Salvador Dalí – Page 21

Dalí and Film

Study for the Dream Sequence in Spellbound by Salvador Dalí (1945).

A new exhibition exploring Salvador Dalí’s connections with cinema begins at Tate Modern this weekend. Interesting seeing Dalí’s gradual reappraisal by the art establishment after years of dismissal but then it is nearly twenty years after his death.

One welcome result of this event is an interview in the Tate’s online magazine with film director José Montes Baquer whose Dalí collaboration, Impressions of Upper Mongolia, Hommage to Raymond Roussel, I wrote about last year. This is the only substantial discussion of this curious film I’ve seen anywhere so it’s fascinating to discover that it came about as a result of Dalí urinating on a pen.

He said: “In this clean and aseptic country, I have been observing how the urinals in the luxury restrooms of this hotel have acquired an entire range of rust colours through the interaction of the uric acid on the precious metals that are astounding. For this reason, I have been regularly urinating on the brass band of this pen over the past weeks to obtain the magnificent structures that you will find with your cameras and lenses. By simply looking at the band with my own eyes, I can see Dalí on the moon, or Dalí sipping coffee on the Champs Élysées. Take this magical object, work with it, and when you have an interesting result, come see me. If the result is good, we will make a film together.”

The interview also includes a few more tantalising glimpses of the film’s images and in the same magazine there’s a piece by Roy Disney remembering Dalí’s encounter with his uncle, Walt.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard on Dalí
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Penguin Surrealism
• The Surrealist Revolution
• 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

Penguin Surrealism

Design by Germano Facetti with a detail from Europe after the Rain by Max Ernst.

Is this the start of a new meme? Ace Jet 170 features a number of posts about the history of Penguin and Pelican book cover design. (I won’t link to any specific page as the site is full of other good stuff which you really ought to go and look at.) Now Dan Hill at City of Sound has followed suit, inspiring me to dig out a few choice volumes connected by theme, in this case the use of Surrealist paintings for cover art.

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A premonition of Premonition

Jungle Tales of Tarzan by Burne Hogarth (Watson-Guptill, 1976).

Premonition (Sony Pictures, 2007).

And multiple works by Salvador Dalí…

Previously on { feuilleton }
• L’Amour Fou: Surrealism and Design
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

L’Amour Fou: Surrealism and Design

Cadeau Audace by Man Ray (1921).

L’amour fou by Robert Hughes
Fur teacups, wheelbarrow chairs, lip-shaped sofas … the fashion, furniture and jewellery created by the Surrealists were useless, unique, decadent and, above all, very sexy.

The Guardian, Saturday March 24th, 2007

THE VICTORIA AND Albert’s big show for this year, Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, is—well, maybe we don’t much like the word “definitive”. But it’s certainly the first of its kind.

Everyone knows something about surrealism, the most popular art movement of the 20th century. The word has spread so far that people now say “surreal” when all they mean is “odd”, “totally weird” or “unexpected”. No doubt this would give heartburn to André Breton, the pope of the movement nearly a century ago, who took the title from his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had called his play The Breasts of Tiresias, “a surrealist drama”. But too late now. The term is many years out of its box and, through imprecision, has achieved something akin to eternal life. Surrealist painting and film, that is. In fact, some surrealist images have imprinted themselves so deeply and brightly on our ideas of visual imagery that we can’t imagine modern art (or, in fact, the idea of modernity itself) without them.

Think Salvador Dalí and his soft watches in The Persistence of Memory. Think Dalí again, in cahoots with Luis Buñuel, and the cut-throat razor slicing through the girl’s eye, as a sliver of cloud crosses the moon (actually, the eye belongs to a dead cow, but you never think this when you see their now venerable but forever fresh movie An Andalusian Dog, 1929). Think of photographer Man Ray’s fabulous Cadeau Audace (‘Risky Present’, 1921), the flatiron to whose sole a row of tacks was soldered, guaranteeing the destruction of any dress it would be used on. Think of Rene Magritte’s The Rape, that hauntingly concise pubic face, with nipples for eyes and the hairy triangle where the mouth should be. Think of the shock, the horniness, the rebellion, the unwavering focus on creative freedom, the obsessive efforts to discover the new in the old by disclosure of the hidden…

Continues here

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealist Revolution
• Surrealist Women
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Surrealist cartomancy

Cormac McCarthy book covers

Still in pursuit of a Cormac McCarthy obsession I picked up a copy of the (American) Vintage International paperback of Blood Meridian this week, almost solely for the cover. As it turns out it’s also an easier book to read than the UK edition, less tightly bound although the body text in both looks as though it was printed from photocopied galley proofs. The cover design is by Susan Mitchell, with photography by Craig Arness, and forms part of a small series among the Vintage reprint editions. Mitchell resists the understandable temptation to put red on the cover, saving that for McCarthy’s tale of a murderer, Child of God.

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