Salvador Dalí's Art and Writing 1927-1942. The Metamorphoses of Narcissus (review)

Book Reviews Haim Finkelstein. Salvador DalÃ-'S Art and Writing 1927-1942. The Metamorphoses of Narcissus. Cambridge/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1996. Pp. 334. $75. This large format, lavishly illustrated volume traces the career of Salvador DaIi, the artist-writer, through his formative years and the decline of his art in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Dali's relationship with surrealism and Breton comprises one of the important moments of Finkelstein's narrative. Breton's judgment of DaIi is well known. In the 1930s, Breton lavished praise on DaIi and regarded his paranoiac-critical method as incarnating the "omnipotence of desire" so endearing to the surrealists. As the decade drew to a close, however, Breton increasingly criticized DaIi, whom he saw as displaying racist and fascist sentiments and a proclivity to commercialize art. (Breton created from Dali's name the anagram: "Avida Dollars.") Finkelstein sets out to counter the view that Dali's art in the late 1930s and 1940s was eclipsed by his exhibitionism. Rather than accepting the notion of a transition, Finkelstein sees him as an antithetical, even antinomical artist, moving in his early work, as well as in his later work, between "seriousness and clowning, authenticity and playacting, clarity of vision and self-deception" (3). Finkelstein posits the thesis that between his work in the late 1930s and the early forties, DaIi underwent a radical change (hence the subtitle) that eventually brought about a decline in his "artistic and creative strength" (3). Finkelstein examines closely the interplay between Dali's early art and writing as well as personal events that led to an evolving dynamics, an evolution from chaos and confusion to aesthetic control (the desire "to become classic," as DaIi said). Two important moments of this evolution involved Dali's relationship with Federico GarcÃ-a Lorca and his collaboration with Luis Bunuel. Lorca exerted an overweening influence on Dali's writing of the twenties, through perhaps 1927. Their relationship played itself out under the sign of the protean figure of Saint Sebastian, with its sadomasochistic and androgynic traces, which offered DaIi an aesthetic escape from what he saw as the disorder of the world. He effected escape through what he termed a "saintly objectivity" (letter to Lorca, summer 1926), which drew on aspects of cubism and increasingly on metaphysical art, that of Chirico in particular. He developed a formal vocabulary "to express his perception of an all-pervading putrefaction as an aesthetic equivalent to an underlying sense of troubled sexuality" (48). Little by little Dali's aesthetic of "saintly objectivity" ceded to his erotic and scatological exhibitionism. DaIi became more and more critical of Lorca's turn, in Canciones, to local and traditional culture and his disinterest in modern technological innovations. DaIi moved closer to Buñuel, who tried to pry him loose from Lorca's "dire influence" (his supposed provincialism and homosexual tendencies) (79-80). In the film Un chien andalou, the symbol formation contributed by DaIi worked through Freudian ideas of displacement, while Buñuel's depiction of human presence helped to break DaIi out of his preoccupation with abstraction and to awaken him to the rich possibilities of meaning through the combination of human action and symbolic representation (95). This change evinced itself in Dali's attempt in the late '20s to mediate between abstract art and surrealism, whose poetic and artistic automatism attracted him. The surrealists, though strongly drawn to Dali's work, found it too explicitly pornographic and were put off by Dali's scatological imagery and its terrorizing intention (182). The most dramatic moments of Dali's work in the early '30s derived from Freud's notion of "perverse sexuality" and the sexual interdictions tied up with the father figure. Also at this time DaIi began an affair with Gala, who became for him "a fixed point of reference" serving as an anchor for his sexual fantasies (134) and as a cure for his fear of the act of love as an annihilating force (214). VOL. XXXVI, NO. 4 97 L'Esprit Créateur In his art he increasingly mixed the animate and inanimate and developed a "body language of hysterics" (159), mutilation, decomposition, cannibalism, ingestion and excretion...