![\"bunuel.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/03\/bunuel.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The riddle of the rocks<\/strong> by Jonathan Jones The Guardian<\/em>, Monday March 5, 2007<\/p>\n I AM SCRAMBLING over the rocks that dominate the coastline of Cadaqu\u00e9s 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.<\/p>\n The entire history of surrealism\u2014from the collages of Max Ernst to Salvador Dal\u00ed’s Lobster Telephone<\/em>\u2014can be read in these igneous formations, just as surely as they unfold the geological history of Catalonia.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, the surrealist film Luis Bu\u00f1uel shot here in 1930?<\/p>\n Bu\u00f1uel had been shown these rocks by his college friend Dal\u00ed years earlier. It was here they had scripted their infamous film Un Chien Andalou<\/em><\/a>. Dal\u00ed came from Figueras, on the Ampurd\u00e1n plain beyond the mountains that enclose Cadaqu\u00e9s, 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 Dal\u00ed’s close friend, the poet Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, when Dal\u00ed brought him here in the 1920s: in his Ode to Salvador Dal\u00ed<\/em>, Lorca lyrically praises the moon reflected in the calm, wide bay…<\/p>\n Continues here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Previously on { feuilleton } The riddle of the rocks by Jonathan Jones It was the art movement that shocked the world. It was sexy, weird and dangerous\u2014and it’s still hugely influential today. Jonathan Jones travels to the coast of Spain to explore the landscape that inspired Salvador Dal\u00ed, the greatest surrealist of them all. The Guardian, Monday March 5, … Continue reading “The Surrealist Revolution”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,7,44,41,18],"tags":[103,243,416,350,854,265,1511,1478,137,907,999,932,1459,278,3639,241,112,733,115,87,898],"class_list":["post-1570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-film","category-painting","category-sculpture","category-surrealism","tag-alan-moore","tag-alexander-mcqueen","tag-alfred-hitchcock","tag-andre-breton","tag-cecil-beaton","tag-david-lynch","tag-edward-james","tag-igor-wakhevitch","tag-jg-ballard","tag-john-constable","tag-jonathan-jones","tag-joseph-cornell","tag-k-rob","tag-lorca","tag-luis-bunuel","tag-man-ray","tag-max-ernst","tag-meret-oppenheim","tag-magritte","tag-salvador-dali","tag-walt-disney"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-pk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIt was the art movement that shocked the world. It was sexy, weird and dangerous\u2014and it’s still hugely influential today. Jonathan Jones travels to the coast of Spain to explore the landscape that inspired Salvador Dal\u00ed, the greatest surrealist of them all.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n\u2022 The persistence of DNA<\/a>
\n\u2022 Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s apocalyptic happening<\/a>
\n\u2022 The music of Igor Wakh\u00e9vitch<\/a>
\n\u2022 Dal\u00ed Atomicus<\/a>
\n\u2022 Las Pozas and Edward James<\/a>
\n\u2022 Impressions de la Haute Mongolie<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"