Salvador Dali: a genius theater of the absurd. Part 1
Throughout his life, Dali was a reflector of his own polymorphism, having managed to realize all the multi-vector nature given to him, going far beyond the boundaries of reason, breaking forms, which, as the artist believed, "are always the result of inquisitorial violence against matter."
Don Salvador, on stage! -
Don Salvador is always on stage!
(from the diary of Salvador Dali)
Salvador Dali, born in 1904, is one of the most expressive, vivid and mysterious figures in the art of the twentieth century. An artist, clown, clown, paranoid, lonely genius on the huge stage of the world theater of the absurd, built by himself and his Russian muse Elena Dyakonova, known throughout the West under her sonorous pseudonym Gala.
Throughout his life, Dali was a reflector of his own polymorphism, having managed to realize all the multi-vector nature given to him, going far beyond the boundaries of reason, breaking forms, which, as the artist believed, "are always the result of inquisitorial violence against matter."
In this phrase he puts his passionate rejection of the tightness of the framework of being, unable to restrain a person with an urethral vector, who has no limitations in anything. The expansion of Dali's creative ideas continues to this day around the world, subjugating more and more new people, leaving no one indifferent.
At the age of 6, Salvador wanted to be Napoleon, the man who conquered many European states, uniting people of various nationalities in his army. Dali even surpassed the great Corsican in some ways. Not limited to European popularity, he conquered the whole world, becoming one of the most famous and wealthy artists - the king of surrealism, leading a huge multinational army of fans of his work, still breaking spears with opponents, proving the maestro's greatness.
Once expelled from the Madrid Academy of Fine Arts for freethinking, an impudent student who claims to know more about art than the entire academic professorship combined, leaves Spain, without regret parting with his family and fellow students. Among them - the future poetic celebrity, artist, musician, playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, passionately in love with El Salvador.
In the meantime, the time has come to conquer Paris, which means to conquer Europe. The decision was correct. If Dali had stayed in Madrid, he would never have become what he became. His name, like the name of Luis Buñuel, is associated with Spain only by his place of birth. Both of them are known to the whole world as surrealist artists, only each in his own direction: one in painting, the other in cinema.
The third friend, Federico García Lorca, was and remains a great Spanish poet and playwright, because the themes of his poems are consonant only with his people. He wrote about him and for him, becoming one of the many victims of the Francoist purge called Death of the Intelligentsia.
Had Dali stayed in Madrid for some time, it is not known how the “romance” between the artist and the poet would have ended, because they have taken “relationships without borders” as a rule. Of course, it all depends on what counts as a novel. However, with all the assurances of mutual sympathy and the obvious propensity of the anal-sound-visual García Lorca to homosexuality, there is no clear evidence that there was any kind of intimacy between the poet and the artist. In addition, Dali, in a skin-like manner, “was terrified when someone touched him,” and the suggestion that Lorca could have gone this far causes a great deal of skepticism.
Federico García Lorca, whose causes of death to this day cause a lot of speculation, according to some sources, went missing during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In general, the number of victims during the Francoist rule is estimated at about 100-150 thousand people. Any attempts to investigate crimes at the official level are still suppressed by the authorities. The amnesty law adopted in 1977, according to which none of the supporters of the Franco regime at all levels is punished for what they did, is still in effect.
In due time, Salvador Dali will fall under this law, to whom, due to the support of Franco, when returning from overseas wanderings, the path to his homeland will seem thorny. All these internal political changes, the unfriendly attitude of the Spaniards towards the artist who "sat out" the European military tragedy in the States, sticking to him the label "fascist" could not but affect future orders, which means - on his work and financial stability.
Dali was never politically active and never belonged to any political party. He also could not be suspected of religious preferences. Despite a number of magnificent works related to Christian themes, Salvador Dali dared to distort the genre of religious painting itself.
And yet Federico Garcia Lorca, if you trust the confessions of Don Salvador, forever remained for him the main person in life, albeit the second after Gala. In his paintings in the style of "cubism", Dali repeatedly paints the heads separated from the body, consisting of two different halves. One part of the face resembles Federico, the other resembles El Salvador.
The stale air of the academy with the boring endless student drinking binges, the bohemian lifestyle with the study of all the hot spots of the Spanish capital, and most importantly - the lack of movement forward - make Dali go to where, like in Babylon, life is in full swing, where political passions boil overnight, where you can become famous. There, where in the 20s all the multilingual, multinational creative intelligentsia was concentrated, looking for new discoveries, eager to find their idols.
Paris is already waiting for the future genius of surrealism, and Dali goes to France. His goal is to get to know Picasso. Dali longed for fame and recognition. He got them. Salvador aims to rise above Picasso. He reached her. "Picasso is a genius, and so am I, Picasso is a Spaniard, and so am I, Picasso is a communist, and neither am I!"
Later, the end of this phrase from Dali will borrow the no less scandalous and shocking French singer, composer, actor and director Serge Gainsbourg for the title of his song “Je t'aime … moi non plus”.
Another goal of Dali is to enter the then fashionable in literature and art, claiming to be a socio-political movement, someone bitingly called “the incidental child of a stormy revolutionary era” - surrealism. El Salvador's secret ambitious plans were to take the helm of the group, ousting the creator of this trend and the then helmsman, inflexible and authoritarian communist Andre Breton.
Surrealism was based on the Freudian technique of "free associations", with the help of which dreams, hallucinations, subconscious images were recorded or sketched until the analyzer was included in the process, that is, comprehension, according to the accelerated principle - "what I see, I sing", while the awakened consciousness did not have time to make a logical correction to the text or drawing.
“To throw old junk off the steamer of our time. Shock, shock and shock”- this was the slogan of the surrealists. The new science of the influence of the subconscious, presented to the world by Freud, cast a scandalous shadow on the eternal values of the anal phase of development, among which were the traditional generally accepted norms of human behavior and morality, where the institutions of family, power and religion dominated. The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, competing with the theory of the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche, could not fail to cause great resonance, especially among the creative intelligentsia, as in a mirror reflecting all the vicissitudes of the first quarter of the twentieth century with all its wars and revolutions, external and internal destruction.
The surrealists, having become followers of Dadaism in art, excluded morality and reason from all spheres of human life, promoting anti-aesthetics and anti-artistry. They adopted Freudianism with its free association, drawing on it in their work, in personal and social relations.
It is believed that Salvador Dali was the main conductor of Freud's ideas, refracting them in the art of the 20th century. The interest in psychoanalysis of the Viennese doctor cannot be overlooked on the pages of the artist's books, in particular, "The Diary of a Genius" opens with a quote from the work of Sigmund Freud: "The hero is the one who rebelles against his father's authority and defeats him."
Dali was familiar with the author of psychoanalysis and even visited him in 1936, already elderly and sick, living as a closed London hermit.
Life in sur for Salvador Dali began long before he joined Andre Breton's group in Paris. The two-facedness, brought to a buffoonery, was not imposed on him by Gala, as many researchers of the artist's work, biographers and contemporaries believe, but by his parents. This is easily observable using Systemic Vector Psychology.
A strict and domineering notary from Figueres, owner of an anal vector, and his wife, a visually intimidated pious Catholic woman, at the age of 22 months, dies their first-born son Salvador. The parents, distraught with grief, do not think of anything smarter than to call the boy who was born after 9 months by the same name. The urethral-sound-visual child becomes Salvador II, and his mother treats him as a duplicate.
However, the complete absurdity of the duality of existence reaches its climax later, when the parents began tirelessly imposing the idea of reincarnating the soul of the older brother who died as an infant into his body. A certain duality arose, which the artist even flaunted, speaking about himself in the third person: "Dali is furious!", "Dali has a request …", "Dali wants to meet with dad!"
On the one hand, such a game in we fully corresponded to the properties of the urethral vector with its natural position in the hierarchical pyramid, where the leader is at the top level and, according to generally accepted court canons, mentions himself in the third person. In addition, it should not be forgotten that Dali was a staunch monarchist and supported the Franco regime only because of the dictator's promise to return the royal Bourbon dynasty to the Spanish throne.
On the other hand, Dali himself has repeatedly admitted that he felt two inside himself, and in these sensations he seemed to live for himself and for his brother. In parentheses, we note that in fact the feeling of duality was given to him by two dominant vectors, which appear in a person alternately and never mix with each other due to the complete opposite. However, the artist himself liked this idea very much, bringing a certain amount of visual mysticism into his life. Even outwardly in childhood, Salvador was an absolute copy of his brother. Of course, one should not trust too much the great inventor, who, for the sake of a catchphrase and demonstratively scandalous behavior, could weave a dozen, another fables about himself.
The crazy mother, in the presence of her son, constantly turned to the photograph of the deceased first-born that hung in the parent's bedroom, and little Salvador was trying to understand who it was about: about him or about his brother, whose tiny grave with his own name "Salvador Dali" inscribed on it showed when the future artist turned, according to various testimonies, either 3 years old, or 5 years old.
In any case, it is known that leaving infancy at the age of three, the child begins to become aware of the world outside and himself in it, realizing that there are other people around with their interests, needs and desires. Through endless parental lamentations and tales, the little boy constantly collides with himself, as it were, but the deceased. Of course, for a visual child, all these events could not pass without a trace, without leaving their imprint in the fragile child's mind. In his visual vector, this will later be expressed, as is customary among sensitive and emotionally unstable people, by fears, phobias and their sublimation onto canvases.
Continue reading:
Salvador Dali: a genius theater of the absurd. Part 2
Salvador Dali: a genius theater of the absurd. Part 3
Salvador Dali: a genius theater of the absurd. Part 4
