Frozen Nightmares

The pale young people who drink sherry at little tables and decide the latest vogues in art were all finished with surrealism years ago. Surrealism may be described as painting the facts of dreams. Example: A little man with a head on which cabbages grow, carrying a huge spoon across a rocky mountain, all painted in meticulous mid-Victorian detail. Month ago a U.S. surrealist named Peter Blume won first prize ($1,500) at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh with his South of Scranton (TIME, Oct. 29). Last week a still abler Parisian surrealist named Salvador Dali arrived in Manhattan with a load of minutely painted canvases to bewilder the eye of logic.

Surrealist Dali, 29, is called a Parisian because that city has been his home for six years. Actually he is a Spaniard, an admirer, friend and onetime disciple of his fellow Catalan expatriate Pablo Picasso. It is hard enough for any surrealist to explain what he means, but dapper, quick little Salvador Dali was additionally handicapped last week by the fact that he speaks no English at all. Still he made a valiant effort. Reporters were ushered into his hotel suite which had been prepared as a visual object lesson. In the centre of the room was a small table. On the table was a red plush Catalan liberty cap and a rocking chair. Balanced on the seat of the chair was a yellow shaded table lamp. There were also two six-foot loaves of French bread on the mantelpiece and a banner with a strange device: a white skull, a key, a leaf, a woman's slipper and the letters DALI.

Surrealist Dali rushed forward effusively and promptly began pulling etchings and small paintings from his portfolio. Through his sponsor, Mrs. Caresse Crosby, he explained his methods:

"I used to balance two broiled lamb chops on my wife's shoulders, and then by observing the movement of tiny shadows produced by the accident of the meat...while the sun was setting, I was...able to attain images sufficiently lucid and appetizing for exhibition in New York.

"I do all my work subconsciously. I never use models or paint from life or landscapes. It is all imagination. That is, I see everything in a dream as I am working, and when I have finished a picture I decide what the title is to be. Sometimes it takes a little time before I can figure out what I have painted."

Newshawks refrained from further questions to concentrate on the etchings. One showed a chair in the middle of a forest. From a spigot in the side of the chair water poured. A hand grew out of a tree trunk. It was tossing in the air omelets that slid down a nearby board.

The chair in the forest and dozens of other Dali works went on view last week at the Julien Levy Gallery. Among them : Monument to Woman and Child, a great grey whorl that might be wood or weathered rock, in which can be seen ogling men's faces, clutching hands, Napoleon, the Mona Lisa, a pair of buttocks; The Spectre of Sex Appeal, with a little child in a blue sailor suit by a rocky seashore gazing at a gigantic diseased figure propped up by forked sticks.

The fanciest title belongs to the simplest canvas: Skull and Its Lyrical Appendage Leaning on a Night Table Which Has the Temperature of a Cardinal Bird's Nest. An elongated grand piano is flying off into the air. The keyboard runs earthward into a heart-shaped skull which is indeed leaning on a night table. Sharp eyes can find the cardinal bird, but there is no nest.

The first Dali canvas to attract general U.S. attention was shown at last summer's Century of Progress Exhibition under its official title, The Persistence of Memory. All Chicago knew it as "The Wet Watches." (see cut, p. 44). In the foreground were four great watches. One dripped over the edge of a table like so much melting butter. A second, like an old washrag, hung over a dead branch. The third reposed on the back of a small monster with a long delicate nose. The fourth, rigid, was crawling with ants.

Critic Lewis Mumford thus describes the Dali canvases:

"Unlike the sentimental painters who represent dreams as misty and delicate, Dali shows them hard and as severely realistic in surface as dreams often are....Dali does not permit the dream to dissolve; his pictures are, as it were, frozen nightmares."

They are also completely devoid of humor and largely erotic. A familiar property in Dali paintings is a crutch which supports fantastic pieces of flesh.

Painting is his metier but the cinema is Salvador Dali's hobby. Already he has written and helped to produce two surrealist cinemas, Le Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or. The latter film, an irrational hodge-podge of sense and sensuality, was banned in Paris but shown behind locked doors in Manhattan two winters ago. Excerpt from the official synopsis of L'Age D'Or.

"In the course of a final ineffectual episode, the protagonist...answers with foul insults and returns determinedly to the woman he loves. At this very moment an inexplicable accident separates them forever, and the man is last seen throwing a burning tree out of the window, a large agricultural implement, an archbishop, a giraffe, feathers."

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