Before Salvador Dali met Sigmund Freud during the summer of 1938 in London, the great Surrealist artist had tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to meet the revered psychoanalyst at his consulting rooms in Vienna. Dali had lacked the confidence to knock unannounced on Freud’s door and instead had wandered the cobbled strasse holding “long and exhaustive imaginary conversations” with his idol. He had also fantasised about bringing Freud back arm-in-arm to his room at the Hotel Sacher, imagining the great psychoanalyst “clinging to the curtains” while he babbled freely about his dreams, his sexuality, and his fears.

Dali had spent his teens and early twenties reading Freud‘s works on the unconscious, on sexuality and The Interpretation of Dreams. His inability to meet the psychoanalyst in Vienna suggests Dali was in some way terrified of Freud, as if this grand examiner of human behavior was capable of seeing straight through him like a believer might feel when coming face-to-face with God.

When Albert Einstein met Freud in 1927, it was a meeting of equals. Two men who were pioneers in their chosen professions yet who had no understanding of what the other did or why it was important. Einstein later said Freud knew as much about physics as he did about psychoanalysis and claimed he could not understand the point of analysis at all. When offered to be psychoanalyzed by the great headshrinker, Einstein had refused stating he preferred to remain in “darkness” about his own motivations.

Freud fled to London from Vienna after Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938. He had heard of how the Nazis had burned his books, but dismissed the seriousness of their actions by saying:

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.

His nonchalance was bluster. When there was a sudden rise in anti-semitic attacks in Vienna, Freud quickly made preparations to flee the country. He arrived in London in April 1938.

Because of their interest in dreams and the unconscious, it may have seemed obvious that Dali and Freud would have made natural friends, but Freud’s taste in art was strictly traditional and he was wary of the Surrealists after a run-in with André Breton in 1921.

Breton was deeply enamored with Freud’s work and had been inspired to develop a technique of “spontaneous” writing to give free expression to unconscious thoughts and desires. Unlike Dali, Breton had the confidence to turn-up unannounced at Freud’s door and thrust his genius on the great man. Freud was not impressed. His lack of enthusiasm caused Breton to later dismiss Freud as nothing more than a “general practitioner…an old man without elegance” working away in his shabby consulting rooms.

Despite this, Breton still credited Freud with pioneering work into the unconscious imagination in his Surrealist manifesto in 1924:

Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man’s birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected.

 

 
Dali did not have a manifesto, but he did have a painting The Metamorphosis of Narcissus which he wanted to show Freud. The meeting between the two men was organized by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who was also exiled in London.

Dali was just thirty-four. Freud, nearing the end of his life, was eighty-one. Dali arrived with his wife Gala and the art collector Edward James, who carried The Metamorphosis of Narcissus under his arm.

Dali was intimidated by the “father figure” Freud. His conversation was nervous and stilted. Freud asked if all Spaniards looked like him? If they did, then this might explain the Spanish Civil War. Freud’s joke fell flat. Dali later wrote that he wanted to be seen “a kind of dandy of universal intellectualism,” and be treated as an equal. As if showing his credentials, he presented Freud with a magazine that contained an article he had written about paranoia. Freud barely looked at it. Trying to interest him in the article, Dali explained;

...it was not a surrealist diversion, but was really an ambitiously scientific article, and I repeated the title, pointing to it at the same time with my finger. Before his imperturbable indifference, my voice became involuntarily sharper and more insistent.

Freud just stared “with a fixity in which his whole being seemed to converge.”

Then Dali revealed his painting, to which Freud said:

...in classic paintings I look for the unconscious, but in your paintings I look for the conscious…

Dali was unsure what Freud meant and took his comment as criticism.

While small chat was exchanged between Freud, Gala and James, Dali began sketching. He suddenly saw Freud as a gastropod:

Freud’s cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral – to be extracted with a needle!

 

Dali’s drawing of Freud is now at the Freud Museum.
 
Dali thought his meeting with Freud a failure, but days later, Freud wrote Stefan Zweig:

I really have reason to thank you for the introduction which brought me yesterday’s visitors. For until then I was inclined to look upon the surrealists – who have apparently chosen me as their patron saint – as absolute (let us say 95 percent, like alcohol), cranks. That young Spaniard, however, with his candid and fanatical eyes, and his undeniable technical mastery, has made me reconsider my opinion.

Zweig never showed Freud Dali’s sketch of him, fearing the picture looked more like a skull than a snail.
 

 
Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali (1969) is a made for television documentary that captured the artist in fine fettle as he delighted in performing for the camera. Dali is seen indulging in his trademark mix of showman, clown and serious artist, hammering out a tuneless miaow on a cat piano (Dali associated pianos with sex after his father left an illustrated book on the effects of venereal diseases atop the family piano as a warning to the dangers of sexual intercourse); or sowing feathers in the air, as two children follow pushing the head of a plaster rhinoceros; or, his attempt to paint the sky. Directed by Jean-Christophe Averty, with narration provided by Orson Welles.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
At home with Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali goes to Hell: Astounding illustrations for Dante’s ‘Inferno’
Salvador Dali’s bizarre but sexy photoshoot for Playboy, 1973
Salvador Dali’s cookbook is every bit as insane as you would expect it to be
Salvador Dali’s strange and surreal illustrations for the autobiography of a Broadway legend
Salvador Dali’s signs of the Zodiac
Salvador Dali: Surrealist Party from 1941
Meet the great ‘English eccentric’ who financed the Surrealists

Sketch of Sigmund Freud by Salvador Dalí (via Freud Museum)
 
If you visit London’s Freud Museum between now and next February, you’ll see an exhibition devoted to the meeting between Salvador Dalí and Sigmund Freud that took place there in 1938, when the house in Hampstead was Freud’s “last home on this planet.” The artist brought his recent painting “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” to show the doctor, and, he later claimed, took the opportunity to sketch the form of Freud’s skull d’après nature (from life).

Like many of the Surrealists, Dalí revered Freud as a towering genius who had solved the riddles of the dream, but Dalí‘s ideas about the shape of Freud’s head were all his own. As he tells it in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the actual meeting between the two men was preceded by a number of fantasy meetings that took place in Dalí‘s imagination during his visits to Vienna. When Freud escaped the Nazis in ‘38, arriving in Paris en route to London, Dalí was eating snails nearby in Sens, and his dinner was interrupted by a shocking epiphany about the involute form of Freud’s brainpan:

Several years after my last ineffectual attempt to meet Freud, I made a gastronomic excursion into the region of Sens in France. We started the dinner with snails, one of my favorite dishes. The conversation turned to Edgar Allan Poe, a magnificent theme while savoring snails, and concerned itself particularly with a recently published book by the Princess of Greece, Marie Bonaparte, which is a psychoanalytical study of Poe. All of a sudden I saw a photograph of Professor Freud on the front page of a newspaper which someone beside me was reading. I immediately had one brought to me and read that the exiled Freud had just arrived in Paris. We had not yet recovered from the effect of this news when I uttered a loud cry. I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud! Freud’s cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral—to be extracted with a needle! This discovery strongly influenced the portrait drawing which I later made from life, a year before his death.

 

Dalí‘s ‘Freud à tête d’escargot’
 

‘Morphology of the skull of Sigmund Freud’: Dalí‘s sketch of Freud’s skull as a snail, ‘d’après nature’
 
Nadia Choucha will be giving a sold-out talk on “occult and psychoanalytical theory in the art of Surrealism” at the Freud Museum on Halloween. Below is the trailer for the ongoing exhibition “Freud, Dalí and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus.”
 

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If you’re ever invited to a “surrealist ball,” my advice is definitely to go. This advice is a hundred times as pertinent if the hosts are among the wealthiest people on the planet.

On December 12, 1972, Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and her husband Guy threw a lush “Diner de Têtes Surrealistes” at the enormous Château de Ferrières, the house in which Marie-Hélène and her sisters had been raised, located outside of Paris. The Château de Ferrières had been seized by the Nazis during World War II and reminded empty for several years until Marie-Hélène and her new husband decided to reopen the property in 1959. During the 1960s the palace became one of the regular hotspots for extravagant parties in France for movie stars, fashion designers, and socialites.

The invitation, inspired by René Magritte, instructed guests to wear black tie and long gowns—the only other directive was to arrive bearing “Surrealist heads.” Adding to the perversity, the invitation was printed in reverse, such that a mirror was required to decipher it. Here it is:
 

 
The Château de Ferrières was bathed in orange by moving floodlights—the intended impression being that the palace was on fire:
 

 
Upon entering, guests encountered on the main staircase a series of footmen dressed as cats who had “fallen asleep” in a variety of staged poses. As described in the New York Times, Marie-Hélène was dressed as “a stag at the kill, with a mask of towering antlers and pear-shaped diamond ‘tears’ on her face.”

Salvador Dalí himself was there, as well as Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, and Marisa Berenson. Baron Alexis de Redé wore a complex hat with multiple faces designed by Dalí.

There’s little doubt that Stanley Kubrick was aware of the Surrealist Ball and drew on it as a resource for the extended party scene in Eyes Wide Shut, which was based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 work Traumnovelle. During the inquisitor sequence, when Tom Cruise’s character Bill Harford is being asked to produce a password to verify his identity, the proceedings are interrupted by a naked lady wearing a mask who seeks to “redeem” Harford. There’s a lovely shot of the gathered masked guests gazing up at her that looks for all the world like the still photos taken at the Surrealist Ball.
 

The hosts, Guy de Rothschild and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild
 
So much more after the jump….....
 

Olivier Mosset, ‘Untitled,’ 1968 (via Contemporary Art Daily)

Fun and Games for Everyone is the second of three films the French director Serge Bard made before changing his name to Abdullah Siradj and abandoning le cinéma. This one immortalizes a 1968 opening at the Rive Droite gallery, dedicated to Olivier Mosset’s series of identical white canvases with black circles in the center.

The film was shot in ultra-high-contrast black and white, an effect achieved by cinematographer Henri Alekan:

Alekan asked LTC film labs to flash the negative before processing it, giving the film a semi-negative look.

Bard was a member of the “Zanzibar group” of filmmakers, which also included Mosset, Jackie Raynal, and Philippe Garrel, later the director of a number of really miserable movies starring Nico. On the soundtrack of Fun and Games is French jazzer Barney Wilen, whose big move in ‘68 was a “free rock” album dedicated to Timothy Leary.

The trailer is below, and the full movie is available for rent on Vimeo. Patient and attentive viewers will spot Salvador Dalí, Amanda Lear, and Barbet Schroeder; there is, for instance, a glimpse of Dalí at 36:45. Caveat spectator: the full movie is a non-narrative deal. There is much gorgeous footage of slightly dazed French people, and the movie opens with a long period of silence; such dialogue as occurs is almost entirely in French, and there are no subtitles.
 

Echo number four (via Discogs)
 
One of the nice people I met at the Revolting Cocks and Meat Beat Manifesto show last weekend kept telling me about an instructional record Salvador Dalí made, demonstrating the proper way to speak English. I think she must have meant this track from the 1960 publication Echo, “the magazine you play on your phonograph.”

“Salvador Dalí—A Linguistic Presentation” appeared in number four of Echo, a 24-page book of articles and flexidiscs. In conversation with Edward Mulhare, the actor who succeeded Rex Harrison as phonetics professor Henry Higgins in the original Broadway run of My Fair Lady, Dalí laments how conventional the English language has become. He exhorts us to inject “some irrational quality” into our boring lives using the Dalinian method, which he demonstrates with the words “butterfly” and “Connecticut.”

“By George, I’ve got it,” says Prof. Henry Higgins.
 

 
This month, publisher Taschen is following up on its successful re-publication of Salvador Dalí‘s Les Dîners de Gala with his long out-of-print companion volume The Wines of Gala.

The Wines of Gala may be the lesser known of Dalí‘s two epicurean books, but it is still a sumptuously illustrated and highly collectible Surrealist treatise on the pleasures of viticulture. Originally published in French under the title Les Vins de Gala et du Divin (The Wines of Gala and the Divine) in 1977, this Dalínian introduction to wine was (surprisingly) not a success on its first release. As Dalí contributed no text, it was seen by many as a money-grabbing exercise by the aging Surrealist. The original text was written by Max Gérard (“Ten Divine Dalí Wines”) and Louis Orizet (“Ten Gala Wines”) with an introductory poem by Baron Philippe de Rothschild (“La Cave”).

However, Dalí was involved in the direction of content, the selection of wines and their organization “according to the sensations they create in our very depths.” These are grouped together under chapter headings like “Wines of Frivolity,” “Wines of Sensuality,” “Wines of Light,” and “Wines of the Impossible.” The idea was based on Dalí‘s belief that “A real connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes of its secrets.”

The Wines of Gala contains over 140 of Dalí‘s illustrations—including “appropriated artworks,” collages, and paintings like “The Sacrament of the Last Supper” (1955). The book was dedicated to Dalí‘s longtime wife and muse, Gala, and the volume applies “Dalí’s famously intense obsession with sexuality and desire to food and wine, two sensual topics he’d rarely addressed in his work.”

Though intended as an introduction to viticulture, the section on “Ten Gala Wines” was considered somewhat revolutionary upon its publication and in many ways it still is today. This section ordered wines by “sensation” or “emotional resonance” rather than by the “prescriptive limits of traditional viticulture.” This opened a whole new way to appreciate wine rather than the way used by most traditional wine critics.

It’s a beautiful book, and who knew Art could be a reason to get merry? Click on the pictures below for a larger image.
 

 

 
More pages from Dalí ‘s ‘The Wines of Gala,’ after the jump…
 

 
Salvador Dali once appeared as the mystery guest on a long-time-ago TV show called What’s My Line? in the 1950s. You know the show, the one that featured a panel of well-known celebrities guessing the occupations of various members of the public by asking them a series of yes/no questions like “Do you work with your hands?” or “Do you tell jokes for a living?” and so on, until the occupation was revealed.

Every week, the show also featured a mystery guest. The same yes/no rules applied but this time the panel wore a selection of dainty blindfolds to make it more fun.

When Dali appeared he insisted on answering “Yes” to nearly every question he was asked, like “Are you a performer?” “Yes.” “Are you a leading man?” “Yes.” (The show’s host John Daly disagreed with that one and marked it as a “No.”) “Are you a writer?” “Yes.” “Do you draw comic books?” “Yes.” (Again, Daly struggled to agree with this answer but Dali was having none of it.)

I am sure if one the panel had asked, “Do you paint pictures on rockfaces while juggling elephants with your knees and wearing sea otters on your hands?” Dali would have said “Yes.”

But the thing is, despite the anchor’s wearying cavils, Dali was absolutely right—he could do everything because he never lived within other people’s expectations. He was boss of what he did and how he did it and this is why he could do anything.

Though I guess I should add the caveat that there was one thing the great artist could not do—Salvador Dali could never be boring. A bit repetitive yes, but never boring.

Take for example, a simple project like that time Picture Post magazine sent over photographer Charles Hewitt to take some snaps of Dali and his wife Gala, at their home in Portlligat, Spain. The resulting pictures were imaginative works of art worthy of inclusion in the Dalit’s ouevre. The finished spread was published in Picture Post on January 8th, 1955, and it’s still utterly impressive.
 

 

 

 
Marvel at the wonder of Dali at home, after the jump…
 

Salvador Dali, ‘Impressions of Africa’ (1938)

The rambling plot of the movie Salvador Dalí made for West German public TV in 1976, Impressions of Upper Mongolia (Homage to Raymond Roussel)—whose title has also been translated as Voyage in Outer Mongolia, and which more precisely concerns the region of Occidental Upper Mongolia—takes in golden circuit boards that replicate the painter’s brain, the giant, hallucinogenic, fictitious mushroom champlinclis histratatus domus biancus, and “the cruel mouth of Hitler.” Inspired by the writer Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, the film does not lend itself to a one-line summary; I would love to see the TV Guide entry.

José Montes Baquer, who directed the movie (though it’s “a film by Salvador Dalí,” of course), provided this useful synopsis in a 2007 interview with Tate Etc.:

The story was: in ancestral times, in order to deal with a wave of starvation, the princess was forced to administer hallucinogenic powders from a gigantic soft mushroom to her subjects. This substance produced a collective madness among the inhabitants of her principality, who created rock paintings that were discovered on boulders by a Dalínian expedition to this dreamland.

In the same interview, Baquer recalled that the collaboration began with a gift from Dalí, who spoke these words as he handed the filmmaker a plastic pen from the Hotel St. Regis with a specially treated metallic band:

In this clean and aseptic country [i.e., the USA], I have been observing how the urinals in the luxury restrooms of this hotel have acquired an entire range of rust colours through the interaction of the uric acid on the precious metals that are astounding. For this reason, I have been regularly urinating on the brass band of this pen over the past weeks to obtain the magnificent structures that you will find with your cameras and lenses. By simply looking at the band with my own eyes, I can see Dalí on the moon, or Dalí sipping coffee on the Champs Élysées. Take this magical object, work with it, and when you have an interesting result, come see me. If the result is good, we will make a film together.

I love a happy ending. Baquer got a half hour of footage out of magnifying the band on Dalí‘s magic piss pen, and the two men turned it into this cinematic act of blunt force head trauma. If you persevere, you will see the pen from the Hotel St. Regis, and you will see Dalí lament that, “in this dreadful time of pornography,” Standards and Practices won’t let him whiz on it on camera.

Continues after the jump…

 
A Madrid judge has ordered the exhumation of the body of Salvador Dalí to adjudicate a paternity claim on behalf of Maria Pilar Abel Martínez, who has reason to believe that she is the famed surrealist’s daughter. 

Born in 1956 in Girona, Spain, Martínez, who is a tarot card reader by trade, has contended that her mother had an affair with the famous artist in 1955. Dalí was married to Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, whom the artist invariably referred to as Gala, his “muse.” (As we’ve written before, Dalí notably published an elaborate and bizarre cookbook dedicated to Gala.)
 

Maria Pilar Abel Martínez
 
At 61 years of age, Martínez says the affair took place in Cadaqués while her mother, Antonia, was working as a maid for a family that spent time in the town. She also jokes that the only thing she’s missing to look identical to Dalí is “a mustache.” You can judge that resemblance for yourself.

Without any existing biological remains from which to draw DNA, the judge has agreed to permit an exhumation to settle the issue of…. Dalí‘s issue (sorry).

Martínez has already undergone two paternity tests but never received the results. Dalí died in 1989 and is buried at the museum dedicated to his work in the Spanish town of Figueres in northeastern Catalonia.

Dalí did not have any other children and left his entire estate to his country of birth. The significance of the paternity suit, unsurprisingly, revolves around inheritance. If paternity is established, Martinez would legally be allowed to use his name and would also be entitled to part of his estate.
 
via Vice News
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
At last, Salvador Dali’s insane sex-cookbook is getting republished

The fabled entrance to the “Dream of Venus” pavilion created by Salvador Dalí for the World’s Fair in 1939.
 
Salvador Dalí was asked to create a pavilion for the World’s Fair to be held in Summer of 1939 in Flushing Meadow, Queens, NY. Given a canvas this big, as you might imagine, Dalí‘s concept for what was called “Dream of Venus” was just as over-the-top as the wildly eccentric Surrealist himself. In a letter written to his friend, Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Dalí reported that the pavilion would include “genuine explosive giraffes.” That never happened during the eight weeks it took to set up and construct what has been referred to as Dalí‘s “funhouse.”

The creation of the pavilion was the idea of noted architect, artist, and art collector, Ian Woodner. Woodner approached New York art dealer Julien Levy and together they quickly decided to give the gig to Dalí. As you entered the pavilion you had to pass between twin pillars that were fashioned in the image of female legs that were protruding from a skirt that had been pulled up above the knees. In various windows at the entrance, Dali placed a sculpture of a nude torso of a woman with another naked body of a woman in a window above who had a mermaid-like tail. There was also a large-scale image of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” Dalí had intended to remove the head of the goddess and replace it with a fish head. This was one of many conceptual ideas the artist had intended to incorporate into the pavilion that was soundly rejected by the Fair’s organizers and sponsors. Dalí was so incensed by the Fair’s requests for alterations to his fever-dream funhouse that he wrote a pamphlet called “Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to His Own Madness.” The pamphlet condemned the Fair’s censorship of his work and with the help of a pilot and an airplane, he had copies of it dropped from the sky all over New York City.

Here’s a bit from Dalí‘s “fuck you squares” manifesto which you can read in its entirety here:

“Only the violence and duration of your hardened dream can resist the hideous mechanical civilization that is your enemy, that is also the enemy of the ‘..pleasure-principle’ of all men. It is man’s right to love women with the ecstatic heads of fish.”

 
Once visitors got inside “Dream of Venus” things got fantastically freaky. Two huge swimming pools featured partially nude models floating around in the water. In one of the pools, a woman dressed in a head-to-toe rubber suit that had been painted with piano keys cavorted around with other “mermaids” who “played” her imaginary piano. In fact, the place was filled with scantly-clad women lying in beds or perched on top of a taxi being driven by a female looking S&M batwoman. There were functional telephones made of rubber as well as an offputting life-size version of a cow’s udder that you could touch—if you wanted to, that is. Dalí had originally intended for all of his female models (his “living liquid ladies”) to have fish heads, but this was yet another one of the artist’s visions for the pavilion that was spit on by Fair’s sponsors. What a drag. Despite all the push back, “Dream of Venus” is nothing short of a stunning display of touristy fun gone off the rails. I’ve posted images of the funhouse-style pavilion below, many of which were taken by German-born photographer Eric Schaal. The 2002 book, Salvador Dalí‘s Dream of Venus: The Surrealist Funhouse from the 1939 World’s Fair chronicled the entire process down to the very last detail in photos including behind-the-scenes snapshots of some of Dalí‘s models getting ready to give the performance of their lives. Most of the images that follow are NSFW.
 

Dalí and his wife and muse, Gala.
 

 
More Dalinian madness at the 1939 World Fair, after the jump…

The great Surrealist painter, Yves Tanguy being himself back in the early 1920s.
 
Paris-born Surrealist Yves Tanguy is one of the masters of the genre and much like his contemporary Salvador Dalí was a spirited individualist. Tanguy’s father passed suddenly when he was only eight. Later his mother would decide to leave Paris after the death of Tanguy’s brother during WWI. Tanguy remained in Paris, finished school and developed a close friendship with Henri Matisse’s son Pierre. That relationship would help lay the groundwork for Tanguy’s future as one of the most influential members during the early days of the Surrealist movement, something that wasn’t really on the young soon-to-be artist’s radar at the time.

After finishing school, Tanguy joined the Navy. In 1920 he was recruited by the Army where he eventually met rebellious French poet Jacques Prévert. Both Tanguy and Prévert had just turned 20 and the two would terrorize parties during which Tanguy would regale guests by chewing on socks or eating live spiders while Prévert egged him on. At some point future actor and screenwriter, Marcel Duhamel would become a regular part of Tanguy and Prévert’s hellraising antics. After leaving the Army the trio headed back to Paris to keep the party going, which they did, quite literally for a few years, by creating a sort of nonconformist utopia at Duhamel’s home where other like-minded creatives could be as off-beat as they wanted.

In an event brought about by the fact that he was surrounded by free-thinkers, Tanguy would see two paintings by Italian artist Giorgio de Chirco hanging in a gallery in Paris. The artist’s work is widely credited with being one of the greatest influences in the development of Surrealism. According to some historians, one of the paintings in question, Le Cerveau de L’enfant (or “The Child’s Brain”), left such an impact on Tanguy that it is said the experience motivated him to start his career as an artist.
 

‘Le Cerveau de L’enfant,’ the painting by Giorgio de Chirco that is said to have inspired the career of Yves Tanguy.
 
During his immersion into the art world and as detailed in the book Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History, Tanguy and members of the Paris Surrealist movement, such as Man Ray and poet Louis Aragon, would contribute to 1928’s La Revolutino Surrealiste—a written exploration of the erotic, and gave considerable consideration to questions such as “what if a man could be aware of a woman’s orgasm during sex?” During this time period, Tanguy would illustrate a series of strangely engrossing and perplexing erotic works. In 1930, some of his paintings along with others by Joan Miró, Man Ray and Dalí were viciously destroyed by violent right-wing activists the “Ligue des Patriotes” or “League of Patriots,” who were provoked by the film L’Âge d’Or, written by Dalí and directed by Luis Buñuel. The silent film was violent and subversive as well as disrespectfully critical of the Catholic church.

Later that same year Tanguy would join other members of the Surrealist movement by signing the second Surrealist Manifesto in 1930 as well as a 1934 letter supporting the decision that led to the dismissal of Salvador Dalí from the group for making statements in support of Adolf Hitler, though it may have also been due to his reluctance to denounce murderous Spanish dictator Generalisimo Francisco Franco—it’s all a bit murky. Tanguy had a long, passionate affair with legendary New York socialite and art collector Peggy Guggenheim whom he would leave for his second wife, fellow Surrealist painter Kay Sage. He would paint for thirty years—nearly up until the time of his death at the age of 55—leaving behind a staggering catalog of spellbinding work that is nearly equal to Dali’s in its precision and dreamlike symbolism. I’ve included some beautiful examples of Tanguy’s work here as well as a selection of his smutty schoolboy erotica which is NSFW.
 

‘Mama, Papa is Wounded!’ 1927.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Someday I hope to see Luis Buñuel’s 1930 short film Menjant garotes (Eating Sea Urchins). Discovered in a biscuit tin that belonged to Salvador Dalí‘s sister, Ana Maria, after her death, it’s a home movie of Dalí‘s family gobbling echinoderms in Cadaqués, shot around the same time as L’Âge d’or.

Sea urchins were a favorite dish of Dalí‘s, and they figure in the initiatory path he lays out in his guide to becoming a painter, Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship. It’s not an easy path to follow; even if you manage to pull off the instructions he gives you, what about the ones for your valet and your maid? Secret Number Four, “the secret of the sea-urchin slumber,” is relatively practicable:

To begin with, you will eat three dozen sea urchins, gathered on one of the last two days that precede the full moon, choosing only those whose star is coral red and discarding the yellow ones. The collaboration of the moon in such cases is necessary, for otherwise not only do you risk that the sea urchins will be more empty but above all that they do not possess to the same degree the sedative and narcotic virtues so special and so propitious to your approaching slumber. For the same reason these sea urchins should be eaten preferably in the spring—May is a good month. But in choosing the time you must make the gathering of the sea urchins coincide with the precise moment when the first tender new beans are picked, and this varies according to the years. These tender beans, prepared in the manner called à la Catalane, are to be the second course of your meal, and I guarantee you that this is a dish worthy of the ancient gods and quite Homeric, for I am convinced that the Greeks of antiquity were acquainted with it and therefore that they were also familiar with chocolate—for, strange as this may seem, the tender beans à la Catalane are in fact prepared with chocolate as a base.

After washing this down “with a light, very young wine,” you are to take a four-and-a-half hour nap preliminary to staring at your blank canvas “for a long, long time.”

More after the jump…