SALVADOR DALÍ
COMPLEXITY OF A GENIUS

The recent death of Salvador Dalí, who died in Figueras on January 23rd, 1989, revealed the dimension and the international interest for the Catalan painter. He was one of the most controversial and interesting personalities of the art history of this century.

It is necessary to consider Salvador Dalí's personality from a polyvalent perspective. Painter, sculptor, designer, illlustrator, creator of objects, prose-writer, dramatist, poet, movies-man with Buñuel and creator of great public shows, provoker of scandals, etc. These are different faces of the same character; on the one hand considered a pure genius and on the other, seen like a simple "avidadollars," just looking for easy propaganda and an astonishing spectacle.

All these characteristics make him one of the most prodigious figures of the historical vanguard. In fact, Dalí went beyond a simple job, a technique or a painting style to become something more than a conventional artist. He was an artist, in the richest and widest meaning of the word, overflowing with imagination and fantasy. He loved provocation, from the time of his schooling and finished his career buried in a Theater-Museum, the seat of his own Foundation, in Figueras.

The true merit of Salvador Dalí has its origin not only in the field of his manifold and remarkable artistic production, but also in the peculiar life cycle present in all his works; always halfway between the "boutade" and the intellectual.

We can make artistic, sociological, philosophical, moral, political, and overall psychological appraisals of this genius of Empurdàn. All and each of them will bring us back to the person, the individual, the true intellectual who is hidden behind this opportunistic mask; where schizophrenia and public relations received a wide popularity, which was not necessary for his art. But he was insatiably longing for it.

On more than one occasion, he said: "All my work is a reflection, one of the innumerable reflections of what I do, write and think." Ture, these activities - doing, writing and thinking - enabled him to become a figure universally admired and at the same time, refused by the most representative vanguard intellectuals or groups, to which he brought criticism and polemic abilities anyways. This is the way Dalí reduced the limits of a strictly pictorial matter, he was in fact, willing to live his life in the most radical sense.

All his work is a reflection of his inner world, of the monsters of his unconscious; it is a struggle against familiar and social closings and finally it is the will to harmonize with new times, ways of organizing and social communications.

These problems - psychology, cinema, mathematics, technology, physics, chemistry and all the doctrines he approached with great curiousity - pointed out the searching qualities of an artist who lived in a constant psychological rending and whose sensitivity kept up with violence and masochism.

This is the reason why he was never able to adapt himself to paternal discipline, or, to the rules of the School of Fine Arts of Madrid (from which he was expelled), to a religious creed, to the parameters of the surrealist group, to a political activity (he was very contradictory on this subject), or to a "normal" artistic career.

Dalí lived in his own way; he made an artistic work of his life and he made it popular through his creations. This is a merit nobody can deny him and he himself confirmed more than once, as by the famous manifesto "Mi Lucha." where he stated: "Against simplicity, complexity; against uniformity, diversification; against collective, individual; against politics, metaphysics; against revolution, trradition; against medicine, magic; against scepticism, faith; etc."

It is from this very different Dalí that today we are progressively discovering two little known faces of his. Dalí as illustrator, creator of books, and Dalí who amuses himself in a phantasmagoric surrealist sculpture, starting from fiction and bringing us back to reality.

Dalí's passion for books and bibliophilism goes back to his childhood. In "Elpays de Salvador Dalí," the writer Josep Pla, also from Empurdàn, tells us that Dalí kept a large quantity of books in his house of Portlligat; they were read, annotated, underlined and very used books. A voracious reader, he took from literature numerous images which he then elaborated and developed, either in the books he wrote (many of them are considerable creative quality) or in those of the universal literature he illustrated.

Everything can be transformed by art in a living object - bronze, gold, the most different metals, precious stones and found objects enrich a sculpture which is more indulgent to anatomic deformation and to visual enticement than to three dimensional purity. More than an illustrator of books or a creator of sculptures, Dalí was an ingenious and creative author, a transformer of symbolism and a lover of decadent traits.

Allegories, metaphors, family myths, sex symbolism, the play of double-image, and all that could be included into the "Persistence of Memory" are elaborated in Dalí's own way, in this undefined, unreal, magical field where both rationality and irrationality are present.

The extraordinary landscape of Mediterranean Catalonia, the land of Empordàn where Dalí was born, lived and died, contributed to all this. Overall, Portlligat, which is in front of Capo de Creus, was for Dalí an almost supernatural place, where he talked with occult powers. This is a bewitched landscape, lashed by the impetuous north winds, eroded by seastorms which carved Costa Brava and, according to rumours, is still inhabited by witches and spells. Whether legend or reality, one thing is sure: the obsession of Dalí for this landscape was a basic part of his plastic universe.

The artist himself stated in his "Confesiones Inconfesables" that "I am persuaded I am Capo de Creus and I embody the living nucleus of this landscape... I can't part from this sky, from this sea, from these rocks, I am bound forever to Portlligat - which means bound port - where I established all my most genuine truths and I roots."

Illustrations, drawings, engravings, sculptures, objects, and jewels express a mixing of physic and metaphysic, mythic and lucid, joyful and transcendental and like all Dalí's work, it describes human being's life, death, love, sex, misery and greatness, through a series of sincere images. His phantoms live with such an amazing power, full of talent: and it is this that makes him an authentic "magister ludi," a true and unparalled artist.

Daniel Giralt-Miracle
Director of the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona
1989