A chop off the old block: what was eating Dali?
The Sunday Age
Sunday June 14, 2009
Love, pain, revenge, cannibalism - Salvador Dali has something for everyone, writes John Elder. THE legend goes that Salvador Dali had to be talked out of eating his dead wife, Gala. She didn't have a lot of meat on her at the end, anyway.Apparently, the pop-eyed clowning surrealist preferred heart-clogging meals such as turkey stuffed with Roquefort cheese - or at least that's what he put in his recipe book, Les Diners de Gala. So it may be that Dali's famous satanic moustache was rolled up with lard rather than wax.On the other hand, he was skinny like a matador. If he ate all that turkey stuffed with cheese, where did it go?Whether or not he ate a great deal, food is said to be one of Dali's obsessions. This is at least true in terms of the symbols he employed in his paintings. Those logo-like melting clocks for example, inspired by a wheel of ripe camembert dripping over the edge of a table . . . as the story goes.But often food makes a literal appearance on his canvases, such as Soft Self-portrait with Grilled Bacon (1941) or Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder (1933), an early portrait of his wife. No larger than a cigarette case, the lamb chopsare tiny but well-gnawed.At face-value, the portrait, now on show at the National Gallery of Victoria, suggests Dali nursed cannibalistic designs on his wife from early on. That is, when she was still alive. But NGV curator Laurie Benson sees the chops, and all talk of the artist eating his missus, as a metaphor for Dali's obsessive love for Gala, "lamb chops being his favourite food".Benson says Dali's life was "peppered with important anecdotes and stories associated with food" that were later told cryptically in his art. As a boy, Dali and his father would wander the Catalan coast, collecting sea urchins. "They were his father's favourite food."Later, when Dali's father had his son arrested, beaten and thrown out of town (in reaction to Dali taking up with Gala, a single mother 10 years his senior), Salvador used the sea urchin as a symbol of his father's violent betrayal - not in a painting but in a film with Luis Bunuel, "where he shaves his head . . . and puts a sea urchin on his head . . . as a reference to William Tell shooting the apple".But let's get back to those gnawed lamb chops for a minute. Professor Dawn Ades, a Tate trustee who organised the Dali centenary exhibition in Venice and Philadelphia in 2004 and the author of standard works on Dali and surrealism, says those chops are a way of diverting Dali's cannibalistic anger towards his father, and perhaps a sign of his protective feelings for Gala. Eat the old man; keep him at bay . . . sort of."Food is one of Dali's great sources for expressing a range of complicated feelings and ideas . . . and the lamb chop is quite complicated," says Ades. "The first portrait of Gala, from 1931 . . . has her face in a lamb chop. It's linked to the relationship he had with his father . . . his father hated Gala. I think some of those paintings . . . are Dali's way of working through his deep-seated feelings."Ades, from the department of art history and theory at the University of Essex, is one of a handful of international scholars who have campaigned to convince the rest of the world that Dali should be taken seriously. "We've been working hard, trying to get people to really look at the paintings . . . and not to assume they're the ravings of a slightly deranged man."Ades met Dali when a 23-year-old PhD student on her honeymoon, a tour of surrealist hotspots in France and Spain. She found a man with a need to "master his natural timidity".He was generous and patient. "Completely different to his public persona . . . I was allowed to sit and watch him paint for a couple of days . . . and then come along in the evening and ask intelligent questions in front of the Catalan intellectuals, when he'd be dressed up as the showman."A lot of the extraordinary pronouncements . . . came from the fact that he enjoyed teasing."But the circus-like narcissism and kooky soundbites made Dali seem silly, obscuring from collective view the mind of a raging intellectual with a long-held disappointment in the human condition.On canvas, Dali is Goya with irony and a plateful of hallucinogenics - as well as various items from the pantry.Consider Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) from 1936. Where Picasso's Guernica is a stark modernist (and almost doodle-like) study in fear, Dali's painting is a horror-soaked shock in classical painterly light: a giant woolly-headed human-like thing, both male and female, tearing itself to pieces. A steak-like tongue is draped over one thigh. Scattered around are a few beans to provide roughage.This is Dali's humour at its most bitter. The creature is Spain.Over the phone, Ades reads a quote from Dali regarding the painting: "A vast human body breaking out into monstrous auto-strangulation . . . I embellish with a few boiled beans. For one could not imagine swallowing all that meat without some mealy and melancholy vegetable . . ." To help get it down.Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire, is at the National Gallery of Victoria until September 30.
© 2009 The Sunday Age