Coffee with a Curator – April 2008

Dirk Armstrong, Assistant Curator

Dali & Film – Installing an Exhibition 101

Selected ‘focus’ work:
Menjamnt garrotes (Eating Sea Urchins), 2 minute film by Luis Buñuel.

When the painter Salvador Dalí began a relationship Gala Eluard, the wife of French poet Paul Eluard, this estranged him from his father; also named Salvador. The elder Salvador did everything in his power to make life uncomfortable for the couple that was ‘living in sin’, including contacting local realtors and merchants with the request that they not assist the young couple with the procurement of the basic necessities of life – food, clothing, and shelter. The couple fled to Paris, where they were able to eke out an existence with the support of a group of patrons; however Dalí’s beloved Cadaques, where he had summered as a youth and created his first works of art, was off limits.

Dalí’s friend and collaborator Luis Buñuel received a letter from Salvador’s father, addressed to him because “I am not writing to him directly because I have not got his address”. The letter goes on to detail a brief trip that Dalí and Gala, referred to as “the ‘madame’”, made to Cadaques in early 1930. Dali’s father had heard about the visit and notified the Civil Guard of their presence and requested that they have the couple removed from town by nightfall. In the letter the elder Salvador also indicates that “I will do everything I can to win [the fight with his son regarding his relationship with a married woman], getting people to help me to beat him up, or seeking the opportunity to bestow the blows myself without receiving any in return”. The letter concludes with: “Spiritual evil no one can cause him because he is a completely debased person, but I can cause him physical damage because he still has flesh and bones. Best wishes from your friend, Salvador Dalí”.

At this time, Buñuel and Dalí had been working on their second film collaboration, L’Age d’or (The Golden Age), and filming had been planned for locations in Cadaques. Keeping in mind the sentiments expressed by his father to his friend, Dalí decided not to accompany Buñuel to the coast of Spain for filming in early April 1930. After completing the filming in Cadaques and its’ nearby environs, Buñuel made a visit to Salvador’s father and his second wife, Catalina (who was Dalí’s aunt, the sister of the senior Salvador’s first wife Filipe – the marriage was another source of friction between the painter and his father). On the visit, a short film was shot that shows the Dalí’s at Es Llane, their summer home in Cadaques enjoying afternoon activities – reading magazines, rocking in chairs on the porch listening to a record player, having a cup of coffee and some brandy while smoking his pipe in the yard, watering the terraced garden that looms over the beach below, and finishing with the senior Dalí enjoying several fresh sea urchins washed down with as many glasses of wine. Dalí’s father was a large and imposing man, and he dominates every scene, while being assisted by the submissive Catalina. The elder Dalí was so pleased with the resulting short film that he had it shown at the local cinema.

Sea urchins are a recurring image, and object of fascination, for Dalí. He was fascinated by the dual nature of the creature – the hard, spiny exterior that conceals the edible, tender organism within. After the initial repudiation by his father, the young painter posed for a photograph balancing a sea urchin on his head, referencing the Swiss myth of the archer William Tell – a myth that Dalí viewed not as one of a father saving his son with his skills, but that of a father shooting arrows at his son. The sea urchin is featured in one of the hallucinatory scenes of Buñuel and Dalí’s first film collaboration, Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), completed in 1929. In the scene, the male protagonist looks in shock at his hand, which has ants emerging from a hole in the center. As the man stares with a look of sheer terror at his hand, the image of the hole and ants dissolves into that of the armpit of a bather at the seashore, and then into a sea urchin resting on a rocky beach. The film footage of Dali’s father eating sea urchins is reminiscent of depictions of Saturn devouring his young – imagery that did not escape the keen eye of Buñel. Sea urchins are also featured elements in Dalí’s later large-scale works that reference historical, scientific, and biblical themes, such as The Madonna of Port Lligat and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.

Dirk Armstrong, Assistant Curator