Maniac Eyeball (6 page)

I rushed out finally on to the terrace above the abyss. I spit as far as I could out over the bushes and gazed at my realm: the ribbonl-ike stream that fed the dam, the vegetable garden, and the forest stretching out to the mountains. I was intoxicated with dizziness and power.

But breakfast time was when I felt most intensely moved, as I noted the paintings on the walls. I was eating buttered honeyed toast steeped in café au lait, all by myself, when I suddenly saw the pictures. They were the work of Ramón Pichot, who at the time was painting in Paris and much involved with Impressionism. I gazed in fascination at the spots of paint, apparently put on without any order, in thick layers, that suddenly shaped up magnificently, if one got the right distance away, into a dazzling vision of colors that communicated a deep, sun-soaked image of a stream, a landscape, or a face. I think my eyes were popping out of my head. Never had I experienced such a sensation of enchantment and magic. That, then, was art! Both precision – I was beside myself at the red hairs in the armpits of a dancing-girl – and the radiance of reality in all its splendor.

The pointillist technique especially aroused my admiration. The re-creation of real life by way of the decomposition of particles into minuscule spots of color seemed pure genius to me. I grabbed the cut-glass stopper of a carafe to use as a monocle so as to de compose reality into its elements and then reassemble them into the Impressionist images of the pictures. The game turned into a method; I spent entire days re-thinking the world through my own eyes. This frenzied interest possessed me completely – or almost, for I did not at the same time cease to indulge other desires, the source of more sensual pleasures.

How Dalínian Sensitivity Manifested Itself

First thing in the morning, I put together an exhibitionistic show. Each time, I had to dream up a pose in which my nakedness might arouse Julia, whose job it was to wake me.

I would pretend to be asleep while the young lady opened the shutters. Completely motionless, I would wait with bated breath for her to come and pull the sheet up over my genitals, which I had made sure to have in evidence, either between my spread legs or in rear view. I then tried to exploit the situation by making her look more closely at me on the most varied excuses: an itch, a pimple, or a scratch... At breakfast, which I gulped down greedily, I did my best to let some of the café au lait spill down my chin, along my neck and on to my chest, where it dried in sticky patches. I sometimes even got it to go all the way down my belly. One day, Mr. Pichot’s sharp eye caught my maneuver, and he remembered it years later as an early sign of my paranoia. However, my greatest source of satisfaction was my “studio”, a whitewashed room bathed in sun all day long. With delight, I painted rolls of paper there that I later strung along the walls. This was the locale of my earliest masterpiece.

All the paper being used up, I decided to use a dismantled door, which I laid on the backs of two chairs. I had planned to paint a handful of cherries from the basketful that I had emptied on the table. For each cherry, I planned to use only two colors: vermilion for the sunlit red and carmine for the shadow, with white creating the reflections. In rhythm with the old mill, I applied my colors with a relentless rigor that made my joy all the more intense. Mr. Pichot’s complimentary remarks added even more to my pleasure and pride.

Friends and neighbors were soon streaming in to see it, and brimmed over with encouraging words. But, since they pointed out that I had failed to paint stems on the cherries, I began to eat the fruit, sticking each stem left in my hand on to one of the painted cherries. These collages gave the whole thing a most striking feeling of reality. I even made use of the worms that were eating through the door, digging them out with a pin, to give a further quality to the representation of the painted cherries. Pepito Pichot watched this operation raptly, and commented, “That’s pure genius.” I was sure of it.

It took him a little time to convince my father that I ought to have drawing lessons, but I didn’t care about that. I just kept saying, “I’m an Impressionist painter.” At twelve, I was enrolled in the drawing class of Professor Don Juan Nuñez, at the municipal school. A former Prix de Rome winner in engraving, he was a remarkable pedagogue, to whom I owe a great deal. I well remember the precious hours he put in commenting to me about an original Rembrandt engraving that he owned, showing me the subtleties of the chiaroscuro.

He was able to impart to me his mystical faith in art, convince me of the high value of the painting profession, and reconfirm the conviction I had of my own genius. He tried also to get this across to my father. But since my marks in school were far below my artistic talents, and the possible painting career before me frightened my father, he was deaf to Nuñez’s urgings about my direction. “Later, later,” he would say. “First, let’s see how you do on your
baccalauréat.”
But he did buy me the art books I asked for.

Each day, I watched Mr. Nuñez, dressed in black, going to the cemetery where his beloved daughter was buried. This three-hour pilgrimage impressed me greatly through its constancy and fervor, but not for anything in the world would I have gone with him to that place where my elder brother Salvador slept, buried with half my soul, while I continued to be marked by him as indelibly as by a wound. Yet, in my eyes, Mr. Nuñez returned all the greater for this frequentation of the dead. But my self-assurance was such that I never hesitated to contradict my teacher on the artistic level, on which he was the master. I did it, in fact, systematically.

Here, I would like to retrace an “experiment” which perfectly illustrates the efficacy of that sense of logical contradiction that ceaselessly drives me on to new heights, all the greater as each challenge I set for myself is more impossible. The class was supposed to draw a beggar with a curly white beard. After looking at my first sketches, Nuñez warned me that I had too many lines and that they were too heavy to allow me to render the downy quality of the beard. He suggested I start again, leaving more white space, and just barely pressing down on the paper. But I resolved to persevere and, without heeding his advice, literally chopped up my drawing with strong black lines. I was working in a kind of rage, and quickly attracted the attention of the whole class. Soon, my drawing was nothing but one dark shapeless mass. Nuñez came over and expressed his desolation at my stubbornness. Then I smeared the whole thing with India ink.

And, as soon as that was dry, with a penknife I scratched at it in spots, tearing away a layer of paper so as to obtain perfect whiteness. Where I spread saliva on it, the white became gray. I succeeded in creating a feeling of both lightness and depth, which I accentuated by composing a perspective of oblique light. On my own, I had rediscovered the engraving methods of that magician of painting named Mariano Fortuny, one of the most famous of Spanish colorists. My teacher was stunned. I will always remember how he said, “Look how great that Dalí is!” These compliments were not enough for me. I wanted more, ever increasingly, warranted by the ceaselessly more brilliant affirmation of my genius. I worked with unbelievable ardor.

From the moment I awoke, until night fell, I was devoted to comprehending the laws and relationships of light and colors. My research led me to making canvases covered with a thick layer of matter that caught the light, creating relief and presence. That was when I decided to stick stones into my picture, then painting over them. Among others, I did a dazzling sunset in which the clouds were made up of stones of every size. My father was happy to hang that one in the dining room. Unfortunately, the paste was not strong enough to hold the weight of my materials, and our evenings were often disturbed by the sound of falling objects, which my father satirically described as “nothing but stones falling from our child’s sky.” Yet, he was being slowly won over to the idea that, like Nuñez, I might become a drawing teacher – in a word, have a respectable job.

How Dalí Became Informed Of The International Art Movement

I continued to go my way stubbornly, discovering Cubism and delighting in Juan Gris through articles in the magazine
L’Esprit Nouveau
(
The New Spirit
), to which I subscribed. I read voraciously. After the Christian Brothers’, I went to school at the Marxists’ to get ready for my higher studies.

But, outside the curriculum, I was devouring Nietzsche, Voltaire’s
Philosophical Dictionary,
and especially Kant, whose categorical imperative seemed beyond my comprehension, and who threw me into depths of reflection. I ruminated for a long time over the ideas of Spinoza and Descartes, thus accumulating much speculative material and sowing seeds of deep thought that one day would bring forth the basis of my philosophical methodology. I was still short on ideas, though long now of hair and sidewhiskers. To contrast with my thin swarthy face, I wore a huge ascot tie.

My jacket was complemented by plus fours and gaiters that came up to my knees. A Meerschaum pipe the bowl of which was the head of an Arab grinning broadly and a tiepin made of a Greek coin were my usual vestimentary accessories. My get-up created a sensation, and attracted attention to my talent. Some thirty artists from Gerona and Barcelona, who were having a show that year, 1918, at Figueras, invited me to take part in it. (Half a century later, this was the very place where Spain built me a museum.) I was highly noted by two of the most important critics, Carlos Compte and Puig Pujades, who predicted I would have a great future.

I had a huge desire to shed my adolescence as quickly as possible and complete my metamorphosis. I worked without let-up, reading all the available magazines,
L’Amour de l’Art,
L’Art Vivant, L’Art d’Aujourd’hui, La Gaceta de las Artes,
L’Amic de les Arts, Variétés,
and
Der Querschnitt,
as well as all the art books that came out. I also wrote for an art magazine,
Studium,
printed on wrapping paper, in which I was in charge of the department devoted to the great masters of painting. I wrote about Velázquez, Goya, El Greco, Michelangelo, Dürer, and Da Vinci, with special emphasis on their plastic techniques, but keeping to myself what I learned of their methods. I also started to write an essay,
The
Tower Of Babel,
and covered several hundred pages on the theme of death. I came out against the compromise by which men pretend to have become reconciled to and forgotten death. On the contrary, I celebrated that event, which to me was the basis of all artistic creation and the very quality of imagination.

Most human beings seemed like wretched wood lice to me, crawling about in terror, unable to live their lives with courage enough to assert themselves. I deliberately decided to emphasize all aspects of my personality, and exaggerate all the contradictions that set me that much more apart from common mortals. Especially, to have no dealings with the dwarfs, the runts that were all around me, to change no whit of my personality, but on the contrary to impose my view of things, my behavior, the whole of my individuality on everyone else. I have never deviated from this line of conduct. So I became more and more of an oppositionist by design. I spit on everything with voluptuous delight. Tears of rage came to my eyes at the mere idea that I might not at every single moment be radically different from all others. My aim was to have absolutely nothing in common with anyone. Oh, had I only been able to be one of a kind! Alone! Just me!

I carried my taste for mystification to the extreme, in dress, in attitudes, and in the slightest events of my life. I claimed the woman’s profile on the Greek coin of my tiepin was Helen of Troy. I was always waving a cane – I had a weird and amazing collection of them. I let my hair grow to phenomenal length. I darkened my eyebrows. Each of my dandified gestures was histrionic. I even tried to pretend I was a madman. One of my tricks was to buy a one-peseta coin for two pesetas from one of my classmates, and then openly gloat over how I had made a killing, according to a secret mathematical system that I claimed to have in a notebook. They thought I was crazy, and I delighted in my loneliness and the lack of understanding by which I was surrounded.

What Dalí’s Philosophical Position Was At The Time

I was an anarchist, and privately composed hymns to my own will to power. One morning, coming to school, I saw a group of students yelling as they burned a Spanish flag in the name of Catalan separatism. I was just getting into their group, when they suddenly began to disperse. I proudly thought my arrival was what had turned them away, but a troop of soldiers rushing up on the double surrounded me as I was picking up the charred remains of the flag. I was arrested, despite my protests, and indicted. But the court acquitted me, because of my age. My legend, however, grew as a result, and in my contemporaries’ eyes I was a hero. Yet, if I increasingly impressed them, I did nothing to win their affection. I took delight in picking on boys smaller and weaker than I. Pretending to have my nose in a book, I would choose my victim. I remember one boy, especially ugly, who was busy eating a chocolate bar, alternating each mouthful with a bite of bread. His placidity and the bovine regularity of his mastication drove me crazy. When I got near him, I slapped him as hard as I could, sending his snack rolling in the dust, and then ran away, leaving him speechless.

Sometimes, things went less well for me. One day I went over to a sickly-looking kid with a violin. I patiently waited for him to put the instrument down to tie his shoelace, then suddenly kicked his behind as hard as I could, and trampled on his fiddle. Unfortunately, the boy had long legs, and his wild fury endowed him with a strength I never would have suspected. He caught up with me. A picture of cowardice, I threw myself at his knees and begged him to spare me, offering him twenty-five pesetas not to hit me. In his fury, he did not even hear me and beat me up good and proper, knocking me to the ground and tearing out a handful of my hair. I began to scream, out of pain – and design. My hysteria had the desired results. My adversary was taken aback, and stopped, as a teacher who heard it all came over to us. He asked what had started the fight.