“I am not discussing the merits of your son’s drawing,” he said, “but he has not observed the examination rules. In these rules it is clearly stated that the drawing must have the exact measurements of an Ingres sheet of paper, and your son is the only one who has made the figure so small that the surrounding space cannot be considered as margins!”
My father was beside himself from that moment. He did not know what to advise me—whether to start the drawing over again or to finish it as best I could in its present dimensions. The problem troubled him all during our afternoon walk. At the theatre that evening, in the middle of the picture, he made everyone turn round by suddenly exclaiming, “Do you feel you have the courage to start it all over again?” and, after a long silence, “You have three days left!” I derived a certain pleasure from tormenting him on this subject; but I myself was beginning to feel the contagion of his anguish, and I saw that the question was actually becoming serious.
“Sleep well,” he advised me before I went to bed, “and don’t think about this; tomorrow you must be at your best, and you will decide at the last moment.” The next day, filled with great courage and decision, I completely rubbed out my drawing without a moment’s hesitation. But no sooner had I completed this operation than I remained paralyzed by fear at what I had just done. I looked, flabbergasted, at my paper which was all white again, while my fellow-competitors all around me, on their fourth day of work, were already beginning to touch up their shadows. The following day all of them would be almost through; and then they would have plenty of time left to check on final corrections, which always require calm and reflection. I looked at the clock with anguish. It had already taken me half an hour just to erase. I thus anxiously began my new figure, trying this time to take measurements so that it would have the dimensions which the regulations required. But so clumsily did I go about these preliminary operations, which any other student would have executed mechanically at a single stroke, that at the end of the session I had once more to rub out the whole thing. When the class was over my father instantly read in the pallor of my face that things were not going well.
“What did you do?”
“I erased it.”
“But how is the new one going?”
“I haven’t begun it. All I did was to erase and take measurements. I want to be sure this time!”
My father said, “You’re right—but two hours to take measurements! Now you have only two days left. I should have advised you not to erase your first drawing.”
Neither my father nor I could eat that evening. He kept saying to me, “Eat! Eat! If you don’t eat, you won’t be able to do anything tomorrow.” We fretted the whole time, and my sister, too, looked shaken. My father confessed to me later that he spent the whole night without being able to sleep for one second, assailed by insoluble doubts—I should have erased it, I should not have erased it!
The next day arrived. Sansovino’s Bacchus was marked and impregnated so deeply in my memory that I threw myself into the work like a starving wolf. But this time I made it too large. There was nothing to be done—it was impossible to cheat! His feet extended entirely beyond the paper. This was worse than anything, a much worse fault than to have left immense margins. Again I erased it completely.
When I got out of class my father was livid with impatience. With an unconvincing smile and trying to encourage me he said, “Well?”
“Too big,” I answered.
“And what do you intend to do?”
“I’ve already erased it.” I saw a tear gleam in my father’s eyes.
“Come, come, you still have tomorrow’s session. How many times before this you’ve made a drawing in a single session!”
But I knew that in two hours this was humanly impossible, for it would take at least one day to sketch it out, and another to make the shadows. Besides, my father was saying this only to encourage me. He knew as well as I that I had failed in the examination and that the day after the next we would have to return to Figueras covered with shame—I who was the best of them all back there—and this after the absolute assurances that Señor Nuñez had given him that I could not possibly fail to pass my examinations, even if by chance my drawing should be the poorest that I was capable of making.
“If you don’t pass the examinations,” he said, trying to continue to console me, “it will be my fault and the fault of that imbecilic janitor. If your drawing was good, which it seemed to be, what would it have mattered whether it was a little smaller or larger?”
Then I whetted my maliciousness and answered, “It’s as I’ve been telling you. If a thing is well drawn, it forces itself upon the professors’ esteem!”
My father meditatively rolled one of the strands of white hair that grew on each side of his venerable skull, bitten to the quick by remorse.
“But you yourself told me,” he said “that it was very, very small.”
“Never,” I answered. “I said it was small, but not very very small!”
“I thought you had told me it was very very small,” he insisted. “Then perhaps it would have passed, if it wasn’t small-small! Tell me exactly how it was, so that I can at least form an opinion.”
Then I began one of the most refined tortures. “Now that we have spoken so much about it, I can’t exactly remember its dimensions; it was average, rather small, but not exaggeratedly small.”
“But try to remember. Look, was it about like this?” showing me a dimension with his thumb and his fork.
“With the twisted form of the fork,” I said, “I can’t tell.”
Then patiently he resumed his questioning. “Imagine that it was this knife; it has no curve. Tell me if it was as small as that?”
“I don’t think so,” I answered, pretending to search my memory, “but perhaps it was.”
Then my father began to get impatient and exclaimed furiously, “It’s either yes or no!”
“It’s neither yes nor no,” I answered, “for I can’t remember!”
Then my father paced back and forth in the room in absolute consternation. Suddenly he took a crumb of bread, and put one knee on the floor. “Was it as small as this,” he asked, in a theatrical pleading tone, showing me the crumb with one hand, “or as big as that?” pointing to the cupboard with the other hand. My sister wept, and we went to the cinema. It was a popular type of motion picture, and in the intermission everyone turned round to look at me as though I were a very rare object. With my velvet jacket, my hair which I wore like a girl’s, my gilded cane and my sideburns reaching more than halfway down my cheeks, my appearance was in truth so outlandish and unusual that I was taken for an actor. There were two little girls, in particular, who looked at me ecstatically, with their mouths open. My father grew impatient. “Soon we won’t be able to go out with you. We’re made a show of every time. All that hair, and those long side-burns—and anyway we’ll damn well have to go back to Figueras like beaten dogs with our tails between our legs.”
An expression of infinite bitterness had come over my father’s bluish gaze in the last two days, and the white strand of hair which he was in the habit of fingering in his moments of cruelest doubt and anxiety now stood out stiff, like a horn of white hair into which was condensed all the torment and all the yellowish and menacing bile of my problematic future.
The following day dawn broke dismally, with lurid flashes of capital punishment. I was ready for anything. I was no longer afraid, for my sense of impending catastrophe had reached its peak in the infernal atmosphere of the previous day. I set to work, and in exactly one hour I had completely finished the drawing, with all the shading. I spent the remaining hour doing nothing but admiring my drawing, which was remarkable—never had I done anything so precise. But suddenly I became terrified as I noticed one thing: the figure was still small, even smaller than the first one.
When I got out my father was reading the newspaper. He did not have the courage to ask any questions; he waited for me to speak.
; “I did wonderfully well,” I said calmly. And then I added, “But the drawing is even smaller than the first one I made!”
This remark came like a bomb-shell. So did the result of my examination. I was admitted as a student to the School of Fine Arts of Madrid, with this mention, “In spite of the fact that it does not have the dimensions prescribed by the regulations, the drawing is so perfect that it is considered approved by the examining committee.”
My father and sister went back to Figueras, and I remained alone, settled in a very comfortable room in the Students’ Residence, an exclusive place to which it required a certain influence to be admitted, and where the sons of the best Spanish families lived. I launched upon my studies at the Academy with the greatest determination. My life reduced itself strictly to my studies. No longer did I loiter in the streets, or go to the cinema. I stirred only to go from the Students’ Residence to the Academy and back again. Avoiding the groups who foregathered in the Residence I would go straight to my room where I locked myself in and continued my studies. Sunday mornings I went to the Prado and made cubist sketch-plans of the composition of various paintings. The trip from the Academy to the Students’ Residence I always made by streetcar. Thus I spent about one peseta per day, and I stuck to this schedule for several months on end. My relatives, informed of my way of living by the Director and by the poet Marquina, under whose guardianship I had been left, became worried over my ascetic conduct, which everyone considered monstrous. My father wrote me on several occasions that at my age it was necessary to have some recreation, to take trips, go to the theatre, take walks about town with friends. Nothing availed. From the Academy to my room, from my room to the Academy, and I never exceeded the budget of one peseta per day. My inner life needed nothing else; rather, anything more would have embarrassed me by the intrusion of an unendurable element of displeasure.
In my room I was beginning to paint my first cubist paintings, which were directly and intentionally influenced by Juan Gris. They were almost monochromes. As a reaction against my previous colorist and impressionist periods, the only colors in my palette were white, black, sienna and olive green.
I bought a large black felt hat, and a pipe which I did not smoke and never lighted, but which I kept constantly hanging from the corner of my mouth. I loathed long trousers, and decided to wear short pants with stockings, and sometimes puttees. On rainy days I wore a waterproof cape which I had brought from Figueras, but which was so long that it almost reached the ground. With this waterproof cape I wore the large black hat, from which my hair stuck out like a mane on each side. I realize today that those who knew me at that time do not at all exaggerate when they say that my appearance “was fantastic.” It truly was. Each time I went out or returned to my room, curious groups would form to watch me pass. And I would go my way with head held high, full of pride.
In spite of my generous initial enthusiasm, I was quickly disappointed in the professorial staff of the School of Fine Arts. I immediately understood that those old professors covered with honors and decorations could teach me nothing. This was not due to their academicism or to their philistine spirit but on the contrary to their progressive spirit, hospitable to every novelty. I was expecting to find limits, rigor, science. I was offered liberty, laziness, approximations! These old professors had recently glimpsed French impressionism through national examples that were chock-full of tipicismo (local color)—Sorolla was their god. Thus all was lost.
I was already in full reaction against cubism. They, in order to reach cubism, would have had to live several lives! I would ask anxious, desperate questions of my professor of painting: how to mix my oil and with what, how to obtain a continuous and compact matter, what method to follow to obtain a given effect. My professor would look at me, stupefied by my questions, and answer me with evasive phrases, empty of all meaning.
“My friend,” he would say, “everyone must find his own manner; there are no laws in painting. Interpret—interpret everything, and paint exactly what you see, and above all put your soul into it; it’s temperament, temperament that counts!”
“Temperament,” I thought to myself, sadly, “I could spare you some, my dear professor; but how, in what proportion, should I mix my oil with varnish?”
“Courage, courage,” the professor would repeat. “No details—go to the core of the thing—simplify, simplify—no rules, no constraints. In my class each pupil must work according to his own temperament!”
Professor of painting—professor! Fool that you were. How much time, how many revolutions, how many wars would be needed to bring people back to the supreme reactionary truth that “rigor” is the prime condition of every hierarchy, and that constraint is the very mold of form. Professor of painting—professor! Fool that you were! Always in life my position has been objectively paradoxical—I, who at this time was the only painter in Madrid to understand and execute cubist paintings, was asking the professors for rigor, knowledge, and the most exact science of draughtsmanship, of perspective, of color.
The students considered me a reactionary, an enemy of progress and of liberty. They called themselves revolutionaries and innovators, because all of a sudden they were allowed to paint as they pleased, and because they had just eliminated black from their palettes, calling it dirt, and replacing it with purple! Their most recent discovery was this: everything is made iridescent by light—no black; shadows are purple. But this revolution of impressionism was one which I had thoroughly gone through at the age of twelve, and even at that time I had not committed the elementary error of suppressing black from my palette. A single glance at a small Renoir which I had seen in Barcelona would have been ample for me to understand all this in a second. They would mark time in their dirty, ill digested rainbows for years and years. My God, how stupid people can be!
Everyone made fun of an old professor who was the only one to understand his calling thoroughly, and the only one, besides, possessing a true professional science and conscience. I myself have of ten regretted not having been sufficiently attentive to his counsels. He was very famous in Spain, and his name was José Moreno Carbonero. Certain paintings of his, with scenes drawn from Don Quixote, I still enjoy today, even more than before. Don José Moreno Carbonero would come to class wearing a frock coat, a black pearl in his necktie, and would correct our works with white gloves on so as not to dirty his hands. He had only to make two or three rapid strokes with a piece of charcoal to bring a drawing miraculously back on its feet, into composition; he had a pair of sensationally penetrating, photographic little eyes, like Meissonier’s, that are so rare. All the students would wait for him to leave in order to erase his corrections and do the thing over again in their own manner, which was naturally that of “temperament,” of laziness and of pretentiousness without object or glory—mediocre pretentiousness, incapable of stooping to the level of common sense, and equally incapable of rising to the summits of delirious pride. Students of the School of Fine Arts! Fools that you were!
One day I brought to school a little monograph on Georges Braque. No one had ever seen any cubist paintings, and not a single one of my classmates envisaged the possibility of taking that kind of painting seriously. The professor of anatomy, who was much more given to the discipline of scientific methods, heard mention of the book in question, and asked me for it. He confessed that he had never seen paintings of this kind, but he said that one must respect everything one does not understand. Since this has been published in a book, it means that there is something to it. The following morning he had read the preface, and had understood it pretty well; he quoted to me several types of nonfigurative and eminently geometrical representations in the past I told him that this was not exactly the idea, for in cubism there was a very manifest element of representation. The professor spoke to the other professors and all of them began to look upon me as a supernatural being. This kind of attention threatened to reawaken my old childhood exhibitionism, and since they could teach me nothing I was tempt
ed to demonstrate to them in flesh and blood what “personality” is. But in spite of such temptations my conduct continued to be exemplary: never absent from class, always respectful, always working ten times faster and ten times harder at every subject than the best in the class.
But the professors could not bring themselves to look upon me as a “born artist.” “He is very serious,” they said, “he is clever, successful in whatever he sets out to do. But he is cold as ice, his work lacks emotion, he has no personality, he is too cerebral. An intellectual perhaps, but art must come from the heart!” Wait, wait, I always thought deep down within myself, you will soon see what personality is!
The first spark of my personality manifested itself on the day when King Alfonso XIII came to pay an official visit to the Royal Academy of Fine Art. Already then the popularity of our monarch was in decline, and the news of his coming visit divided my fellow-students into two camps. Many spoke of not appearing on that day, but the faculty, to forestall any sabotage of the splendor of the occasion, had bluntly announced severe penalties for any failure to be present on that day. One week beforehand there began a thoroughgoing house-cleaning of the Academy, which was transformed from a frightfully run-down state to one that was almost normal. A carefully planned organization was set up to change the aspect of the Royal Academy, and several clever ruses were tried out. In the course of the King’s visit to the different classes the students were to run from one room to the next by some inner stairways and take their places before the King arrived, keeping their backs to the door, so that he would have the impression that there were many more students than there really were. At that time the school had a very small attendance, and the large rooms always had a deserted look. The authorities also changed the nude models in the life classes—young but very poor creatures, and not much to look at, who were paid starvation wages—for very lovely girls who, I am sure, habitually exercised much more voluptuous professions. They varnished the old paintings, they hung curtains, and decorated the place with many trimmings and green plants.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 21