One of the pleasures I was looking forward to in going back to Paris was seeing Coco Chanel again; Misia was her best friend and a true sorceress of charm and intelligence. Misia was a natural born musician. Liszt had taught her her scales, Fauré had been her professor, Debussy later sang Pelléas et Mélisande to her and Grieg Peer Gynt. She was almost the perdition of old Renoir, who was in love with her breasts and did eight portraits of her that are today in either the Barnes Collection or the Leningrad Hermitage. She set them alongside those done by Vuillard, Bonnard, Vallotton and Lautrec.
The Symbolist poet Mallarmé had been her neighbor at Valvins, on the banks of the Seine, and used to drop in on her in his wooden country shoes. He wrote a tricky quatrain for her, on her fan. Paul Morand, in his Venice, described her as “a genius of perfidy, refined in her cruelty.”[1]
Her second husband, Alfred Edwards, owner of the mass-circulation newspaper Le Matin, gave her the other part of the social world after her divorce from Thadée. The third was a Catalan. Sert was a giant with huge appetites who mainly taught her how to go through a fortune with nonchalance. His painting was monumental, too, “but shrinking,” people said at the time.
The big event in Misia’s life was her meeting with Coco Chanel. The war had smashed all corsets, both the actual, physical ones, and the comparable symbolic taboos.
“In 1919, I woke up famous,” Coco Chanel said, “and with a new friend who was to give its full meaning to my success.”
Did Dalí Feel Friendship for Coco Chanel?
I look like all the characters I paint and my pictures all hang from my mustache. In the same way, Coco was bobbed hair, costume jewelry, black tailored suits, sweaters, suntan, white pajamas. Her existence too was an uninterrupted monologue in which she told everything, and the disorder of her existence became a magical stability. To go into her salon was to discover the Surrealist Golconda. The first time she invited me, I immediately recognized who she was. In the midst of her mother-of-pearls, the ebonies, golds, crystals, masks, mirrors, perfumes, in which lions, does, and a charging wild boar were her mythological flock, Coco Chanel, never without a hat on her head, smoking incessantly, talked, talked, talked – imperious, innocent, terrifying.
She would say, “Celebrity is loneliness, isn’t it, Dalí?”
“People like us don’t need advice; we need approval.”
“My friends, there’s no such thing as friends.” In which she was not mistaken, since to me being incapable of friendship is my pet luxury!
She would say, “People with a legend end up being like their legend, so as to reinforce their own celebrity.”
And that was how she had manufactured everything she had: family, childhood, age, and even her given name.
My paranoiac-critical mind in its genius perfectly understood Coco Chanel, who had suffered from being ill-loved. Her father had betrayed her after her mother’s death, allowing her to believe he was preparing a new home for her in the South, when he was leaving the same day for the Americas, never to return.
From that day forward, she was never again to trust a man. She read cheap romances from which she could borrow a different family and imagine herself a heroine. At twenty, she was swept off her feet by a rich, titled lieutenant of the hussars, who took her to Paris. She made an entry at Maxim’s and made friends with Emilienne d’Alençon, one of her handsome horseman’s official mistresses. Humiliated, she looked daggers at those corseted, proud-busted beauties of the night who ruled over bodies and hearts, sweeping the dust with their long-trained gowns and dancing with wide wiggling of their arses, on their high heels. It was against them that she first invented the men’s felt hat with split crown, one rim down and the other up; against them and their sexy plumed hats that she created this new fashion that was launched by the actress Gabrielle Dorziat. Against them, too, like a bomb she exploded her fashions of the tailored suit, the knit frock, reducing them to nothing. She had known how to turn every event of her existence to her advantage so as to grow ever more important.
“I was able to open a high fashion shop,” she said, “because two gentlemen were out-bidding each other for my hot little body.” In the paranoiac Parthenon, she deserves a special mention.
“I don’t know what I’m trying to forget,” she would say; “maybe that I’m alive. And I keep moving to pretend that I’m trying to catch up with time.”
She was very proud of her neck, “the longest neck in the world,” as she called it, and to keep it in shape, she kept her head high when she ate. She massaged it constantly, as if it were an enormous penis that she was masturbating.
She walked in her sleep, “all night in the middle of gardens”. One morning, at the Ritz, the chambermaid found a tailored suit cut out of a terrycloth robe during the night with a pair of scissors. “In the lapel, the suit had a gardenia fashioned from a hand towel.”
She told a funny story about her first evening at Maxim’s: an Englishman and his lady had just sat down, when a woman broke in, grabbed a glass and smashed it, and with the jagged stem cut up the gent’s face. “I ran away,” she said. “I climbed up the stairs and hid under a table covered by a tablecloth that came all the way down to the floor. I am terrified of blood.
“The second time, at Maxim’s, we had hardly sat down when a man came in waving a revolver and forced us all to get up and stand with our hands up. You can understand why it took me thirty years before I ever went back to that restaurant.”
Coco Chanel considered herself an artist and spoke of her self in the third person: “She took the English masculine and made it feminine. All her life, all she did was change men’s clothing into women’s: jackets, hair, neckties, wrists. Coco Chanel always dressed like the strong independent male she had dreamed of being. She set women free because she had suffered too long from not being free herself. Showing what so-called meaningless fashions can sometimes be due to!”
Was Coco Chanel Capable Of Friendship?
I think Coco Chanel gave her friendship not to beings but to entities. I was genius as Diaghilev was dance and Coco was fashion. She liked herself very much and talked about herself tirelessly.
Misia Sert had introduced her to Diaghilev. He treated her as a sister, though he was in love with her. When he was broke in London, after Sleeping Beauty, which was a resounding flop, he took refuge in Paris, at Misia’s at the Ritz. Coco was there. The next day, without telling a soul, she gave him a big check that allowed him to get started again, on the sole condition that Diaghilev was to keep her generosity a secret. This silence completely upset Diaghilev, who always expected his angels to be in love with one of the ballet members, male or female.
She backed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Noces, and Diaghilev tried to pay court to her, but she sent him back to his pas de deux. She was doing it out of something quite other than love, perhaps to prove something to herself – her freedom, her power, her masculinity. The money she had acquired let her prove her reality in her own eyes. While at sea on the Flying Cloud, the yacht belonging to the Duke of Westminster, one of the great loves of her life, she heard that Diaghilev, diabetic, was on his deathbed in Venice; she forced the yacht to set sail for Venice. She got there after he died, just in time to see Diaghilev to the cemetery. Serge Lifar and Boris Kochno wanted to follow the cortège on their knees.
Coco told them to follow her, and led the procession of mourning friends followed by her two pages. But she was not one for gratitude, and paid no tribute to memory.
“Every morning, the bag of the past ought to be emptied,” she used to say, “else the weight of life drags you down and soon you’re in the dust, with the ghosts and the idiots.”
She loved Pierre Reverdy very much, to the point of hating Jean Cocteau, because he was so successful a poet.
“Thank God, the future will change all that,” she would say, “and only Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars will remain.” In Reverdy, she loved his saintliness – but he preferred the peace of Solesmes Abbey to a
great love. Coco was also long fascinated by the fact that the Duke of Westminster did not mail his love letters to her, but sent the daily missive with a messenger specially dispatched from London. They did not marry because the House of Chanel could not enter into alliance with the House of England. But there was true luxury in their relationship.
Once, to apologize for having made her jealous, the Duke, during one of their yacht cruises, gave Coco an emerald; she leaned against the railing, admired the light playing on the gem, and then, having seen it, let it drop into the sea. She was being Cleopatra who, to stand up to Caesar, took the pearls the Imperator gave her and dropped them into vinegar to dissolve them.
I was often her guest at La Pausa, her villa on the Riviera. The whole Almanach de Gotha went bathing there, without formality. Around the Duke were Cocteau, Georges Auric, Prince Kutuzov, the Beaumonts, Serge Lifar. Back at the house, there were two huge buffets on the terrace, with cassoulet, risotto, stew, fishes in aspic. Hot and cold in profusion for all tastes. After that, we would go inside. Over her gilt iron bed, Coco had hung some useless fertility amulets.
Winston Churchill forced the Duke to marry the daughter of the royal palace’s chief of protocol. In one night, a memorable rupture scene sent all the appearances of happiness flying in smithereens. The sun disappeared; it was the ice age.
The last time I had seen Coco Chanel was at Arcachon just before the great exodus to the U.S. when the war was on. She spoke of the vacations of her girlhood at an oyster breeder’s; he took her out on his boat in the morning and gave her fresh-gathered oysters to eat. “I would spit them out disgustedly,” she said. “Later, I was sorry I had not learned to like them. When I lived at the Ritz with my fine officer, I used to have them sent up to my room and, trying to get myself to like them, invited the chambermaid to share them with me, but she unfortunately had no taste for them either. How about you, Dalí, do you like oysters?” I like tearing the oyster out of its shell as I like crushing bones so as to suck out the marrow. Whatever is sticky, gelatinous, viscous, vitreous, to me, is suggestive of gastronomical lust.
As Gala and I were about to sail again for Europe, I thought back on that conversation and my mouth watered with pleasure at the vision of the friends and the meals that lay ahead. From the boat deck, I looked at New York with satisfaction. Helena there, Coco in Paris. One of the queens of world snobbery in each capital, to say good-bye and to welcome me, and Gala in my heart and my bed. What luxury!
But what happiness to get back to the transcendent beauty of Port Lligat, my kingdom, my Platonic cave. As soon as I get back, I dip again into the splendor of the Gulf, become intoxicated with the sacred landscape that encloses the horizon. I walk on air. I forget the haughtiness of the skyscrapers and the agitation, the noise, the excitement of America. There is no way out, at the point of hypersnobbery I have reached, but to be come a mystic.
I allow the sun to seep into me and I experience the Mediterranean light. Like a burning arrow, I receive the certainty of my communication with God whose elite creature I am. My return from America is consecrated by this solemn event: after success, money, the greatest hit of snobbery, God brings me His witness. I feel I am the divinely chosen.
That is the time the government decides to declare Port Lligat “picturesque, of national interest”, thereby turning this corner of the world into a Dalínian church. I feel assured of the triumph that awaits me in Paris.
““I AM VERY FAITHFUL TO MY FRIENDS, BUT ALWAYS REASONABLY. I DO NOT EXPERIMENT WITH MY EMOTIONS WHERE THEY ARE CONCERNED. CREVEL HAD A BREAKDOWN IN A LITTLE VILLAGE WE LIVED IN AND WAS AT DEATH’S DOOR AND I COULD NOT EVEN TOUCH HIM. I ACTED AS I SHOULD HAVE, IN A WAY THAT EVERYONE CONSIDERED THE MOST DEVOTED POSSIBLE, BUT I COULD NOT BRING MYSELF TO TOUCH HIM IN ORDER TO HELP HIM. ANYTHING THAT IS SENTIMENT IS STRICTLY CHANNELED TO MY WIFE AND ALL OTHER BEINGS LEAVE ME ABSOLUTELY INDIFFERENT BUT I ACT TOWARD THEM WITH INTELLIGENCE AND REASONING.”
[1] Misia, “who harvested geniuses who were all in love with her, collected hearts and pink Ming trees: launching her fads that became fashions... imitated by the empty-headed women of high society, Misia was the queen of modern baroque. Misia sulking, pretending, a genius of perfidy, refined in her cruelty... unfulfilled, Misia whose piercing eyes were still full of laughter when her mouth was already turning into a pout.”
Chapter Fifteen: How To Pray To God Without Believing In Him
The atomic explosion of August 6, 1945, shook me seismically. Thenceforth, the atom was my favorite food for thought. Many of the landscapes painted in this period express the great fear inspired in me by the announcement of that explosion. I applied my paranoiac-critical method to exploring the world. I want to see and understand the forces and hidden laws of things, obviously so as to master them.
To penetrate to the heart of things, I know by intuitive genius that I have an exceptional means: mysticism, that is to say, deeper intuition of what is, immediate communication with the all, absolute vision by grace of truth, by grace of God.
Stronger than cyclotrons and cybernetic computers, in a moment I get through to the secrets of the real, but only facing the landscape of Port Lligat will this conviction become certainty and my entire being catch fire with the transcendental light of that high place.
On the shore at Port Lligat I understood that the Catalan sun which had already engendered two geniuses, Raymond de Se bonde, author of Natural Theology, and Antonio Gaudí, the creator of Mediterranean Gothic, had just caused the atom of the absolute to explode within me. I became a mystic as I watched the swallows pass by outside the window. I understood that I was to be the savior of modern painting. It all became clear and evident: form is a re action of matter under inquisitorial coercion on all sides by hard space. Freedom is what is shapeless. Beauty is the final spasm of a rigorous inquisitorial process. Every rose grows in a prison.
I had a sudden vision of the highest architecture of the human soul: Bramante’s Roman tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio and the Spanish Escorial, both conceived in ecstasy. “Give me ecstasy!” I shouted. “The ecstasy of God and man. Give me perfection, beauty, so I may look it in the eyes. Death to the academic, to the bureaucratic formulas of art, to decorative plagiarism, to the feeble aberrations of African art. Help me, Saint Teresa of Avila!” And I plunged into the most rigorous, architectonic, Pythago rean, and exhausting mystical reverie that can be. I became a saint. I might have become an ascetic, but I was a painter. I made myself a dermo-skeleton of a body, shoving my bones to the exterior like a crustacean, so that my soul could grow only upward toward heaven; working at it from awakening till slumber, putting to contribution the slightest digestive incidents, the least phosphenes, I succeeded in exploring myself, dissecting myself, reducing myself to an ultra-gelatinous corpuscular wave so as the better to reassemble myself in ecstasy and joy.
It was in this state of intense prophecy that I understood that the means of pictorial expression had been invented once and for all with maximum perfection and efficiency during the Renaissance, and that the decadence of modern painting came from the skepticism and lack of faith resulting from mechanistic materialism. I, Dalí, by restoring currency to Spanish mysticism, will prove the unity of the universe through my work by showing the spirituality of all substance.
I feel, sensorially and metaphysically, that the ether is non- existent. I understand the relative role of time, Heraclitus’ statement, “Time is a child”, appearing to me in blinding clarity with my limp watches taking on all their meaning. “No more denying,” I shouted at the height of ecstasy, “no more Surrealist malaise of existential angst. I want to paint a Christ that is a painting with more beauty and joy than have ever been painted before. I want to paint a Christ that is the absolute opposite of Grünewald’s materialistic, savagely anti-mystical one.” The way was laid out for me!
In an ebullition of ideas of genius, I decided to undertake the plastic solution of the quantum theory of energy and invented “quantified r
ealism” so as to be master of gravity. I started to paint the Leda Atomica, which exalted Gala as goddess of my metaphysics, and succeeded in creating “suspended space,” and then Dalí à l’Age de Six Ans Quand il Croyait Etre une Jeune Fille en train de Soulever la Peau de la Mer Pour Voir un Chien Endormi à l’Ombre de l’Eau (Dalí At The Age Of Six When He Thought He Was A Young Girl Raising The Skin Of The Sea To See a Dog Sleeping In The Shadow Of The Water), in which beings and things appear as foreign bodies from space. I plastically dematerialized matter, then spiritualized it in order to create energy. Each thing is a living being by virtue of the energy it contains and radiates, the density of the matter that makes it up. Each of my “subjects” is both a mineral subject to the pulsations of the world and a piece of live uranium. I succeeded through painting in giving substance to space. My Coupole Formée par les Brouettes Contorsionnées (Cupola Made Of Contorted Wheelbarrows) is the most striking demonstration of my mystical vision. I solemnly affirm that heaven is in the center of the believer’s chest, for my mysticism is not religious alone, but nuclear and hallucinogenic; and in gold, in the painting of limp watches, or my visions of the Perpignan station, I discover the same truth. I also believe in magic and in my own destiny.
I decide to paint the Mystical Madonna, later to be known as the Madone de Port Lligat (Virgin Of Port Lligat), which Pope Pius XII was to admire. But first I must get away from any religious formulation. The Renaissance cupolas that corresponded to the cupola of heaven in a flash of genius appear to me as the receptacles of con science. I go back to that theme in Tête Raphaelesque Eclatée (Raphaelesque Head Exploded) and express a transcendent meta physical message in my Mystic Manifesto.
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