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The riddle of the rocks
It was the art movement that shocked the world. It was sexy, weird and dangerous—and it’s still hugely influential today. Jonathan Jones travels to the coast of Spain to explore the landscape that inspired Salvador Dalí, the greatest surrealist of them all.

Jonathan Jones
Monday March 5, 2007
The Guardian

I AM SCRAMBLING over the rocks that dominate the coastline of Cadaqués in north-east Spain. They look like crumbling chunks of bread floating on a soup of seawater. Surreal is a word we throw about easily today, almost a century after it was coined by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Yet if there is anywhere on earth you can still hope to put a precise and historical meaning on the “surreal” and “surrealism”, it is among these rocks. To scramble over them is to enter a world of distorted scale inhabited by tiny monsters. Armoured invertebrates crawl about on barely submerged formations. I reach into the water for a shell and the orange pincers of a hermit crab flick my fingers away.

The entire history of surrealism—from the collages of Max Ernst to Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone—can be read in these igneous formations, just as surely as they unfold the geological history of Catalonia.

I sit down on a jagged ridge. What if I fell? Would they find a skeleton looking just like the bones of the four dead bishops in L’Age d’Or, the surrealist film Luis Buñuel shot here in 1930?

Buñuel had been shown these rocks by his college friend Dalí years earlier. It was here they had scripted their infamous film Un Chien Andalou. Dalí came from Figueras, on the Ampurdán plain beyond the mountains that enclose Cadaqués, and spent his childhood summers here, exploring the rock pools and being cruel to the sea creatures. In most people’s eyes, this is a beautiful Mediterranean setting. It certainly looked lovely to Dalí’s close friend, the poet Federico García Lorca, when Dalí brought him here in the 1920s: in his Ode to Salvador Dalí, Lorca lyrically praises the moon reflected in the calm, wide bay.

Buñuel and Dalí shared a baser sensibility. When they composed that screenplay here, they remembered Lorca’s poem—and sneered at it. The opening sequence they devised shows a thin band of cloud crossing a full moon, a beautiful nocturne. Cut to a razorblade slicing an eyeball. Sitting on these rocks, you can just picture Dalí and Buñuel over there on the beach, watching the moon over the water, and sniggering at their hideous travesty of Lorca’s poetry.

Dalí and Buñuel filmed Un Chien Andalou in Paris, and it is admired to this day as the most outrageous 17 minutes in cinema history. More to the point, from its opening image of an eye being destroyed, to its scenes of a man with his lover’s underarm hair in place of his mouth, its priests, and that cyclist dressed as a Dutch girl, it is funny; not drily amusing in an avant-garde way, but laugh-out-loud funny. “Irreverent” doesn’t do it justice; this is blackhearted cynicism.

When we speak of something being surreal, we mean something between funny peculiar and funny ha-ha. It is undoubtedly this comic dimension that made surrealism so popular in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and still does today. It survives as living culture, not as museum art. You would strain to discern the influence of, say, cubism in contemporary creativity, but it is entirely accurate to call the fiction of JG Ballard, the comic books of Alan Moore, the cinema of David Lynch and the fashion designs of Alexander McQueen surrealist. It’s equally valid to call TV’s Green Wing or Black Books surreal; after all, the surrealists adored the comedy of their day, especially Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers. Dalí even collaborated on a film idea with Harpo Marx.

Surrealism had brutal humour at its core: the movement’s leader, the French poet André Breton, published an Anthology of Black Humour. And Buñuel said he was drawn to surrealism by a grotesque joke: “I was fascinated by a photo in Le Révolution Surréaliste [the movement’s journal] entitled Benjamin Péret Insulting a Priest.” That photograph still fascinates. The bespectacled Péret is shouting at a black-robed priest who turns in fury and shock; what is funny is the priest’s rage, the bad temper of someone not used to being addressed in that way.

Péret was a poet, and it was a group of poets in Paris in the early 1920s who invented surrealism. André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos and their friends had been involved with the Dada movement that sprang up in protest at the first world war. The aggressive humour so integral to surrealism is a continuation of Dada; nothing could be more Dadaist than insulting a priest. Started by German draft-dodgers in Zurich in 1916, Dada was a manifestation of contempt for a civilisation whose logic led to the Somme and Verdun. It fought against this by being chaotic, childish and irrational.

The terrible massacre of European youth made people want to rediscover Eros, to assert they were still alive: skirts got shorter, flappers flapped. The surrealists were at the forefront of this 1920s sexual revolution. They also took from Dada the belief that art is dead. Dada replaced art with readymade objects such as a urinal or a bike wheel. Surrealism added its own special intensity to the idea of the “found object” by emphasising the act of finding. A surrealist object cannot be just anything: it must be something that in the finder’s eyes is magical for reasons that can’t quite be put into words. “Only the marvellous is beautiful,” says the Manifesto of Surrealism, written by Breton in 1924. You see this appetite for the marvellous, as well as sex and black humour, in Man Ray’s iron with nails stuck in it, Meret Oppenheim’s furry cup, and Joseph Cornell’s dolls preserved in fetishistic boxes; work by all three artists will be on show at the V&A’s Surreal Things exhibition later this month.

The French poets and intellectuals who dominated the surrealist movement acted like an elite revolutionary organisation that met in cafes and apartments for long, bitter debates and miniature show trials. Breton’s Manifesto cites an amazing cast of surrealist predecessors, from Dante to Poe, but most of all Sigmund Freud. It might seem that what drew the surrealists to Freud was his insistence that sexuality is the driving force of personality. Yet what intrigued them equally were the Viennese doctor’s analyses of how dream images are formed and how the subconscious causes slips of the tongue.

The surrealists were inspired by Freud to try to tap into the unconscious, to find a new kind of image. Breton called this “psychic automatism”. He was amazed to encounter the work of the artist Max Ernst, believing that, working independently in Cologne, the German had discovered through collage a new “automatist” way of making visual art. And so Ernst became the first “surrealist artist”.

So many artists followed Ernst into the movement that surrealism is now remembered essentially as an art movement. Joan Miró, in the 1920s, made paintings according to automatist principles; their perfect sense of space gave depth and reality to an amoebic creature that’s just a couple of black lines and blobs in blue space. Belgian René Magritte painted in a deliberately flat, conventional style that makes images such as 1928’s The Lovers, with its veiled, suffocating faces, all the more obscene. And yet surrealism had yet to discover its full potential. It had yet to encounter Dalí.

The reason I am at Cadaqués is, ultimately, to try to understand the most famous surrealist of all, the artist who became its moustached icon. In the hard, clear paintings that followed Un Chien Andalou, Dalí turns his unconscious into grand opera, confessing to every deviation mentioned in Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality. His paintings, objects and cinema are lurid and excessive, their Freudianism so explicit it can seem a cheap put-on.

It is strange to stand here watching boys throw pebbles into the sea at Cadaqués. In Dalí’s painting The Spectre of Sex Appeal, he portrays himself as a child in a sailor suit on this same beach, looking up at a monstrous mutilated body whose pink rounded flesh is his remembered introduction to the world of adult desire. There is nothing wholesome about any of Dalí’s memories, or his vision of this landscape. One peculiarly shaped rock near Cadaqués lent its silhouette to his perverse composition The Great Masturbator.

Dalí saw no difference between the avant-garde and popular culture, and excelled at the art of sensation: when a surrealist exhibition was staged at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936, it was Dalí who made the papers by giving a lecture wearing a deep-sea diving suit complete with brass helmet—and collapsing.

Dalí projected his dreams so clearly they fascinated fashion designers and Hollywood, where he worked with Alfred Hitchcock and even Walt Disney. He happily designed the lip sofas that feature in the V&A show and, in his one-man museum in Figueras, created an entire room whose furniture forms itself into Mae West’s face, with sofa lips. None of this was the betrayal of surrealism that Breton and his comrades accused him of after they threw him out of the movement in 1936, for confessing to a fascination with Hitler. Surrealism was an attempt to release “the marvellous” into everyday existence. Dalí, a clever man, saw that this connected it with architecture, which shapes our everyday environment.

His hero was the Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí. At Figueras, you see Dalí’s desire to create a total environment of fantasy such as Gaudí’s rapturous house Casa Batlló. This is what Dalí’s Mae West room, lip sofa and telephone with a lobster for a receiver try to do: replace reality with fantasy, as Gaudí’s architecture does. Nothing could be more surreal. Dalí did it in a way anyone could respond to. Soon designers were making surrealist dresses, Cecil Beaton taking surrealist fashion photos. Dalí travelled far from home and, some say, lost his soul painting portraits of rich Americans. To track him back to his childhood haunts among the Catalan rocks is to discover his authentic surrealist soul.

As soon as you hit the Ampurdán plain, you start to sense how honest, how intense, an artist Dalí is. The obsessions that fill his art are all too real. Take Vermeer’s painting, The Lacemaker; when Dalí was old and rich and widely seen as a hack, he sat down to copy it in the Louvre and drew a rhino horn. Yet his fascination with this image of a woman working was perfectly real. In Figueras, there is an early painting, Woman at the Window in Figueras. Made in 1926, it portrays a girl working with her needle in front of a view of the Ampurdán hills. Vermeer’s Lacemaker itself appears in Un Chien Andalou.

The journey east from Figueras to Cadaqués takes you across an immense open space that, with its tall sky and fringe of hills, is instantly recognisable from Dalí’s 1930s paintings Spain and Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War). For Dalí, this becomes the plain of La Mancha across which Don Quixote wandered in his madness, a dry and dusty space in which he sees Spain’s tragedy. But it is only when you descend to Cadaqués that you realise something crucial. Whatever else he is, Dalí is Spain’s landscape artist. Like John Constable, he was in thrall to his “early scenes”. It is the persistent reappearance, endlessly metamorphosised, of the rocks and cliffs of this unique coast that anchors his art in a real, physical context of memory and longing. I collected a horny crab shell in a rock pool at Cadaqués; looking at Dalí’s portrait of the surrealist Paul Eluard, I realised a lion’s head in the painting is based directly on the shape of this crab.

Freud liked to compare his method with that of an archaeologist who digs down to expose layer upon layer of buried pasts all existing in the same mind. This image of textured depth could easily be a description of surrealist art. In Ernst’s paintings of swarms of barbarians, savage forests and lost cities, you get that archaeological sense of texture, just as you do in Giorgio di Chirico’s melancholy classical cities, where it is always a dead moment in a Mediterranean afternoon.

Surrealism is about time. It is about the tantalising and unreliable nature of memory, about the melting fabric of experience. The rocks at Cadaqués are remarkable not only for their biomorphic shapes at a distance, but even more, their layered, crumpled texture up close. These rocks are remains of a vast lava flow from an ancient volcano. Flowing between north and south, the white hot river settled in a series of layers that were then blasted, eroded and exposed along the seashore. The rocks are not only fractured in strata but perforated by huge gas bubbles made when the stone was hot and flowing. Telling the earth’s time in their apparent fluidity, they are Dalí’s soft watches.

I took that horny Dalínian crab shell from the sea at Cadaqués, along with a sea urchin, perhaps related to the one on Dalí’s shaved head, in a photograph that makes him look like the inventor of the mohican; but by the time I got them home, they were just a pile of dust in my bag. Surrealism as we experience it today—when we speak of a surreal advert, a surreal sitcom—is just the dust, the shards of Europe’s last great revolutionary art.

• Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design is at the V&A, London SW7, from March 29 to July 22. Details: 0870 906 3883 and www.vam.ac.uk. Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or will feature in Dali & Film, at Tate Modern, London SW1, from June 1 to September 9. Details: 020-7887 8888 and www.tate.org.uk.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The persistence of DNA
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Dalí Atomicus
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

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