Arcachon: The invisible man on the run
“The Invisible Man” from 1929.
George Orwell criticised Dali for “scuttling off like rat as soon as France is in danger … When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near.”
The words are brutal, but true enough. In the late summer of 1939 the artist was indeed looking for somewhere safe and nourishing. How they ended up spending nine months on the sunny French coast is quite a story.
“The European war was approaching,” Dali wrote in his 1942 autobiography. “The enervating adventures of our recent voyage to America had exhausted Gala and myself, and we decided to go off for a rest to the Pyrenees, close to the Spanish frontier, where we stopped at the Grand Hotel in Font-Romeu. ‘To rest’, for me, meant to begin immediately to paint 12 hours a day instead of resting.”
Today famed as “the sunniest French ski resort”, Font-Romeu evolved around the old village of Odeillo, with the completion of the Grand Hotel in 1913 guaranteeing its allure for devotees of winter sports. The hotel, pictured here, was remodelled in the 1970s as a complex of private apartments.
The resort town’s name means “Fountain of the Pilgrim”, after a shepherd’s discovery of a statue of the Virgin Mary hidden in a woodland crevasse, perhaps by the persecuted Cathars. The Ermitage Chapel was built on the site in the early 14th century.
Had he arrived much later, Dali might have been more interested in the solar furnace at the National Scientific Research Centre, 1.5 kilometres south of the Grand Hotel. Built in 1968, it has a gigantic mirror that concentrates 16,000 times the energy of the sun in a bid to discover new elements that might be used in space exploration.
But in 1939 Dali had other things weighing on his mind, not least the war, which had brought to town General Gamelin, Chief of Staff of the French army, to inspect the border fortifications. The military commandeered the hotel suite that Dali had reserved, and “we therefore had to wait impatiently for Gamelin to leave …
“The evening when I got into General Gamelin’s bed with Gala, she read the [tarot] cards before we went to sleep, and saw the exact date of the declaration of war. The clothes that we had left on the armchair in disorder cast upon the wall the shadow of an impressive silhouette, which was exactly the profile of General Gamelin. A bad omen!”
Sure enough, the French forces were mobilised and the Grand Hotel was closed indefinitely.
“Back in Paris I examined the map of France, I studied my winter campaign, trying to plan it in such a way as to combine the possibility of a Nazi invasion with gastronomical possibilities, for in Font-Romeu the food was rather bad, and I was possessed by a frenzy for appetising dishes.
“I finally put my finger as close as possible to the Spanish frontier and at the same time on a neuralgic point of French cooking: Bordeaux. That would be one of the last places the Germans reached if, as seemed to me highly improbable, they should win. Moreover Bordeaux naturally meant Bordeaux wine, jugged hare, duck liver aux raisins, duck aux oranges, Arcachon Claire oysters … Arcachon! I’ve got it! That is exactly the spot, a few kilometres from Bordeaux, to spend the war days.”
A mere fishing hamlet until 1857, but soon enough a popular destination for people suffering from tuberculosis and other ailments, Toulouse-Lautrec among them, Arcachon is also the home of Europe’s largest sand dune, the Dune de Pyla (or du Pilat), three kilometres long, more than 110 metres high and on the move, inland at five metres a year.
The dune became a backdrop in several of the paintings Dali did during his sojourn, including “Two Pieces of Bread, Expressing the Sentiment of Love”, shown below, with the accompanying pawn a nod to his friend Marcel Duchamp, who played chess with Gala while he worked.
Whether or not the insecurity of their immediate future was a spur to creativity isn’t known, but certainly Dali’s stay in Arcachon from September 1939 to June 1940 was immensely productive.
The Dalis arrived three days before the Allies declared war on Germany and Salvador set up a studio “in a large colonial-style villa, overlooking the famous Arcachon ornamental lake”.
Although no one is positive, their new home was almost definitely the Villa Salesse at 131 Boulevard de la Plage. A 1988 book called “Letters to Gala” claimed it was the Villa Flamberge at #231, about 500 metres down the road, to which some letters to Dali (including two from Paul Eluard, Gala’s ex) were indeed addressed, but this has been disputed by, among others, the widow of the owner of #131.
The owner was Henry Calvé of Bordeaux, who declined Dali’s offer of a portrait in gratitude, but Dali says in “The Secret Life” that he rented his premises from a Monsieur Colbet, a world traveller who enjoyed nothing more than talking — about his adventurers and anything else.
“Until then I thought it was Chanel who was the most tireless talker,” Dali wrote, recalling how he set one against the other when Coco Chanel came to spend two weeks with the Dalis.
“The struggle … remained undecisive for over three long hours, but toward the end of the fourth hour Monsieur Colbet began to get the upper hand, and finally triumphed.
“His victory was due chiefly to his respiratory technique. His way of breathing while he talked was simply astonishing, for even in the most heated moments he did not for a second abandon that even and unalterable rhythm of inhaling and exhaling characteristic of those who are determined to go a long way.
“Coco, on the other hand, would from time to time let herself be caught in the trap of her own eloquence and have to stop for a second or two to take a deep breath — aaahhh!
“It was then that Monsieur Colbet would perfidiously push home his advantage and continue imperturbably the thread of his story, somewhat frayed up to that point, and at the same time veer the conversation in the direction of themes and questions in which he felt that Mademoiselle Chanel was growing increasingly unsteady.
“When termites came up for discussion, for instance, Chanel lost her footing, not having sufficiently definite opinions on the subject. Then Monsieur Colbet would go boldly ahead and pour forth tons of anecdotes drawn from personal experiences during his African travels. One felt that he was capable of pursuing this theme for the whole rest of the night …
“After Coco, Marcel Duchamp came to see us. He was terrorised by those bombardments of Paris that had never yet taken place.”
A view of the Dali neighbourhood and the great dune, the vast block of white down the shore from the town.
Dali poured himself into his art, pried away only when his visitors or his next-door neighbour, his fellow surrealist painter Leonor Fini, insisted on taking Gala out to restaurants like the Château Trompette and the Chapon Fin in Bordeaux, or when some children brought him seashells to decorate, as local historian Eliane Keller noted in her book about the well-known people who’ve stayed in Arcachon.
Duchamp’s “inactivity”, Dali wrote, “was for me a paroxysmal stimulant for my work.
“Never had I worked so hard, or with such a burning sense of intellectual responsibility, as during this war, at Arcachon. I delivered myself over body and soul to the struggle of technique and of matter. It became alchemy.
“I was seeking that unfindable thing, the medium to paint in, the exact mixture of amber oil, of gum, of varnish, of imponderable ductility and of super-sensitive materiality by virtue of which the very sensibility of my spirit could at last materialise itself. How many times I have spent a sleepless night because of two drops too many erroneously poured into my painting medium!
“Gala alone was a witness to my furies, my despairs, my fugitive ecstasies, and my relapses into the bitterest pessimism. She alone knows to what point painting became for me at this period a ferocious reason for living, while at the same time it became an even more ferocious and unsatisfied reason for loving her, Gala, for she and she alone was reality; and all that my eyes were capable of seeing was ’she’, and it was the portrait of her that would be my work, my idea, my reality.
“But in order to achieve this portrait of my Galarine, as I called her, I would perhaps have to die of fatigue like a real Catholic donkey …”
“Portrait of Gala”, seen here, did after all remain unfinished, but in the meantime he completed studies for “Millet’s Angelus” (see this post) and the painting below, “Philosopher Illuminated by the Light of the Moon and the Setting Sun” (so Robert Descharnes believes).
The “philosopher” here is in fact the laziest man in Port Lligat, a fisherman (when he did work) named Ramon de Hermosa, and his “philosophy” was this: “There are years when you don’t feel like doing anything at all.”
Since he hung around the house, Gala asked him to pump water each evening to fill the washtub, but the tub was never filled, even though she could hear the noise of pumping. Salvador and Gala found Ramon lying under an olive tree mimicking the grinding sound of the pump by rubbing together two pieces of iron suspended on strings from the branches.
“After the tense, agitated conversations in Paris, swarming with double meanings, maliciousness and diplomacy,” Dali wrote, “the stories of Ramon achieved a serenity of soul and a height of boring anecdotism which was incomparable.”
The journalist Jean Claude Garnung saw elements of the Arcachon landscape in Dali’s bizarre picture of Shirley Temple (this post) as well.
Meanwhile Kenneth Wach and Robert S Lubar placed the origins of “The Invisible Bust of Voltaire” there too, the first in a series of important double-image paintings that continued with “Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages)” and “Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire”.
Dali did two magazine illustrations about this time as well: “Appearance of a Scene of War in the Face of the Lieutenant Deschanel” for the October 12, 1939, edition of Paris Match and “Actress Betty Stockfeld Is Metamorphosed into a Nurse”, which was the cover of Pour Vous on October 11.
“Telephone in a Dish With Three Grilled Sardines at the End of September” could have been done in Arcachon, and quite possibly several other works.
“Gala alone enabled me to live,” Dali continued in his first autobiography. “She collected Bordeaux wines … She would put a mushroom a la Bordelaise fragrant with garlic on the tip of my tongue, and say to me, ‘Eat!’ ‘It’s good!’ I would exclaim.
“Beside all this the European war appeared to me like an episodic children’s fight on a street corner. One day, nevertheless, this fight began to make too much of an uproar and became too real because of those big, happy and taciturn children of the German troops, who were already very close, and who arrived in fairytale armoured carriages covered with childish drawings and camouflaged with branches. I said to myself, this it getting too historical for me; and in a rage I stopped painting the picture I was in the midst of, and we left.”
They “spent a sinister day” in Bordeaux as the first German shells fell, and fled into Spain two days before the international bridge at Hendaye was seized on June 28. Other sources say Dali left Arcachon ahead of Gala, who was visited there in early July by her and Eluard’s daughter Cécile.
Less than a year later Hitler and Franco would meet in Hendaye to sort out Spain’s role as an Axis power. Franco, still smarting from his civil war, stayed “neutral”, while actually pro-Axis.
“Gala left directly for Lisbon,” Dali continued, “where I was to meet her as soon as my documents were in order, in order to arrange our trip to America, which appeared to bristle with red tape of a superhuman refinement.”
He travelled from the Basque city of Irun, immediately across the bridge from France, and crossed Spain to see his estranged father and sister in Figueras before setting sail once again across the Atlantic.
Life on the lam wasn’t always bad. Here, the Dalis party with Jacques Bollinger at a bash in the “champagne king’s” honour in Paris in 1939.
Another roost, in January 1941, was the Beverly Hills Hotel, where a newspaper photographer snapped this picture of Salvador showing Gala his press clippings.