There are as many periods to his art as there are women he loved. He was a lover. But he felt cramped. He became enraged. He broke off, in order to start again: propulsions and repulsions like the waves of the sea make up an incessant motion that is the rhythm of his genius.
He was sadistic the better to enjoy existence by breathing in the pain of others. He once said his happiest memory was of when two women – one he no longer loved and the other he did not yet love – fought over him. He had brought on the scene by painting one in the other’s clothes, and did nothing to try to separate them.
It has been claimed (as by Professor N. N. Dracoulides in his Le Cas Picasso [The Picasso Case]) that the blue of his most famous period reflects the profoundly depressed mood of the time he was living in Paris with Max Jacob in a small room in which they had to share a bed.
Picasso painted at night while Max Jacob slept, and slept during the day when his roommate was at work. Max at the time was a deliveryman for his uncle’s bookshop. But one day he just dumped the books in the gutter so as to get done earlier, and was himself given the heave-ho. The two of them even thought of committing suicide by jumping off their balcony. Picasso got hold of himself first. In order to go back to Spain, he tried to sell some of his paintings. No one wanted them. Vollard sneered. Finally, the wife of his color dealer, Mme. Besnard, paid him sixty francs for a Maternité au Bord de la Mer (Seaside Maternity), the same one that was sold in 1971 for half a million dollars. Enough to make you see red!
But if the blue of that period reflected anything, it was cer tainly not the price of a tube of ultramarine! Picasso may have burned some of his drawings to keep warm, but he was too much the painter to put to canvas any color that betrayed his vision. It was the phoenix blue-baby reflecting that blueness in the depths of his despair: I prefer this explanation which brings things back to the arcana of creation, the roots of metamorphoses. Picasso said, “Art is the child of rejection and suffering, and I paint as others write their autobiographies.”
Picasso is doubtless the man I have most often thought about after my father. He was my beacon when I was in Barcelona and he was in Paris. His eye was my criterion. I have come across him at all the high points of my reign.
And when I left for America, once again he was there: without him, I would have had no ticket. I thought of him as the apple-crowned boy thought of William Tell taking aim.
But he was always aiming at the apple, not at me. He radiated prodigious Catalan life. When the two of us were together, the spot at which we were must have become heavier and the noösphere assumed special density. We were the highest contrasts imaginable and conceivable. My superiority over him lay in my name being Gala-Salvador-Dalí and knowing that I was the saviour of modern art that he was bent on destroying while his name was simply Pablo. I was two and predestined. He was so alone and desperate that he had to become a Communist. He never ceased cuckolding himself.
I am often asked what will remain of Picasso’s work. What a question! All that will help to bring out the children of my own genius – when the harassed, tortured eye turns away from Picasso’s paintings, it comes to ineffable delight by simple exposure to my own. Catalonia conceived us at the same time, as heirs to the noblest of traditions, and Picasso preceded me into the world the better to set me off from the most classical delirium of the creative virtuosity of imperial masterpieces to drawings quantified by energy, which in a mechanical and mediocre universe were to have the noble task of transmuting into gold and beauty the emptiness of modern paint ing – leading to Gala-Salvador-Dalí.
Some say, “Why, Picasso never copied a photograph!” All my life I have of course used photography. Years ago I already stated that painting was merely color photography done by hand, made up of hyperfine images the only importance of which was that they were conceived by a human eye and created by a hand. All the great works of art I admire were done from photographs. The inventor of the magnifying-glass was born the same year as Vermeer. This has never been fully appreciated. And I am convinced that Vermeer of Delft used an optical mirror in which the subjects of his paintings were reflected so he could trace them.
Praxiteles, most divine of all sculptors, copied bodies precisely without the slightest subjective deformation. Velázquez, likewise, reflected reality with total chastity.
The day I planned to do a painting to the glory of St. James, I happened to bump into the Vicomtesse de Noailles, who had just bought a book on Santiago de Compostela and showed it to me. Opening it, I was immediately struck by the shell-shaped architectural vault that is the palm tree of the famous shrine which I decided to reproduce. I also looked until I found a photograph of a horse buck ing and traced it in the same way.
Exact copying of nature is no scandal, provided the painter doing this is capable if he wishes to do as well as or even better than the camera. The only scandal would lie in dissembling and pretending to have created a work one has not done.
Praxiteles said that all the beauty of a work of art lay in the bit of clay the sculptor who faithfully copied his model had neverthe less left between the nail and flesh of a finger.
If you be an artist, copy, keep copying! Something will be left of it. Something more always grows out of it.
One of Louis XIV’s sculptors was one day ordered by the king to make a medal. To flatter him, and in view of his admiration for Roman bas-reliefs, the artist decided faithfully to trace an extant Roman medal, yet his hand, in spite of himself, because he was the Sun-King’s man and not a contemporary of Caesar, added lines, small differences of touch, imponderables which slightly modified the subject. And art historians know that it was these slight modifications that gave birth to Louis XIV style.
Today, such a phenomenon is hard for us to understand, for we live in a violent period; our contemporaries like only brutal things and are unable to appreciate shadings. The only important and decisive thing in art is the touch of the painter’s brush or the sculptor’s finger. The brushstroke is the only imponderable, the angelic manner of self-expression.
Today’s abstract painters, a Mathieu for example, do their painting with terribly amplified brushstrokes, on an enormous scale. We must remember that one stroke of the artist’s brush is the equivalent of a tragedy by Sophocles.
No need to deform, contort, or cheat on reality to express one’s art. Neither Praxiteles nor Vermeer cheated in this. Yet they communicated the most sublime and complete of feelings and ideas.
Every time a painter manipulates reality, that is, does some thing other than to photograph the outside world, it is because he has a very feeble viewpoint on nature. He has a caricatural eye, and wants to give it predominance over beauty. The work is therefore aesthetically less important.
The painter’s hand must be so faithful that it can automatically correct a photograph’s deformations of natural elements. Every painter must have ultra-academic training.
Only on the basis of that can something else, in a word: art, become possible.
I divine what the new painting will be, which I call quantified realism, that is, taking into account what physicists call the quantum of energy, mathematicians chance, and we artists imponderable and beauty. Tomorrow’s picture will be the expression of the most faithful reality, but one will be able to feel that it is pulsating with extraordinary life corresponding to what is called the discontinuity of matter.
Velásquez and Vermeer were divisionists in their time. They intuited modern angst. Today, the most talented, most sensitive painters merely communicate the angst of indeterminism. Modern science tells us nothing actually exists. We see scientists arguing over apparently virgin photographic film about the existence of matter. So there is nothing abnormal about some painters making their pictures out of nothing. But that is only a transitional phase. The great painter must know how to assimilate the nothingness into his picture. And that nothingness is what will give life to tomorrow’s great art.
I believe the artist is the true cosmo
logist of the world and the painter the most compelling of artists because he is dominated by the eye – the highest organ in the hierarchy, the one that dominates situations in all ways.
It is very important for an artist to have a developed sense of the cosmos. I am much more important as a cosmic genius than as a painter. My painting is but one of the means for me to express my cosmic sense. My delirium and lucidity are more important than my painting.
How Dalí Remembers His Relations With Picasso
He had a feel for adjectives, but few ideas. He listened to me and gratified me with answers full of modifiers. His whole brilliance lay in his skill as plagiarist and stager-as-jewel-setter. When all was said and done, Picasso was a duettist. He always needed a partner: Ingres, Delacroix, Velázquez, and others I forget. But he was a eunuch, a caricaturing imitator who tore down and made fun of what he could not outdo.
When the magazine Minotaure was coming out, he and I played a game of working together on a picture that each of us redid five times. The point was to react to each other’s work. I thus saw his work processes close up. And Picasso then kept the original: he did not like incriminating evidence left around. All he knew how to do was to distort as he copied.
Picasso’s great discovery was Cubism, and at that he took it straight out of Catalan sculpture; it is the pictorial transposition of a position of a sculptured volume found in Catalan churches. A flattening of a three-dimensional object. Cubism was the holography of 1912.
No one at the time understood the plastic significance of this appeal, but Picasso kept at it despite the loneliness and his friends’ jibes; mainly, because he wanted to go through with what he had started. He was very stubborn. For instance, he admired Juan Gris, who was a real painter. He often visited him in his studio and Juan Gris then walked him back home, but then Picasso walked him back again so he could go back into the studio and see him paint and understand how he did his grounds. But he was not patient, nor painter, enough to do as well.
In his whole painting life, Picasso never did anything but projects. He had to do the same subject a hundred times, for he never knew which was the right one. Others had to make the choice for him. The only thing he never pulled off was a real painting.
Not one masterpiece! But a prodigious quantity of satires. He was a barbarian. Whence his success in a period interested only in immediate effect. His work was a great cymbal clap.
Each year, I sent him a postcard to remind him of an old story he had told me. In Cadaqués there was a contralto who had posed for a photographic postcard, holding Samson’s head. Her underarms had tufts of hard black hairs that titillated us greatly – they were blacker and harder than Samson’s. One day when her lover wanted to fuck her, she refused and went out on the balcony shouting, “In July, do not have women or snails.”
Picasso never replied, but I knew he always enjoyed my annual card and this reminder. But those around him stood between us. If he had answered me, they probably would have called him a traitor to the cause. He was the prisoner of his political system, which after all was on the base level of the mob. He got his inspiration from the blood and sweat of the people. Nothing sublime in him – just always the need to make Judy O’Grady laugh or cry! He was gifted, but not skillful. The only positive thing to be said for him was that he was cleverer than Cézanne – who is really lower than low!
What Dalí Sees As The Key To Painting
The day I discovered the key to art I fell to my knees and thanked God. With both knees on the ground! And hands together! Leonardo da Vinci agreed with Euclid that the egg was the most perfect of shapes; to Ingres, the sphere was ideal; Cézanne put his faith only in the cube and cylinder.
The truth lies not in any shape but in a geometric locus that is the same for all curved shapes of the human body: I discovered this golden rule at the rounded point of the heaven swept cone of the rhinoceros horn. You can find it for yourself. The point is to apply this inquisitorial mathematics with an implacable rigor that alone can give rebirth to great painting.
I think the time is past for painting algae in the manner of Matisse, that lugubrious kitchen chef for the bourgeois heirs to 1789. A painter of hairs on the soup! I invite the world to a gastronomical and aesthetic revolution: softness, viscousness, gooeyness, against the straight line, the acute angle, the sign disincarnate. A painting of desire and erection. A painting of error and holiness. A painting of the sublime!
Geometry is always Utopian and bodyless. I have often proclaimed: “Geometers rarely get a hard-on!” Many good craftsmen strayed into painting: Kandinsky, for instance, who would have fared admirably as a manufacturer of enamel-headed canes.
Cézanne is the finest expression of this decadence. He was truly unable to imitate the masterpieces and all of his admired tech nique is merely proof of his inability. His apples are made of cement. The paradox is that what is least admirable is most admired: nullity! What a symbol for a period! On the pretext of the academic being detestable, the worst in the class was made a hero! He opens the door to the ethics of shit! Newness at whatever cost – and art becomes just a latrine! The logic of this search for newness leads to the glorification of total shit of which Cézanne is the high priest.
Meissonier was the last painter who knew how to paint. After him came the period of disaster. (Thank God nothing but documents will remain of those two scourges, modern art and Russian Communism.) Accepted to the Salon at nineteen, Meissonier began an extraordinary career, the high points of which were the sale of his 1814 for three billion old francs and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s telegram of condolences to the President of France when the painter died.
What a success his existence was! What an exploit his painting which turned minute faithfulness to detail into a golden rule allowing him to assimilate the complexness, the density, and the tragedy of his time.
I see only his pupil Detaille to rival him. Received by all the sovereigns of Europe, mobilizing entire armies as extras so as to get the feel of reality when he did his sketches, calling in President Jules Grévy, Detaille was great enough so that it can be said that without him salon painting would have gone out of existence. And his sense of micro-structures was carried forward by the Cubists.
The eight hundred paintings of Gustave Moreau are in the studio-museum he willed to the State, where dreamy adolescents fall under their spell. At the end of the nineteenth century, beauty and love were conveyed by him, and will be for a long time to come. Surrealism owes him a great deal.
In Boldini I like the sensuality that lets him undress a woman with a biting stroke and makes his graphicness one of the revelations of modern painting.
I like Millet’s erotic cannibalism, which recurs in my work. But what I don’t like is just as clear.
The art of painting could have done without all German painting, and especially the work of Max Ernst; quite incapable of grasping what the phenomenon of beauty is, he is merely a good illustrator. Dürer – one of the rare Germans to know how to draw – is but a pale reflection of the Italian Renaissance.
Braque used to say, “I like the rule that keeps emotion in check.” Which Juan Gris felicitously corrected into, “Let us like the emotion that keeps rule in check.” Braque is the French petit bourgeois of good taste, perfectly suited as a house painter, imitator of fake marble.
He was lucky in that nature took a hand in finishing his work, and his collages, for example, would be less successful without the flyshit that quantifies them.
Miró is a Catalan peasant, very gifted as are all Catalan peasants, but quite incapable of “murdering painting” as he set out to do. He might have been successful as a society painter because he looked good in evening dress, but he stuck to folklore and that hurts his standing.
Léger is the worst of all; even Braque is better than this flat foot, for he at least is sometimes pleasing.
Soutine belongs to a filthy family of drunks.
Moore, compared to Praxiteles’ Hermes, is the village idiot,
his work a sculpture of holes.
On the other hand, I admire Marcel Duchamp who was first to paint mustaches on the Mona Lisa, to underline her ambivalence. Is she the Oedipal portrait of Leonardo’s mother, or the shell-game image of his prattboy? Duchamp posed the question properly with his phonetic caption for the mustachioed Gioconda: LHOOQ (pronounced: Elle a chaud au cul, or: Her arse is in heat).
I like De Kooning, the colossus straddling the Atlantic with one foot in New York and the other in Amsterdam, whose paintings suggest the geological dreams of earliest ages and the cosmic happenings that record the adventures of the planet.
But today, fake culture sneaks in everywhere. One day at the St. Regis in New York, I met André Malraux. We discussed the his tory of art. I told him Oriental art was nothing and ought to be passed over in silence, which would be a great savings.
He retorted that Oriental art was just as important as Occidental.
“Let’s take a closer look,” I said. “I’ll name you three Western masterpieces and you name me three masterpieces of your art of the East.” And I enumerated Velázquez’ Las Meninas, Raphael’s Madonna, and Vermeer’s View of Delft.
“Your turn.”
He told me there was a fragment of a Chinese horse’s head, of he could not remember which dynasty, that he said was sublime. But what horse? What work? What dynasty? What fragment? How? Why? By whom?
Nothing. A total poverty of culture.
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