Dalí Under The Effect Of A Mystic Delirium

Dalí Under The Effect Of A Mystic Delirium

An Overview on Dalí

He had always been talked about for his unmistakable style, excesses, provocations, uncontrollable creativity, worldliness, and extravagances. The absolute genius, who declared “I am Surrealism” and who raised the envy of his Surrelist mates who called him “Avida Dollars” by anagramming his name, gave form to his inspiration in every single way: furnishing apartments, installing shop windows of the biggest shopping malls, collaborating to magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, choreographing ballets, designing scenographies, taking part into films.

Yet, at the apex of the artist’s success, Art News provokes the public opinions and ideas about him: “It is impossible that from now on Dalí would focus more on the conscious than on the unconscious. If things were actually like this, he would need nothing else to become the greatest academic painter of the 21st century.”

To such provocation, the Catalan artist responds: “The most subversive things that can happen to an ex Surrealist are: first, to become mystical; second, to learn how to draw. These two forms of energy have just happened to me together and at the same time. Catalonia counts three brilliant geniuses, i.e. Raymond de Sebonde, author of the “Natural Theology”, Gaudí, creator of the Mediterranean Gothic, and Salvador Dalí, inventor of the new paranoiac-critical mystic and savior, as his name suggests, of modern painting. The intense crisis of Dalinian mysticism depends on today’s scientific progress, on metaphysical spirituality of the substantiality of quantum physics, and, on a level of les substantial simulacra, on the most ignominiously supergelatinous results and on their coefficients of monarchic viscosity of the whole general morphology...”

 

What pushed the cantor of the subconscious towards mysticism?


Between 1949 and 1950, Dalí undertakes a tormented pathway through the rediscovery of Catholicism. It is unsurprising that many considered this the last provocative expedient of an anti-clerical, a narcissist, and a play-actor, who has always been ready to carry out exhibitionist behaviors, sometimes hard to bear.

At a famous lecture, the artist affirms: “I believe in God, but do not have faith. Science and mathematics tell me that God must exist, but I do not believe it”. Beyond an unavoidable taste for paradoxes, something had shaken Dalí’s spirit. He was left “blinded” by the atomic explosion of the 6th of August 1945, which “made me seismically vacillate. By then, the atom had become my favorite topic of thought. Many landscapes painted during this period express the great fear I felt at the announcement of this explosion; I applied my paranoiac-critical method to the explosion of this world. I want to see and understand the forces and the hidden laws of things to be able to control them. I have the brilliant intuition of using an extraordinary weapon to penetrate inside the core of reality: mysticism, i.e. the deep intuition of what is, the immediate communication with the whole, the absolute vision by means of the grace of truth, by means of divine grace. More powerful than cyclotrons and cybernetic calculators, I can penetrate the secrets of reality in one instant. To me the ecstasy! The ecstasy of God and man. To me perfection, beauty, could I look at it in the eyes. Death to academicism, to bureaucratic formulae of art, to decorative plagiarism, to demented aberrations of African art. To me, Saint Teresa d’Avila!... It was in this state of intense prophetism that I comprehended how the media of pictorial expression had been invented once for all with the maximum of perfection and effectiveness during the Renaissance, and how the decadence of modern painting had derived from skepticism and lack of faith, consequences of mechanistic materialism. I, Dalí, by ritualizing Spanish mysticism, will demonstrate with my work the unity of the universe, revealing the spirituality in every substance.”

Certainly, the fact that Catholic Church officially recognized the validity of the Big Bang theory in 1951 played a relevant role: this meant that the origin of the universe consisted in an explosion of infinitely dense matter. Indeed, in the same year, Dalí publishes his famous Mystic Manifesto, in which he expresses his ideas of the new holy painting. Since then, Dalí focused on the different theories of nuclear, quantum, and relativity physics, which replaced in some part the previous sources of inspiration, namely psychoanalysis. Instead, from an artistic perspective, his purpose is to restore the connection with the great tradition of ancient and Renaissance art.

Drawn to these new suggestions, in a sort of declaration of intent, Dalí portrays himself “naked in contemplation, in front of five regular bodies metamorphosed into corpuscles, in which Leda by Leonardo suddenly appears, chromosomatized by the face of Gala” (1954).


 The new Holy Paintings


The Christ of St. John Cross is a Dalinian personal reply to the theme of crucifixion, in formal and conceptual opposition to traditional iconography: the Christ does not present a suffering face, or lesions on his hands or wounds on his chest, or a crown of thorns, but he is robust and beautiful as in a “cosmic dream” from a brave perspective on a sea landscape at Port Lligat.

104 more watercolors belong to this period as well. They illustrate the Divine Comedy by Dante, and were commissioned by the Italian government for the 700th year since the birth of the greatest poet. About 10 years later, the artist created the wonderful “Biblia Sacra” (1967-69), a collection of 105 lithographs published by Rizzoli-Mediolani, and commissioned by his close friend and strong believer, Giuseppe Albaretto, hopeful to draw the Catalan artist closer to Catholicism.

These Gospels and other works of intense beauty and spirituality are available for purchase on Wallector.com. Explore “the relation between today’s man and the perennial sense of God” according to the eye and the sensitivity of Dalí, who was never tired to say that “in this time of decline of religious art (...) it is more desirable to solicit unbelieving geniuses than believers lacking genius.”