V.V. (19) Dali's Last Supper (418.21)

[jbor]

http://www.ellensplace.net/dali4.jpg

"The Sacrament of the Last Supper"
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
1955 - Oil, 66"x 105"

    For Breton, Dalí's appearance in Paris in 1929 saved surrealism from an
    encroaching sterility. But Dalí came from a medieval country saturated
    with violent pathologies, and his surrealism was dangerously total. It
    is difficult to imagine the fastidious Breton eating his lover's stools,
    as Dalí did with Gala's, and it is equally difficult to imagine Dalí
    humbling himself before dreary Marxist orthodoxy, as most of the
    surrealists were beginning to do. Breaking with Breton, Dalí declared
    instead that "Marxism is shit, the last of Christian shit." [ ... ]

Excerpted from a review of Ruth Brandon's excellent _Surreal Lives: The
Surrealists 1917-1945_ (2000). Continues at:

http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/10/28/brandon/index.html

During the 30s in Paris Dali would claim to have erotic dreams of Hitler,
though perhaps simply in order to bait Breton. He moved to the U.S. in 1940
and became a Catholic -- of sorts -- sometime after that, and produced
striking and provocative religious images such as this painting of the Last
Supper. Dali described it as "arithmetic and philosophical cosmogony based
on the paranoiac sublimity of the number twelve [ ... ] the pentagon
contains microcosmic man: Christ." It sounds like parody to my ears.

More from the review of the Brandon book:

    Surrealism's development was marked by a continual clash between the
    ordered, sensitively rational minds of its French controllers, like
    Breton and Aragon, and the earthy, anti-rational fanaticism of acolytes
    who came from "backward" corners of Europe -- first the Romanian Jew
    Tzara, then what Brandon calls the "Andalucian dogs": Dalí and Luis
    Buñuel. By concentrating on personal chemistries, Brandon brings this
    out beautifully, showing how a volatile dialectic bound these two
    psychic halves of Europe together. [ ... ]

"Who let the dogs out?" indeed!

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