Dalí's Religious Models: the Iconography of Martyrdom and its Contemplation © Miguel Escribano 2012 A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD Department of Art History and Theory University of Essex February 2012 ii Summary This thesis investigates Dalí’s adoption of religious iconography to help represent themes that he had conceptualised through Surrealism, psychoanalysis and other thought systems. His selective use of sources was closely bound to his life circumstances, and I integrate biographical details in my analysis of his paintings. I identify unexpected sources of Dalí's images, and demonstrate how alert he was to the psychological motivations of traditional art. I find he made especial use of the iconography of martyrdom – and the perceptual and cognitive mechanics of the contemplation of death – that foreground the problem of the sexual and mortal self. Part I examines the period 1925-7, when Dalí developed an aesthetic outlook in dialogue with Lorca, formulated in his text, 'Sant Sebastià'. Representations of Sebastian and other martyr saints provided patterns for Dalí's exposition of the generative and degenerating self. In three chapters, based on three paintings, I plot the shift in Dalí's focus from the surface of the physical body – wilfully resistant to emotional engagement, and with classical statuary as a model – to its problematic interior, vulnerable to forces of desire and corruption. This section shows how Dalí's engagement with religious art paradoxically brought him into alignment with Surrealism. In Part II, I contend that many of the familiar images of Dalí’s Surrealist period – in which he considered the self as a fundamentally psychic rather than physical entity – can be traced to the iconography of contemplative saints, particularly Jerome. Through the prism of this re-interpretation, I consider Jerome's task of transcribing Biblical meaning in the context of psychoanalytical theories of cultural production. In Part III, I show how Dalí's later, overt use of religious imagery evolved from within his Surrealism. I trace a condensed, personalised life-narrative through Dalí’s paintings of 1948-52, based on Biblical mythology, but compatible with psychoanalytical theory: from birth to death to an ideal return to the mother's body. iii Contents page Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………... 1 Prologue: A Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist ………………………………….. 5 Part I: St. Sebastian …………………………………………………………………………………. 10 Chapter 1. The Marble Body: Composition with Three Figures …………………. 11 1.1 Hello Sailor! …………………………………………………………………………………. 13 1.2 Sebastian Bound ………………………………………………………………………..… 22 1.3 Venus, Sebastian and the Sea …………………………………………………….… 29 1.4 The Neo-Cubist Academy ……………………………………………………………… 33 Chapter 2. The Wooden Body: Barcelona Mannequin …………………………….… 44 2.1 Picturing the Other …………………………………………………………………….… 45 2.2 The Rhetoric of the Halo …………………………………………………………….… 52 2.3 Passion Play ……………………………………………………………………………….… 60 2.4 Something Fishy …………………………………………………………………………… 67 Chapter 3. The Body of Flesh: The Forest of Apparatuses …………………………. 78 3.1 A “rigorous logic of fantasy” ………………………………………………………… 79 3.2 Painting well ………………………………………………………………………………… 85 3.3 Little Things ………………………………………………………………………………..… 94 3.4 The Triumph of Death …………………………………………………………….…… 101 3.5 Cinderella shall go to the Surrealist Ball …………………………………….… 105 Part II: St. Jerome …………………………………………………………………………………..… 114 Chapter 4. Self-analysis: Constructing a Surrealist Self …………………..………….. 116 4.1 The First Days of Spring ………………………………………………………………… 117 4.2 Lugubrious Game ……………………………………………………………………….… 120 Chapter 5. Diagnosis: Visualising the Surrealist Self …………………………….…..… 135 5.1 Desire: the Great Enigma ……………………………………………………………… 136 5.2 The Egyptian Enigma: “I want my mummy!” ………………………………… 154 5.3 The Landscape of Primary Loss ……………………………………..……………… 156 Chapter 6. Therapy: Contemplating the Self ……………………………………………….… 182 6.1 Book Transforming Itself into a Nude Woman (1940) ………………..…. 183 6.2 A Scholar and a Lion-Tamer ………………………………………………………….. 188 iv Part III: Christ ………………………………………………………………………………………………..… 199 Chapter 7. Birth: The Madonna of Portlligat ………………………………………………... 202 7.1 Dalí’s Return to Eden ……………………………………………………………………..… 203 7.2 Raphael's Madonnas ……………………………………………………………………….. 206 7.3 The End of the Idyll ………………………………………………………………………….. 209 7.4 Surrealism's Crisis of Faith: Carrouges, Breton and Dalí ………………..... 212 Chapter 8. Death: Christ of St. John of the Cross …………………………………………... 216 8.1 Ecstatic and Quiet Mysticisms ………………………………………………………….. 218 8.2 Mystic Perspective ……………………………………………………………………………. 231 8.3 A Hidden Source: Andrea del Castagno’s Holy Trinity …………………….… 239 Chapter 9. Reparation: Assumpta Corpuscularia Lapislazulina …………………….… 242 9.1 El Greco's “Dionysian dynamism” …………………………………………………….. 244 9.2 Aldous Huxley's “rationally defensible mysticism” ………………………….… 250 9.3 Mechanical Mysticism: The Vierge Ouvrante …………………………………… 252 Epilogue: Pietà …………………………………………………………………………………………..……. 254 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….… 259 Appendix 1: 'Ode to Salvador Dalí' …………………………………………………………….…. 262 Appendix 2: 'Sant Sebastià' ………………………………………………………………………….. 266 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 271 List of Illustrations ……………………………………………………………………………………………... 279 v Introduction I have investigated the origin of much of Salvador Dalí's Surrealist visual repertoire in traditional religious iconography, as a useful supplement to psychoanalytical readings of his work. In particular, I have found that Dalí adapted religious art that depicts and facilitates the contemplation of mortality. The interest of this approach is not merely anecdotal or archival, but for the patterns it reveals in Dalí's appreciation of meanings and communicative methods within the religious tradition. It not only reveals unexpected sources of Dalí's images – enriching the experience of solving his visual conundrums – but also demonstrates the seriousness of his art-historical scholarship, and his insight into the underlying psychological content and motivation of much religious art. Few artists' lives have been documented in as great detail as Salvador Dalí's, and to a great extent the parameters were set by Dalí himself in an insistent and conscious effort of autobiographical mythopoesis – in his voluminous writings as well as his prolific art work. His methodical reinterpretation of all phenomena in relation to a mythical self attended a vital need for reassurance of his own existence, betraying the fundamental self-doubt underlying his apparent megalomania. Dalí's thoughts and art can be distilled and labelled as an interrogation of the truth of himself: probing origins and identity within; the real and the represented without. The basis for my thesis: the not-so-blank canvas Dalí deliberately and methodically created images that appeared to flow spontaneously from his subconscious onto his Surrealist canvases, but the concept “self” that he explored was always personalised, inhabited and shaped by his own memory and experience. He submitted these to a process of interpretation that he called his “paranoiac-critical method”, integrating them within a coherent, personal network of associations.1 Dalí's motivation for assimilating particular signifying structures of religious art at particular moments of his life was related to real events, and I integrate biographical study into my analysis of his works. Dalí was only ready to accept Surrealism's stated aim of revealing the machinations of the subconscious once he had reconciled this with his vital need for a sense of autonomy and control. He consciously sifted his memory for images that he had internalised and processed, before incorporating them into his mythography, even if their meanings had undergone a process of reinterpretation and appropriation since their original production. André Breton welcomed this contribution to Surrealism as an effective imitation of unmediated, instinctive thought, but Dalí's tendency toward deliberate manipulation of the subconscious in the service of his own mythopoesis remained a source of tension. In contrast to most of the Surrealists, Dalí arrived at their door with a thorough academic art education, and with firm conviction regarding the purpose and aims of painting, which helps explain his reticence to abandon control of his image-making to automatic processes. With the support of Freudian theory, Dalí considered his art historical knowledge, and the vast store of images that he had absorbed since childhood, to be a fundamental part of the neural network of associations that comprised him as an individual. Certain constants in Dalí’s career – Millet’s Angelus, the Venus de Milo, St. Sebastian, Raphael, Vermeer or Velázquez – gain in significance by the fact of his familiarity with them from an early age. For example, images in the churches of Figueres or Cadaqués – where he attended mass with his mother – were established at the core of the mnemonic archives from which he compiled his paintings. In Freud, Dalí also found the licence to take seriously the humorous associations that he had already made as a child, or later with friends, and we shall come across several examples. In May 1922 – shortly before Dalí arrived at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid to begin his studies at the Academia de San Fernando, and long before his full engagement with Surrealism – Ortega y Gasset's