What I wanted to learn was the formulas for mixing oils and colors, the way to spread the colors, the quality of marriages of tones, the best way to put in grounds, and all the technological information there might be about the great masters. The fact is, the teachers knew nothing of the essential, and their approach was empirical and vulgar. They taught the absence of rules, while my highest ambition was to learn the laws of the art of painting. I was furious with them. The only one who escaped in my eyes was José Moreno Carbonero, one of the oldest ones, who had solid métier and faultless professional conscientiousness. But the pupils laughed at him, at his coat, the black pearl stickpin he wore in his tie. and his white gloves. His skill was unmatched, but no sooner did he turn his back than the little upstarts erased his corrections, which in fact reflected the gifts of a true master.
I preferred to keep apart from that bunch of loafers and idiots, and go on with my Cubist experiments. One of my paintings led to my making contact with my new friends. Within the Residence, there was a sort of segregation based on intellectual snobbery. Around Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel, and Eugenio Montès, a small avant-garde literary and artistic group had taken shape. One of its members, Pepin Bello, passing down the corridor one day, peeked through the open door of my cell-like room and saw the Cubist canvas on the easel I was working at. He imparted this news to the others who had thought I was backward-looking and were happily surprised at my avant-gardism. They would have been even more surprised, had they known that it was out of a concern for better understanding of representation and realism, of the exact science of drawing, and for research in perspective, that I was indulging in this manner, and not out of any drive toward abstraction or provocation. They made me one of them.
How Does Dalí Remember That Period?
My attire, since my arrival, had acquired a waterproof cape that came down to my heels, and a broad-brimmed hat. Wearing gaiters and hair down to my shoulders, and my huge ascot tie, I never went unnoticed. My friends were all Beau Brummels, in the finest manner of English dandyism. They came from some of the best families of Spain, but their admiration was undivided and their friendship total. My words and ideas intrigued them, and quickly became the group’s gospel. They adopted my revolt against the faculty, with its demagogic pedagogy that was thirty years behind the times, teaching Impressionism when Cubism was fashionable, while disregarding all true tradition. With them, and through them, I first heard the expression that was to be so successful – and make me so, at the same time – “It’s Dalínian.”
But I quickly wearied of their flattery and their open-mouthed speeches. The fact is, very few of them were worth my attention and I would very soon have left a great distance between me and all of them, except for Lorca, whose personality and gifts truly impressed me, but they did reveal a world to me that I was unaware of: that of the pleasure born of alcohol, orgy, music, and painting the town a bit of an off-color red.
It was at the Crystal Palace, one of Madrid’s most elegant tearooms, that I got my baptism of fire. Our entry, with me at their head in my painter-anarchist’s uniform, made quite a little sensation. To the point that in later similar circumstances, my friends, led by Bruñel, were generally turned into bodyguards, and forced to fight it out. This time, there was no disturbance, but for the first time I saw what might be termed an elegant lady, plucked eyebrows, armpits bluish and devoid of hair, and gown and jewels of greatest luxury; and I had only one idea left: to please her. So, I decided forthwith to return my outfit to the wardrobe department. I thanked my friends for their fortitude, and to their great consternation, for they enjoyed the game and found it a magnificent opportunity for provocation, decided that I too would be a Beau Brummel, whom women might be interested in. Once more, they mistook my intentions and thought I was acting this way out of friendship.
As I was having my hair cut, I thought I would faint at being shorn of the signs of my singularity, but I stuck to it. I bought a sky-blue silk shirt, a pair of sapphire cufflinks, ordered a fashionable suit, and to top it off plastered my hair with a coat of picture varnish that turned it into a plaque as flexible as galalith, giving me a veritable black helmet. In my hand I nonchalantly twirled a bamboo cane, and took my place on the terrace of the Café Regina. It was the start of a new era...
This era was marked by two revelations: alcohol and the all-powerfulness of money. The effect of cocktails on my stomach was explosive. Vermouths, champagnes, martinis opened a new world to me as in olden days the Pichots’ cut-glass carafe stopper had shown me an “Impressionist” universe. We spent our days and nights in discussions, eating and drinking in the midst of laughter and shouting. With the wee morning hours we wondrously discovered jazz at Rector’s Club. We swore all kinds of pacts, sealed in champagne. (One of my friends from those days still has a hunk of cardboard with our six signatures, swearing we would all meet again in the same place fifteen years hence. I had clean forgotten that childishness.) Of course, we needed money for drinks, gardenias, meals, and the sumptuous tips that turned waiters into slaves. I signed notes to the Bursar of the University Residence, to be honored by my father, being only too happy to make things as disagreeable as possible for him.
In October, the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona showed some of the students’ works. I exhibited a jug that scored quite a hit, but I never got time to enjoy it.
After one particularly hard-drinking night, when I had thrown up everything in me, I had to take to my bed, unable to keep food down. When I got back to school the following day, I found things in a tizzy. A contest was being held to name a new professor of painting, on the basis of one free work and one obligatory subject. The works of all the candidates had just been exhibited, and all the students agreed that Daniel Vázquez Díaz had submitted the most remarkable pictures.
But there were backstage maneuvers we were perfectly well aware of, which eliminated him and substituted an old fogey we wanted no part of. The students wanted me to be their spokesman in the revolt.
Everything happened as foreseen. The president of the jury announced the result, meaning we had lost. I rose and stalked out without a word. I did not come back until the next day, but then found out that after I left the students had insulted and manhandled the jury, and then barricaded themselves, making it necessary to call in the police. Since my departure, though wordless, had been the apparent signal for the fight, I was the obvious suspect as leader. I was given a year’s suspension. And, as if that were not enough, as soon as I got back to Figueras, the police came to arrest me and move me to Gerona, where I spent a month in jail. That gave me time to ponder the success, the glory, and the popularity that lay before me.
How Dalí Acted In Adversity
My freedom meant the start of a wondrous vacation. Catalonia had been shaken by the tremors of an abortive uprising that General Primo de Rivera (whose son José Antonio was to be founder of the Falange) put down with an iron hand. Obviously, it was these circumstances that accounted for my arrest and detention. I went back to Figueras, where everyone treated me as a local celebrity. Without waiting, I got back to work as if I were in a hurry to make up for all the time lost in my nights of wild carousing.
I saw Nuñez again and developed a passion for engraving. My father even had a press set up in one of the rooms at home. I was soon up on all the techniques and in addition developed a few of my own.
Garcia Lorca came to stay with me for a long visit at Cadaqués. He read us extracts of Mariana Piñeda, the play he had just finished writing, for which I was to design the sets. (It was staged in Barcelona, at the Goya Theatre, by Marguerite Xirgu.) I can still hear his vibrant voice hammering out,
I remain alone, the while
Beneath the flowering acacia
In the garden, death waits for me.
My life is here.
My blood is moved and trembles
Like a tree of coral
Cradled by the deep.
We even danced the sardana on the
rambla in his honor before he left. I at the time was painting Cadaqués landscapes, my father, my sister, everything that could be a subject for my frenzied brush.
I was paying close attention to Chirico’s paintings, through the magazines. I was contributing to Barcelona’s Gaceta de las artes and L’Amic de les arts; and one book was always at my bedside, Ingres’ Thoughts. I decided I would take some essential notes out of it as preface to my first one-man show, at the Dalmau Gallery, Barcelona, in November 1925. I put into the catalogue: “Drawing is the touchstone of Art” and “He who calls upon no mind except his own will soon find himself reduced to the most wretched of all imitations, namely, that of his own works.”
This tribute to the beauties of craft and tradition corresponded exactly to my own ideas. This is the basis on which one can afford to be a genius. I exhibited five drawings and seven paintings. The critics, who are always laggards and unaware of truth, were nevertheless enthusiastic.[1]
There was another show at Dalmau’s, from December 31, 1925, to January 14, 1926, this time including twenty paintings and seven drawings, and equally successful. I was not unhappy to display the admirable classical tradition that inspired me – and paradoxically had inspired the anarchist suspended from the Fine Arts School.
I exhibited among others a girl of the Ampurdan, with an admirable pair of buttocks, and a basket of bread that a representative of the Carnegie Institute, visiting from the U.S., was to borrow for an exhibition at Pittsburgh, where it was bought and remained in the States.
I returned to Madrid, the year of my suspension having come to an end. And I saw my old friends and fell into the same kind of nightlife. My father, cautiously – so he thought – had granted me only a tiny allowance, but I signed chits everywhere to be forwarded to him, and he had no choice but to pay them. My friends, who were always ready to go along with any idea of mine and had greeted my return with delirious delight, proved that I had lost none of my pres tige, far from it. I came out magnified by this adventure, during which I had even found time further to polish my craft, while having the wildest of times. They pooled their resources to be able to pay for my whims. The Municipal Pawnshop (sometimes known as the Mount of Piety) became a familiar haunt of young Madrileños, and we had developed the fine art of “mooching” on our friends to the level of an institution of cynical technical perfection. Any expedient, any pocketbook, flush or meager, any lie was acceptable – if it did the trick.
Did The Low Life Not Bother Dalí?
We were really greedy, cunning, and diabolical little lowlifes. I was in the grasp of a self-destructive mania against all values, as if to test their resistance and establish a new hierarchy, selected by my own genius.
Even my friendship with Lorca now was subject to question. I had veritable fits of jealousy that made me shun him several days running. I systematically tried to become more debauched and more detached from all past ties. In painting class, being assigned one day to paint a Gothic Virgin atop a ball, I drew a balance-scale and assured the bemused professor that “That is what I see in the model.” I might also have pointed out to him that in the Zodiac the respective Virgo and Libra are right next to each other, and connected, but that would not have helped any.
The final flourish was sounded by the publication in the official gazette on October 20, 1926, of my order of final expulsion from the Fine Arts School, signed by King Alfonso XIII. I had seen how the King, when visiting the school during my first year there, had adeptly flicked his cigarette butt into the spittoon over two meters away, just like any Madrileño street urchin. Now he disposed of me in the same manner. Need I confess I had been hoping that luck would vouchsafe that kind of experience to me, so I might make a full break with a life that was becoming as unbearable in the monotony of its fake enchantment as the uninterrupted daily routine in the life of a petit bourgeois? By now I knew what a guttersnipe adolescence was like. Well and good. I could leave again for Figueras, hands in my pockets, leaving my luggage behind at the Residence and using my last bit of legal tender to buy a bouquet of gardenias as a gift to an old beggar woman.
When I got home, my father was in the middle of writing the preface to a logbook he was planning to keep as a record of my worldly successes! He was trying to console himself for the mishap that spelled finis to his hopes of seeing me get into an official career as a teacher. It was a real heartwarmer to see how broken up he was over it. I made a faithful drawing of him, with my sister, in lead pencil, and it is true that he had a leaden complexion, his eyes heavy with angst and uncertainty; I devoted a great deal of talent to immortalizing his discomfiture. With a somewhat asinine application, he was trying to paste the pieces of his dream together again. I had no need of such childish paste-ups to convince me of my genius.
I now had solid teachings and a technical mastery that allowed me, like a piano virtuoso, to play everything available on my keyboard, in the noblest classical tradition, while permitting the most secret elements of my subconscious to express themselves. I had developed an unquenchable thirst for knowing and imagining. I had been able to test the hold I could have over the most varied kinds of audiences. I had made everyone accept my singularity. I had exaggerated my persona to every kind of theatrical excess, each time quite capable of perfectly entering into it.
I had spurred on all of my inner contradictions, my wildest tendencies, my maddest imaginings, savoring each time to intoxication the feeling of being alive right out to the tips of my emerging mustache. Now all I lacked was love, glory, and money. And I knew my destiny held triumph in store for me.
How Dalí Lived Through His Military Service
I did nine months’ military service. It was de luxe service generally referred to as “per diem” – with permission to eat out, wear a tailor-made uniform, and sleep at home. There was a small group of us, theoretically not subject to any duty roster, although a few irritated and jealous noncoms missed no opportunity to ride us, which led some of my comrades to react. For my part, I gladly acceded to all of their demands.
Nothing suited me better than latrine duty, and the stinking regimental toilet bowls were made to shine like brand new living-room vases. I saluted everything in uniform, even firemen: I was a model soldier, and took simplistic sensual pleasure in this easy submission to slavery and constraint. To submit to things of one’s own free will: what could be more delightful!
But, since I hated to stand guard at the prison at night, out of laziness and especially fear (for there were sometimes desperate escapes), I pretended to be subject to nervous fits, while affecting to do all I could to control them, but making sure that each one was seen by some officer. The ruse worked. I was exempted, even when I volunteered. My skill at deception was proving itself once again. That left me a lot of time to think about the future.
“I HAVE HAD THE GIFT FOR PAINTING SINCE THE CRADLE. I HAD A CRIB WITH TWO WOODEN SIDEBARS – SO I WOULD NOT FALL OUT – AND THEY WERE BLACKENED WITH MY DRAWINGS. DRAWINGS THAT WERE ALWAYS REPRESENTATIVE OF HIGHLY IMAGINATIVE FIGURES. IF IT WAS A DOG, IT WAS A DOG WITH A WOMAN’S BREASTS OR A HUMAN FACE, NEVER JUST A NORMAL DOG. I PAINTED WITH COLORED CRAYONS BECAUSE I ALWAYS WANTED TO REPRODUCE THE INTRAUTERINE IMAGES THAT WERE SO HIGHLY COLORFUL AND, TO ME, ALWAYS HAD A PARADISIAC FEELING. I ENCOUNTERED THIS PARADISIAC FEELING AGAIN WHEN I READ THE TRAUMA OF BIRTH, WHICH GAVE ME THE KEY TO SUCH CLEAR MEMORIES THAT I WAS IMMEDIATELY ABLE TO PLACE AS COMING FROM MY INTRAUTERINE PERIOD.”
[1] “He has covered so much ground that the present exhibition classes him as one of the most dependable values of the recent generation of Catalan artists.” –La Publicidad
“His brush is like a sharp surgeon’s scalpel initiating us to the mystery of reality and reveals him, like the philosopher, wrapped in the melancholy of trans-cendency with which humble things are covered.” –Gaceta de las artes
“Young Salvador Dalí has a strong soul, the gift of materializing his pictorial vision and reflecting things of this world in their corpo
real aspect without depriving them of an intensity that never eliminates grace.” –D’aci i d’alla
Chapter Five: How To Become Erotic While Remaining Chaste
At twenty I was a being of desires, savoring pleasures, all pleasures of the senses and the mind, with refined, exquisite voluptuousness, with an Olympian fulfillment that obeyed a long-nurtured code of hyperlucid discipline. My eye, my intelligence, and my prick were my most delectable media of enjoyment, and the almost infinite variety of combinations among them pleasured me with delights ranging from scatology to exhibitionism, from daydreaming to masturbation (one not excluding the other); the confirmation by action being always the least interesting part, except where voyeurism was concerned, and even then it would happen that the failure, refusal, or accident, interfering with consummation, might give me greater satisfaction than success itself. The point indeed was to remain chaste while becoming erotic. The formula demands a very high degree of self-control. In a word, the mastery of the paranoiac-critical attitude. But the facts speak for themselves.
My love at the age of seven for beautiful Ursulita Matas, who, according to Eugenio d’Ors’ legend, inspired his La Bien Plantada, was not due only to the quality of her beauty, but the orgasmic oral delights I got from Napoleon. The plump flanks of the emperor with the maté inside and the big silver sucking-cup that was passed around allowed me to suck in at the same time a honeyed liquid sweeter than my mother’s blood, a bit of Ursulita’s spittle, and the imperial strength of Napoleon that came to me from his guts through the little keg.
Maniac Eyeball Page 6