction, to spend the summer here. The carpenter did his best, it was already possible to live there. True, when Dali sent a photo of this building to his benefactor Viscount de Noailles, with whose money the house was built, he noted, not without venom, that if Dali had not succeeded in painting, he would have found himself in architecture. The Viscount, I must say, was very fond of gardening and architecture and knew a lot about it.