GO_Redactioneel Ontwerp_PuckdeHaan

PUCK DE HAAN
IMAGE AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGY

Inhoudsopgave
Salvador Dali...................................................................................... 4
Surrealism.......................................................................................... 6
The Persistence of Memory................................................................ 7
Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach ................................... 8
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans.................................................. 10
The Burning Giraffe............................................................................ 11
Napoleon’s Nose................................................................................ 12
Shirley Temple.................................................................................... 14
Illumined Pleasure.............................................................................. 15

1943
Salvador Dalí
Spain, 1904-89
The iconic artist Salvador Dalí was born in Catalonia, in 1904. Artistically
gifted as a child, he attended drawing school and continued his studies at
the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernandoin, Madrid. After being
expelled for causing trouble in 1926, he visited Paris where he met Picasso,
Magritte and Miró, encountering the Surrealist movement for the first time.
In the late 1920s, Dalí worked in his own ‘Paranoiac-Critical’ method and
became a member of the Surrealists. He also met Gala, the striking woman
who would later become his wife and main muse. His overtly eccentric
appearance and behaviour eventually provoked André Breton to oust him
from the Surrealist circle, but he continued to work in the style. Between
1940-55 Dalí lived in America, establishing himself as a celebrity by making
regular appearances on television and courting publicity. An incredibly
versatile and imaginative artist, he worked in a proliferation of different
media, including painting, drawing, film, sculpture, objects, furniture, and
set design. He designed the Dalí Theatre and Museum in 1960, which was
completed in 1974 in his home town.
He died in Figueres, in 1989.
“Dali has endowed surrealism with an
instrument of primary importance, in
particular the paranoiaccritical method,
which has immediately shown itself capable
of being applied equally to painting,
poetry, the cinema , to the construction
of typical surrealist objects, to fashion, to
sculpture, to the history of art and even, if
necessary, to all manner of exegesis.“
Andre Breton
(In a lecture given at Brussels, June 1934)
1953
4 1939
5

Surrealism
SUR•RE•AL•ISM (suh-ree-uh-liz-uh m) n.
A style of art and literature developed principally in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or
nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects,
unexpected juxtapositions, etc.
“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
- Salvador Dali
Surrealism, is the name given to the cultural
movement in visual arts and literature, that
flourished in Europe between World Wars I
and II. The movement represented a reaction
against what its members saw as the destruction
wrought by rationalism which had shaped
history, art and politics; it was characterized by
unexpected juxtapositions in ordinary scenes
that challenge the viewer’s imagination. The
Surrealists sought to channel the unconscious
as a means to unlock the power of the imagination.
Disdaining rationalism and literary realism,
and powerfully influenced by psychoanalysis,
the Surrealists believed the rational mind repressed
the power of the imagination, weighing
it down with taboos.
According to the major spokesman of the movement,
the poet and critic André Breton, who
published ‘The Surrealist Manifesto’ in 1924,
Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious
and unconscious realms of experience so completely,
that the world of dream and fantasy
would be joined to the everyday rational world
in “an absolute reality, a surreality.”
Dalí’s painting, The Persistence of Memory is
a striking example of a surrealist artwork: the
ants and melting clocks are familiar objects
placed in a strange and odd setting. Dalí wants
to twist our usual ideas about what is ‘normal’
and ‘accepted.’
Dalí was interested in Freud’s writings on psychology.
Freud was an Austrian psychologist
(b.1856, d.1939) who wrote about the theory of
subconscious. According to Freud, dreams are
coded messages from the subconscious and
Surrealists, like Dalí, were interested in what
could be revealed by their dreams.
The organized Surrealist movement in Europe
dissolved with the onset of World War II. Breton,
Dalí, Ernst, Masson, and others, including
the Chilean artist Matta (1911–2002), who first
joined the Surrealists in 1937, left Europe for
New York. The movement found renewal in the
United States at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery,
Art of This Century, and the Julien Levy Gallery.
Fig.1 Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, 1935
6 7

The Persistence of Memory
The Persistence of Memory is aptly named, for the scene is indelibly memorable.
With its strange subject matter and dream-like atmosphere, Salvador
Dalí‘s painting, has become a well-known symbol of Surrealism. Painted
during the Dada-inspired movement, the melting-clocks-masterpiece embodies
the sensibilities that define the experimental and eccentric genre.
To contextualize the iconic piece’s place in art history, one must understand
its unique influences, examine its symbolic content, and appreciate
the artist’s avant-garde approach to its creation.
Art Historical Context
The Persistence of Memory was painted in 1931, at the height of the Surrealist
Movement. During this time, innovative artists explored ideas of automatism and
the self-conscious in their work. This experimental approach to art culminated in
a tendency toward peculiar subject matter that evokes dreams and challenges
perceptions.
As a key figure of the movement, Salvador Dalí delved deep into this artistic
mindset, which he viewed as revolutionary and liberating. “Surrealism is destructive,”
he explained, “but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting
our vision.”
Fig. 2 The Persistence of Memory, 1931
When Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory, his artistic practice was guided
by the peculiar “paranoiac-critical method.” Developed by the artist in 1930,
the technique relies on self-induced paranoia and hallucinations to facilitate a
work of art. This method was particularly instrumental in the creation of Dalí’s
“hand-painted dream photographs,” a collection of works that are stylistically
rooted in realism yet unrealistic in subject matter.
“— 24 —
Salvador Dali, in 1935, is no longer content to make auto-amorphism for you out of the agonising and colossal question
which is that of einsteinian space-time, he is no longer content to make libidinous arithmetic of it for you, no longer content,
I repeat, to make flesh of it for you, he is making you cheese of it, for be persuaded that Salvador Dali’s famous flabby
watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant and solitary paranoiac-critical camembert of time and space.”
Surrealist Symbolism
Though set in a realistically-rendered landscape, The Persistence of Memory
features bizarre subject matter evocative of a dream. While the actual inspiration
behind the scene is up for debate (art historians recall Einstein’s theory; Dalí
comically mentioned Camembert cheese), the odd iconography of the painting is
characteristic of the Surrealist movement.
Paragraph from the ‘Conquest of the Irrational’.
8 9

Fig. 3 Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, 1936
When Dalí painted his Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), the Spanish Civil War had not yet begun.
In fact, he completed the painting nearly six months before General Franco’s fascist army unseated the democratically
elected socialist government of the Second Spanish Republic. Though it is likely that Dalí changed the title after the military
coup to add to the seemingly prophetic power of his unconscious mind, a volatile climate of social and political struggle had
existed in the country for years.
Dalí began his studies for Soft Construction with Boiled Beans in 1935, sketching the hideously deformed anatomy of the
colossal creature. The aggressive monster destroys itself, tearing violently at its own limbs, its face twisted in a grimace of
both triumph and torture. Dali described this convulsively arresting picture as “a vast human body breaking out into monstrous
excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation.” The desecration of the human body
was a great preoccupation of the Surrealists in general, and of Dali in particular. Here, the figure’s ecstatic grimace, taut neck
muscles, and petrifying fingers and toes create a vision of disgusting fascination.
Fig. 4 The Burning Giraffe, 1937
10 11

Napoleon’s Nose
Sometimes the myriad ideas that must have been colliding constantly in
Salvador Dali’s mind at any given time found an echo in certain of his paintings
that featured a disparate and dizzying array of thoughts, reflections,
obsessions, and fetishes.
And while the titles of many Dali paintings were almost annoyingly inscrutable,
others pointed unambiguously to what was in store for us. This latter
case is well exemplified in this extraordinary canvas called “Napoleon’s
Nose, Transformed into a Pregnant Woman, Strolling his Shadow with Melancholia
Among Original Ruins”.
This strange work, which the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali describes as “meticulously
painted,” was created at a pivotal time in Dali’s career: he was just
about to abandon his purely surrealistic style while on the cusp of his classical
period, the latter portending a very different way of interpreting his thoughts and
observations.
Here we see, as the title tells us, a woman seen through an archway, ambling
along a barren stretch of land, behind which mountains appear that transform
themselves into the eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte, while the woman’s form outlines
his nose, and broken tree branches become his lips. This negative-space
image of the French emperor, military and political leader is repeated in a more
positively formed bust in the middle foreground.
This double-image is surrounded by an undulating art nouveau structure sprouting
elongated appendages supported by crutches – one such structure decidedly
phallic in nature. These phallic like protuberances find an echo in the seductively
writhing female figure at right, whose bright red glove matches her red footwear.
Fig. 5 Napoleon’s Nose, Transformed into a Pregnant Woman, Strolling his Shadow with Melancholia Among Original
Ruins, 1945
“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily
ever since.” - Opening line of Dali’s autobiography.
The Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali in Figueres, Spain, notes in a book about the
Dali Theatre-Museum, that “Napoleon’s Nose” is “…absolutely structured, with
perfect geometries. The painting is exuberant, full of nuances and iconographic
references: Napoleon, architecture, the double image, crutches, the Emporda
region…and totally theatrical. It is a surrealist work in the Dalinian way, with wide
and desolate spaces and almost academic Freudian symbols.”
12 13

Fig. 5 Illumined Pleasures 1929
Fig. 4 Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time, 1939
14 15

PUCK DE HAAN
IMAGE AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
2018