“Ants”, 1929. The world was rotting in Dali’s eyes, the better to make way for the new. Ants, festering donkeys and an Andalusian dog would soon help make him famous in Paris, but first he was at war in Spain.

Barcelona’s Carrer de Petritxol is the tiny lane in this aerial view, running back from the church, and it’s been the site since the mid-19th century of the Sala Pares, a groundbreaker among art galleries.

The original owner, JA Maragall, was the first to put Picasso’s work on formal public display, and he had all the big Catalan names too — Casas, Rossinyol, Clarà and, for a pair of memorable visits, the young and still unfledged Salvador Dali.

Dali exhibited in the second and third Salons d’Automne here. On October 8, 1927, just after Miro had brought to his Figueras studio Pierre Loeb, who’d founded the Galerie Pierre in Paris a few years earlier, Dali showed “Apparatus and Hand” (detail below, top left) and “Honey is Sweeter than Blood” (detail below across the bottom), with their early clarion calls of surrealism.

In his 2007 book “Salvador Dali: The Construction of the Image”, Fèlix Fanés underlines the influence of Miro in the imagery of these pictures, but also de Chirico’s sense of depth, something Miro didn’t need to make his point.

The fish was a surrealist icon of the moment, Fanés points out, and Dali borrowed the amputated torsos from Chirico, Ernst and, perhaps, grim photographs that emerged from World War I.

Also in evidence are debts to Brueghel’s “The Triumph of Death” (detail above at the top right), painted around 1562, and Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”, from circa 1500, both of which Dali had no doubt seen at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

In Bosch’s “Garden”, in fact, is none other than Dali himself. Bosch contrived a double-image in the left panel from rocks, shrubbery and small creatures.

The resemblance to Dali is downright spooky, and even moreso when you realise this is the way he portrayed himself in “The Great Masturbator” and quite a few other paintings.

More on “The Great Masturbator” in this post.

“Honey is Sweeter than Blood” is not to be confused with the far better known 1941 painting of the same name, but I haven’t yet sorted out the relation between the work shown here, “Blood is Sweeter than Honey” of 1926, and a 1927 piece also called “Honey is Sweeter than Blood”, which seems to be a rough version of the supposedly earlier canvas, and is only seen online in black and white.

At any rate, the painting in question here was originally titled “Forest of Gadgets”, and that’s what Dali was exploring at the time in his reading and writing as well.

At the third Salon d’Automne on October 6, 1928, Dali had “Thumb, Beach, Moon and Decaying Bird” and the painting that was too sexually explicit for Maragall, “Two Figures on a Beach”.

For lack of images of either of these works, “Big Thumb”, above, and “Rotting Bird”, below, have to suffice.

Decomposition as a concept served several purposes — as an affirmation of the life process, as a comment on the state of art in general, and as a condemnation of “average” people, who Dali and his friends at the Students’ Residence, considering themselves revolutionary, dismissed as “putrefacts”. Civil servants were favourite targets for mockery.

A year had passed and the “gadgets” were gone from Dali’s paintings. In place of mechanical and geometric forms were the first soft, biomorphic masses that would become a mainstay of his work.

The lopped-off thumb had already been used in “Sterile Attempts”, the work that would later be renamed “Senecitas” (”Little Cinders” or “Little Ashes”) and had started out with the title “The Birth of Venus”, but hadn’t yet been shown publicly. Here’s a detail; it’s discussed further in this post.

Fingers are prominent, too, in “Bather” and “Bathers” from the same period, shown below, the latter with a finger beginning to rot and taking on a form not unlike the female torso in “Sterile Attempts”.

Dali, who’d written an essay of his own called “The Liberation of the Fingers”, had been dipping into Freud, and especially Freud’s analysis of Leonardo da Vinci, with its interpretations of flying digits as phalluses.

Somewhat comically, Freud ended up backpedalling when it was pointed out to him that Leonardo hadn’t said a vulture attacked him with its tail when he was a babe in the cradle. His “Codex Atlanticus” had been mistranslated into German: it was a kite that frightened the infant Leonardo.

So much for the psychoanalyst’s eureka moment when he spotted a vulture in Leonardo’s “Madonna and Child with St Anne” (sideways). Freud — via Egyptian hieroglyphics representing the mother as a vulture — extrapolated passive homosexuality in the Renaissance genius.

Dali certainly had his admirers, but as the 1920s drew to a close he was primarily regarded by the Spanish art establishment as an assassin, a characterisation he relished. Iconoclasm suited his ego perfectly.

Also in the 1928 show was his “Portrait of Maria d’Abadal”, a commissioned work he’d been dithering with for two years. Faced with a straightforward, “pretty” painting, his usual critics were delighted to see him demonstrate such skill. Dali promptly let it be known that finishing the picture had merely convinced him once and for all of the sterility of such techniques.

“Sterile Attempts / Senecitas” finally appeared in public in March 1929 at a Madrid exhibition of “Spanish artists living in Paris”, which Dali was not yet.

He sold two works from this show for handsome sums. The Duchess of Lerma paid 700 pesetas for “Honey is Sweeter than Blood”, and the Duchess of Penaranda, possibly the niece of Napoleon III’s empress and a woman famous for her newly fashionable tan (that’s her in the middle in the photo, taken at Wimbledon in 1921), took home “Male and Female Figures on a Beach” for 1,000 pesetas.

ARTIST HUMOUR

On his second trip to Paris, in 1929, Dali had dinner one evening with gallery owner Pierre Loeb and “half a dozen of his ‘colts’” — his stable of artists. One of the young guns was Pavlik Tchelitchev, who accompanied Dali when they left and had the difficulty of introducing him to the Paris subway.

“For nothing in the world would I enter it,” Dali wrote years later. “My terror made him laugh so heartily that his eyes were drowned in tears.”

He was eventually coaxed onto a train, but then Tchelitchev told him he’d be getting off at the station before Dali’s.

“I clutched at his overcoat, terrified. ‘You get out at the next stop,’ he repeated to me several times. ‘You’ll see “Exit” in large letters. Then you go up a few steps and you go out. Besides, all you have to do is to follow the people who get off.’

“And suppose nobody got off?

“I arrived, I went up, I got out. After this horrible oppression of the Metro everything struck me as easy. Tchelitchev had just shown me the underground way, and the exact formula for my success. For the rest of my life I was always to make use of the occult and esoteric subways of the spirit.”

“L’Age d’Or” had a warm reception at its premiere at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930, accompanied by an exhibition of the surrealist group’s paintings and sculpture in the cinema lobby, but members of the right-wing League of Patriots came to see it on the third night and rioted in protest, destroying many of the artworks on display.

Dali reckoned the scene in which the protagonist displayed his unfulfilled love by sucking on the big toe of a marble Apollo had the biggest impact, but no one had reckoned on the fury the movie would soon provoke.

“The audience was almost wholly sympathetic to surrealism,” was how Dali, in his 1942 autobiography, remembered the first night. “Only a few noisy laughs and a few protests, quickly drowned out by the frenzied applause of the majority of the hall … But two days later it was a different story.”

Onscreen, a luxury car pulls up and a liveried chauffeur emerges. The passenger door opens and a pair of fetching woman’s legs swing out.

“At this moment, at a pre-arranged signal, an organised group of the ‘King’s Henchmen’ proceeded to toss bottles full of black ink that went crashing into the screen.

“Simultaneously, to the cries of ‘Down with the Germans!’ they fired their revolvers in the air, at the same time throwing stink bombs and tear-gas bombs.”

The thugs beat other audience members with blackjacks and rampaged through the lobby. An usher thought to rescue a Dali painting by hiding it in the restroom, “but the rest were mercilessly torn to shreds”.

While Bunuel bolted for Hollywood, hopes and ambitions in his pocket, the next day’s newspapers were full of horror — over both the film and the melee it sparked — prompting police to ban further screenings.

Dali feared he might be kicked out of France, until a tide of public opinion rose in the movie’s defence, but the subsequent reluctance of others to collaborate with him became a sword of Damocles over his head.

Little did people realise that Dali’s plans for “The Golden Age” were far more excessive than what appeared in the final cut. He’d been busy fishing for patrons for his painting in Paris while Bunuel — seen at right is his friend’s 1924 portrait — completed the movie on his own.

“I was terribly disappointed,” Dali said in hindsight, “for it was but a caricature of my ideas. The ‘Catholic’ side of it had become crudely anti-clerical, and without the biological poetry that I had desired …

“I accepted the responsibility for the sacrilegious scandal, though I had had no such ambition. I should have been willing to cause a scandal a hundred times greater, but for ‘important reasons’ — subversive rather through excess of Catholic fanaticism than through naive anti-clericalism.

“Nevertheless I realised that in spite of everything the film possessed an undeniable evocative strength, and that my disavowal of the film would have been understood by no one. I therefore resolved to accept all the consequences.”

Dali’s ties to the surrealist group were thus forged in violence, even as co-founder Andre Breton shuddered at Dali’s evident political conservatism.

Dali showed his team spirit by designing the cover for the Second Surrealist Manifesto and published his own manifesto in rhyme called “L’Ane Pourri” in the magazine Le Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution. This is where he first unveiled his theory of the paranoiac-critical method — a spontaneous mode of irrational understanding by seeing something two different ways, implying a revelation of its true nature.

On his return to Paris in 1930 Dali decided that the capital had been transformed by the imprint he’d left on it, the citizenry displaying a new affection for both the modern and the nostalgic — meaning fin de siecle fancies. He walked the streets “without being able to ‘do anything’.

“Everyone managed to carry out my ideas, though in a mediocre way. I was unable to carry them out in any way at all!”

He strived to come up with something fresher still, and “drew up a list of the most varied inventions, which I considered infallible”.

These included:

* artificial fingernails with mirrors
* shop mannequins that could be filled with water so that goldfish could swim around inside
* bakelite furniture moulded to the buyer’s body
* masks with camera that reporters could wear
* kaleidoscopic spectacles to wear on boring car trips
* shoes with springs to make walking more fun
* a cinema where viewers could reach out and touch what was appearing on the screen — “silk fabrics, fur, oysters, flesh, sand, dog, etc”
* a series of unexpected shapes for bathtubs
* objects that could be thrown and shattered against the wall in a fit of rage
* and objects for which no satisfactory place could be found to put them, thus creating anxiety “that would cease only the moment one got rid of them”.

The insides of the pockets light up at night!

“It was my contention that these objects would have a great commercial success,” Dali wrote in his 1942 autobiography, “for everyone underestimated the unconscious masochistic buyer who was avidly looking for the object capable of making him suffer in the most indefinite and least obvious way.”

It fell to Gala to go out and try to flog these unpatented dreams, but she was told every time that the ideas were too mad and impractical. This also applied to her husband’s “whole catalogue of streamlined designs for automobiles, which were those that would be called streamlined 10 years later”.

“I cannot understand why human beings should be so little individualised, why they should behave with such great collective uniformity,” Dali lamented on another occasion.

“Take such a simple thing as amusing oneself by derailing trains! Think of the thousands of kilometres of railroad tracks that cover the earth … and what a negligible percentage of those who have a passion for derailing trains ever put it into practice, as compared to the number who have a passion for travelling!

“I cannot understand why man should be capable of so little fantasy. I cannot understand why bus drivers should not have a desire once in a while to crash into a five-and-ten-cent store window and catch a few toys on the fly for their wives, and amuse the children who happened to be around.

“I do not understand, I cannot understand why toilet manufacturers do not put concealed bombs in the flushing compartment of their products which would burst the moment certain politicians pulled the chain …

“I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone …

“Telephone frappe, mint-coloured telephone, aphrodisiac telephone, lobster telephone, telephone sheathed in sable for the boudoirs of sirens with fingernails protected with ermine, Edgar Allan Poe telephones with a dead rat concealed within, … telephones on the leash which would walk about, screwed to the back of a living turtle … telephones … telephones … telephones.”

The lobster telephone would, of course, arrive in due time.

“Figure and Drapery in a Landscape”, circa 1934

America makes its choices, Dali wrote in his 1942 autobiography, “with all the unfathomable and elementary force of her unique and intact biology”.

“She knows, as does no one else, what she lacks, what she does not have. And all that America ‘did not have’ on the spiritual plane, I was going to bring her … precisely the horror of my rotten donkeys from Spain, of the spectral aspect of the Christs of El Greco, of the whirling of the fiery sunflowers of Van Gogh, of the airy quality of Chanel’s decolletes, of the oddness of fur cups, of the metaphysics of the surrealist mannequins of Paris, of the apotheosis of the symphonic and Wagnerian architecture of Gaudi, of Rome, Toledo and Mediterranean Catholicism.”

In 1934, following his row with the other surrealists, his expulsion from his father’s home, his marriage to Gala, and his solo London show, Dali had been talking about the United States with Alfred H Barr Jr, the director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who he met at the Vicomte de Noailles’ place in Paris.

“His information on the subject of modern art was enormous. By contrast with our European directors of modern museums, most of whom still had not heard of Picasso, Alfred Barr’s erudition verged on the monstrous. Mrs Barr, who spoke French, prophesied that I would have a dazzling future in America, and encouraged me to go there.”

He and Gala dearly wanted to go, but had no money. Fortunately, Rene Crevel had introduced them to another wealthy American, Caresse Crosby, who’d bought Le Moulin du Soleil in the Forest of Ermenonville, northeast of Paris in Oise.

She and Dali plotted to build the 15-metre oven there that he needed to bake his giant loaf of bread with which to befuddle the masses.

Below is a Google Earth view of the forest itself.

A few years later, in June 1940, 800 hectares of trees were destroyed in a fire, and in 1974, in about this spot, Turkish Airlines Flight 981 crashed here. A memorial recalls the 346 victims.

“Every weekend we went to the Moulin du Soleil,” Dali wrote. “We ate in the horse stable, filled with tiger skins and stuffed parrots.”

Surrealists and society people were drawn to the place knowing “things were happening” there. The phonograph played Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” constantly and Dali glimpsed for the first time The New Yorker and Town & Country, lapping up the images of America.

“I want to go to America, I want to go to America … This was assuming the form of a childish caprice. Gala would console me: as soon as we could scrape together enough money we would go!”

Dali claimed to have realised that nothing was really stopping him from getting to New York when one day he lashed out at a “repugnant” legless blind man rolling along Boulevard Edgar-Quinet on a wheeled cart. He kicked the cart and sent it scurrying, and it dawned on him that he was neither blind, lame nor “plunged in abjection”. So he booked passage on the Champlain.

Possibly it was karma that made his first ocean crossing so horrific. Supposedly with a $500 loan from Picasso, he and Gala set sail on the Champlain in late autumn.

“As soon as I felt myself on the high seas, a great fear of the ‘ocean space’ took hold of me. I had never yet in my life sailed out of sight of land, and the creakings of the ship appeared to me more and more suspect.”

Catastrophe loomed, Dali was sure, so he attended every safety drill strapped into his life jacket, which he kept on even lying on his bunk in their cabin. Gala found him pathetic and hilarious by turns.

Glowering at the ship’s officers “as my executioners”, Salvador downed champagne constantly. Meanwhile Caresse Crosby, also on board, was asking the captain how long a loaf of French bread the galley might manage. The baker came up with a baguette two and a half metres long.

Tipped off by Crosby and keen to meet Dali, reporters boarded the ship when it reached New York at noon on November 14, and he duly produced his loaf — which the newshounds duly ignored. In an even bigger surprise, “They knew stupefying details about my life.”

“They immediately asked me if it was true that I had just painted a portrait of my wife with a pair of fried chops balanced on her shoulder. I answered yes, except that they we’re not fried, but raw.

“Why raw? they immediately asked me. I told them that it was because my wife was raw too.

“But why the chops together with your wife? I answered that I liked my wife, and that I liked chops, and that I saw no reason why I should not paint them together.”

See this post for more about what became the Dalis’ penchant for ocean voyages.

Finally on terra firma, the newlyweds stayed at the St Moritz Hotel on Central Park South, now the Ritz Carlton, on the seventh floor. Their first dinner engagement was with the Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis Simpson, who will be making more appearances in Dali’s life shortly.

“Javanese Mannequin”, 1934

On his first night in New York Dali had a dream “involving eroticism and lions”. He awoke early in the morning to and could still hear lions roaring, now mingled with the sound of ducks quacking and other animal noises. The waiter who brought breakfast explained that the hotel was right across the road from the Central Park Zoo.

Another lion’s roar — at the Barcelona Zoo — inspired the elongated limbs, heads and rumps that Dali so often painted resting on crutches. He pictured the roar extending out from the animal’s mouth. “I conceived these distortions,” he wrote, “whose prolonged appendix forms represent in my aesthetic system something like the ‘cavernous roarings of form’.”

At right, “Manhattan Skyline”, sometimes identified as “La Lune”, done years later.

Dali commemorated their American debut with an elegy to the Big Apple’s phallic towers:

“New York, you are an Egypt! But an Egypt turned inside out. For she erected pyramids of slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organ-pipes of your skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty!

“New York, granite sentinel facing Asia, resurrection of the Atlantic dream, Atlantis of the subconscious. New York, the stark folly of whose historic wardrobes gnaws away at the earth around the foundations and swells the inverted cupolas of your thousand new religions.

“What Piranesi invented the ornamental rites of your Roxy Theatre? And what Gustave Moreau apoplectic with Prometheus lighted the venomous colors that flutter at the summit of the Chrysler Building?

“New York, your cathedrals sit knitting stockings in the shadow of gigantic banks, stockings and mittens for the Negro quintuplets who will be born in Virginia, stockings and mittens for the swallows, drunk and drenched with Coca-Cola, who have strayed into the dirty kitchens of the Italian quarter and hang over the edge of tables like black Jewish neckties soaked in the rain and waiting for the snappy, sizzling stroke of the iron of the coming elections to make them edible, crisp as a charred slice of bacon.

“New York, your beheaded mannequins are already asleep, spilling all their ‘perpetual blood’ which flows like the ’surgical fountains of publicity’ within the display windows dazzling with electricity, contaminated with ‘lethargic surrealism’.

“And on Fifth Avenue Harpo Marx has just lighted the fuse that projects from the behinds of a flock of explosive giraffes stuffed with dynamite. They run in all directions, sowing panic and obliging everyone to seek refuge pell-mell within the shops. All the fire alarms of the city have just been turned on, but it is already too late. Boom! Booml Booml Booml

“I salute you, explosive giraffes of New York, and all you forerunners of the irrational — Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, and you too, unforgettable Buster Keaton, tragic and delirious like my rotten and mystic donkeys, desert roses of Spain!”

What Dali saw himself as bringing to the New World was an “infekzious poizun”, the surrealism he would inject into America’s bloodstream. The Land of the Free was swiftly addicted.

Below, “Gangsterism and Goofy Visions of New York”, an illustration for a series of articles about American life that Dalí wrote for The American Weekly from 1934 to 1935.

It should be noted that there’s some confusion as to the animal depicted in the portrait of Gala: some sources refer to “lambchops”, others to “pork chops”. For what it’s worth, I say lamb.

“As soon as we had got settled in Port Lligat,” wrote in his 1942 autobiography, referring to his and Gala’s new home next door to Cadaques, “I painted a portrait of Gala with a pair of raw chops poised on her shoulder.

“The meaning of this, as I later learned, was that instead of eating her, I had decided to eat a pair of raw chops instead. The chops were in effect the expiatory victims of abortive sacrifice — like Abraham’s ram and William Tell’s apple. Ram and apple, like the sons of Saturn and Jesus Christ on the cross, were raw — this being the prime condition for the cannibalistic sacrifice.

“In the same vein I painted a picture of myself as a child at about the age of eight, with a raw chop on my head. I was trying thus symbolically to tempt my father to come and eat this chop instead of me.”