Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  If we move our discussion of modern art to the nineteenth century, we can see the paradoxes and the tensions at the heart of any discussion of art and modernity. Impressionism, for instance, was perceived as very avant-garde, even dangerously so. According to G. K. Chesterton, a critic who should never be taken lightly, impressionism was the product of philosophical relativism, the absence of definition in the former being the result of the absence of definitive objectivity in the latter. One can see Chesterton’s point, and even agree with it, but are we to conclude that there was no good impressionist art? Surely not. Pace Chesterton, we cannot see Monet’s masterful vision of Rouen Cathedral in full sunlight as anything but sublime. Similarly, the protoimpressionism of J. M. W. Turner was truly “modern” in the sense of being avant-garde or ahead of its time. Although one critic dismissed a particularly monochromatic Turner seascape as nothing but “soap-suds”, it is the artist and not the critic who has stood the test of time or, more correctly, the test of timelessness. It is indeed a paradox worthy of note that Turner’s greatest champion among his contemporaries was John Ruskin, who, as both artist and critic, is better known as a neomedievalist who championed Gothic “tradition” than as an advocate of modern concepts of “impressionism”. It is, in fact, an even greater paradox that Ruskin’s championing of another artistic movement, the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, exhibited the surprising fact that even tradition can be modern.

  The Pre-Raphaelites, as their name suggests, sought a return to the purity of a medieval vision of art. In contradistinction to the pastel haze of the impressionists, the Pre-Raphaelites painted in the bold daylight of primary splendor. Their subjects were often taken from literature and myth and were imbued with neomedievalist romanticism. It is a medieval victory over Victorianism, and yet it is also medievalism modified and modernized by Victorianism. And herein lies the dynamism of the paradox. Neomedievalism is both new and medieval. It is the light of tradition seen through the telescope of modernity.

  And so to the twentieth century.

  Arguably, of all centuries, the last was the worst—at least in terms of the divorce of modernity from tradition. And if this is true of culture in general, it is certainly true of art in particular.

  Perhaps Pablo Picasso is more culpable than most for the divorce. He was certainly guilty of adultery, in the sense of the adulteration of the gifts he was given. Unlike many of the modern “artists” who followed his example, Picasso could paint beautifully. The problem is that he ceased to do so. Having established a solid reputation, he sullied himself with inferior “primitive” experiments utterly unworthy of his talent. This, in itself, might not have mattered too much except for the fact that a legion of disciples who, unlike their master, could not paint, crept wormlike through the crevices of credulity that the weight of Picasso’s fallen talent had caused. The result was an artistic revolution as nihilistic and destructive as were the political revolutions of the century. The cubist castration of art heralded the omnipotence of impotence made manifest in the dust and fluff of today’s artless moderns.

  It is not all bad news, however. Much art of real stature has emerged in the twentieth century. The art of Otto Dix is as gruesome as Grünewald in its graphic depiction of the ugliness of sin, and the surrealist symbolism of Salvador Dali has more in common with the artistic vision of Hieronymus Bosch than with the heinous bosh of “postmodern” pretentiousness. Unlike many of their contemporaries, Dali and Dix have retained the critical connection with tradition that is essential to all true art. Their art is the product of the marriage of tradition and modernity and, in consequence, will survive alongside the modern art of previous centuries. The rest of the ephemera masquerading as “art” will decay in the putridness of its own corruption. Will anyone remember the nameless Brazilian artist who creates “art” from fluff in a century or so, or next year for that matter? Of course not. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . . Will genuine art, modern or otherwise, survive the test of timelessness? Of course it will. Vincit omnia veritas.

  62

  _____

  SALVADOR DALI

  From Freud to Faith

  Around Dali everything is real except myself.

  —Salvador Dali

  SALVADOR DALI IS AN ENIGMA. He is such an enigma that it is almost trite to describe him as such. He is as elusive as a butterfly—infuriatingly so, self-contradictorily so. He is so elusive, flittering from one flippant frivolity to another, that the pursuivant’s sadistic curiosity desires to pin him down and, like a lepidopterist, examine the colorful concoction of beauty and ugliness with which he revealed himself to, and concealed himself from, the world.

  It is never possible satisfactorily to explain a man, least of all a man of Dali’s contradictions, through a process of biographical vivisection whereby the investigator seeks to dissect his subject’s secrets with the scalpel of subjectivism and the forceps of Freudian self-deception. It is, however, possible to arrive at sensible conclusions through a process of good solid detective work. In the case of one as self-consciously elusive and artfully deceptive as Dali, it becomes more necessary than ever to stick resolutely to the facts and not to fly off in pursuit of Dali’s flights of fancy. Such flights will simply lead to the pursuit of the elusive butterfly with no hope of pinning him down. Instead, the Dali detective must keep his feet on the ground and his eyes on the facts, remembering in true surrealist fashion that red herrings can fly Salvador Dali was born in 1904 in Figueres on the plains of Andalusia in northern Spain. From 1921 until his expulsion in 1926, he studied at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid. During his period as a student, he became attracted, albeit briefly, to revolutionary politics and was jailed for thirty-five days for anarchistic tendencies. His early paintings were somewhat eclectic, vacillating between the traditional and the avant-garde and betraying the influence of artists as diverse as Jan Vermeer, Francisco de Zurbaran and Pablo Picasso. His artistic identity attained coherence, or at any rate cohesion, following his joining of the surrealist movement in the summer of 1929. Thereafter, the bizarre dreamscapes awash with the remnants of Freudian psychoanalysis became the hallmark with which he attained global prominence.

  In the same year in which Dali formalized his relationship with the surrealists, he was introduced to the captivating Helena, who would soon become Gala, his beloved wife. According to Dali expert Antonia Spanos, Gala became a “Beatrice figure” who would serve as his muse for the next fifty years. Her influence on Dali is certainly as striking as was that of Beatrice on Dante, and she emerges and reemerges in his art in guises as disparate as Leda and the Blessed Virgin.

  In 1932 Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory caused a sensation at an exhibition of his paintings at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Its evocation of the psychoanalysis of Freud mixed with the scientific relativism of Einstein tapped into the Zeitgeist of the interwar years. If, however, his art had succumbed to the allure of the Zeitgeist, neither Dali nor his art would be a slave to its wiles. In 1934 he was summoned to appear before the illustrissimi of surrealism at the home of its leader, Andre Breton, to answer charges that he had become “a counterrevolutionary”. According to Dali’s own account, the “Order of the Day”, which had apparently been circulated prior to the meeting, berated him for failing to kowtow before the avowed communism of the rest of the surrealist movement: “Dali having been found guilty on several occasions of counter-revolutionary actions involving the glorification of Hitlerian fascism, the undersigned propose—despite his statement of 25 January 1934—that he be excluded from Surrealism as a fascist element and combated by all available means.” In true Stalinist fashion, Dali had become the victim of a show trial and had been found guilty in absentia on the charge of “political incorrectness”. He was, of course, no more guilty of “Hitlerian fascism” than were the numberless victims of Stalin’s show trials. He was, however, guilty, if guilty be the word, of treating Lenin with evident contempt in his painting The Enigma of William
Tell, which had been exhibited, to the anger of his “comrades” in the surrealist movement, only a few months before the travesty of a “trial”.

  In the following years, he would make himself, and his work, even more anathema to his former comrades as a result of his opposition to the communists in the Spanish civil war and his scarcely concealed support for Franco’s Nationalists. In 1936, the year in which the war began, he painted the bizarrely titled Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War. Dawn Ades, in her study of Dali, wrote perceptively that “Goya was clearly in Dali’s mind as he planned this painting, and the monstrous figure broods over the landscape like Goya’s Colossus presiding over a ruined land.” Dali described the painting himself in terms that were more graphic, if less allusive: “In this picture I showed a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of auto-strangulation.” The painting is certainly ugly, horrifying even, but not more so than the war of which it was an uncanny premonition. If this is surrealism, it is also realism at its most symbolically resonant.

  In a similar vein, Autumn Cannibalism, painted at the end of 1936, after the war had started, depicts two dehumanized human forms locked in a morbid embrace while eating each other. Commenting on this painting, Dali distanced himself from the communist sympathies of Pablo Picasso: “These Iberian beings, eating each other in autumn, express the pathos of the Civil War considered (by me) as a phenomenon of natural history as opposed to Picasso who considered it as a political phenomenon.” These words have been misunderstood, by Dawn Ades among others, as an indication that Dali was an historical determinist who sees “the events of contemporary history . . . as being as inevitable as evolution, a phenomenon equivalent to a biological or geological cataclysm.” The truth is, however, that they indicate something far subtler than a purely deterministic approach to history. Dali does not deny the role of free will in shaping history but is stressing that human will works within the parameters of an inherent dynamic within history defined by the perennial tension between the power of tradition and the power of the reaction against it. Ades is closer to Dali’s true position when she discusses his attitude to “change” and to “tradition”: “Change is irresistible, and though Dali has an acute horror of it, he believes that it is none the less paradoxically necessary in order to reveal the true strength of tradition.” The war in Spain was, therefore, a manifestation of this inherent conflict between change and tradition, with Dali siding very firmly with tradition. This much is evident from his own words about the war and its significance:

  It was going to be necessary for the jackal claws of the revolution to scratch down to the atavistic layers of tradition in order that, as they became savagely ground and mutilated against the granitic hardness of the bones of this tradition they were profaning, one might in the end be dazzled anew by that hard light of the treasures of “ardent death” and of putrefying and resurrected splendours that this earth of Spain held hidden in the depths of its entrails.

  Writing in 1942, Dali was even more explicit in his support for the forces of tradition under General Franco. Describing how “the cadaverous body of Spain” had been “half devoured by the vermin and the worms of exotic and materialist ideologies”, he contrasted the morbid nihilism of the anarchists with the life-affirming faith of the Nationalists: “The Spanish Anarchists took to the streets of total subversion with black banners, on which were described the words viva la muerte! (Long Live Death!) The others, with the flag of tradition, red and gold, of immemorial Spain bearing that other inscription which needs only two letters, Fe (Faith).” Dali’s triumphalism at Franco’s victory is almost salacious, to such an extent that his description of the triumph of faith over death continues with the use of phallic imagery to metamorphose the war from a destructive debauch to a fertility rite. The Faith is phallic. It represents the triumph of life over death.

  Appropriately enough, Dali’s most powerful reaction to the war in Spain is to be found not in his words but in his work, particularly in the paradoxical serenity of Spain, 1938. Unlike the two earlier angst-ridden paintings, Premonition of War and Autumn Cannibalism, both of which were painted two years earlier when most people expected the communists to emerge as the victors, the statuesque serenity of the later work signifies the artist’s relief that the forces of tradition were emerging triumphant. Spain, 1938 depicts Spain personified as a beautiful woman. Her upper body is delineated by fighting figures who are struggling through her, with her and within her, presumably for the right to possess her. She, however, is seemingly indifferent to the struggle and reclines in the tranquility of her own transcendence. She seems to know, even if the combatants do not, that her victory is assured. She has faith; her enemies have only death—not her death but their own.

  The similarity of Dali’s Spain, 1938 to Roy Campbell’s poem “Posada” cannot pass without comment:

  Outside, it froze. On rocky arms

  Sleeping face-upwards to the sun

  Lay Spain. Her golden hair was spun

  From sky to sky. Her mighty charms

  Breathed soft beneath her robe of farms

  And gardens: while her snowy breasts,

  Sierras white, with crimson crests,

  Were stained with sunset.

  As with Dali, the Spanish civil war was to prove a decisive event in Campbell’s life. Having experienced the anarchist uprising in Barcelona in 1934, shortly after his arrival in Spain, Campbell perceived immediately that the stage was set for a bloody war between the opposing forces of tradition and revolution. “From the very beginning my wife and I understood the real issues in Spain. There could be no compromise . . . between the East and the West, between Credulity and Faith, between irresponsible innovation. . . and tradition, between the emotions (disguised as Reason) and the intelligence.” For Dali, her native-born son, and for Campbell, her acolyte by adoption, Spain was the embodiment of faith and tradition. For both men, the artist and the poet, she found personified perfection in the perfect beauty of femininity enshrined. For the artist and the poet alike, conversion to Catholicism was a natural progression from their traditionalist stance. Campbell was received into the Church in Spain in 1935; Dali would be reconciled to the Church following his arrival in the United States in 1940.

  In the years following the Second World War, many of Dali’s greatest works would be inspired by his religious faith. From his first major painting on a religious theme, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1946), until his celebrated illustrations of the Bible in 1965, Dali blended the sacred and the surreal with innovative, if sometimes controversial, zeal. The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, painted in the mid-1950s, signaled his apparent rejection of the dominant Freudian influences of his earlier work. In truth, however, he never managed to cleanse the “damn’d spot” of Freudianism from his life or work. Its ubiquity in his youth had psychoanalytically scarred his psyche, preventing any thorough purgation of its stain. Its presence was at least curtailed, and, for the most part, the Freudian was replaced by the ascendant if eccentric nature of his Catholic faith. The other major influence to emerge in the postwar period was an almost obsessive interest in the apparent overlap between physics and metaphysics in the wake of the dawn of the nuclear age.

  The mystical relationship between Catholic theology and nuclear physics is the dominant inspiration in several of Dali’s postwar works, including Nuclear Cross (1952), Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954), Angelic Crucifixion (1954) and Anti-Protonic Assumption (1956). In Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), Christ and His Mother are depicted as being outside time and space, symbolizing the eternal significance of Christ’s Passion. In Angelic Crucifixion, the crucified Christ is placed within cubes, signifying the reality of His suffering within time and space, but the Crucifix and the cubes that encompass it are set upon a sphere, presumably signifying the world, and the sphere itself is set upon an island from which protrude several needles, presuma
bly signifying heaven and the angels. The use of needles is, of course, a comic touch, alluding to the oft-quoted reference to scholastic philosophers arguing about how many angels could dance upon the point of a needle. Dali’s point is, however, not so much comic as cosmic; indeed, not so much cosmic as hypercosmic. The whole of the cosmos, as represented by the cubic representation of time and space, is quite literally dancing on the point of a needle. One angel, in the sense that he is eternal, is greater than the cosmos; and, of course, by extension, every man is also greater than the cosmos, in the sense that he too is eternal. Christ’s Presence on the Cross within time and space signifies human destiny beyond time and space. Paradoxically, the Blood from the Cross drips onto the island, signifying heaven, but is not spilled on the sphere, signifying the world. Since orthodoxy dictates that Christ’s Blood was poured forth for all humanity, one is tempted to detect an element of heterodoxy in Dali’s symbolic representation of the Crucifixion. The suggestion that Christ’s suffering is not fully universal, that is, for the salvation of all men, appears to show Dali as being guilty of error in his understanding and portrayal of the Faith. The problem might possibly be overcome, however, by the realization that the world, as signified, is representative of those who preferred darkness to the Light. In this sense it does not signify Creation but the denial of Creation, and, by extension, the denial of the Creator. Put simply, the sphere at the base of the Cross represents the rejection of God and the eternal consequence of such a rejection: hell. Seen in this light, the eternal contradiction between the Cross and the sphere in Dali’s sculpture is akin to the contradiction that forms the heart and the inspiration of G. K. Chesterton’s novel The Ball and the Cross.