A dead octopus immersed in acid and put on a copper plate to be etched as the deadly tresses of Greek mythological figure of Medusa! It's something that places Spanish surrealist master Salvador Dali in a league of his own - a realm where real meets bizarre to create avant-garde art.
The painter, who is credited to have developed the ‘paranoid-critical’ method of creating surrealist art, was as unpredictable as he was charming, remembers Christine Argillet, curator of his first show in India by Bruno Art Group.
The exhibition, “Dali Comes to India”, first opened at Visual Art Gallery at India Habitat Centre from February 7-13 with about 200 of his etchings, including his "Hippies" series that was inspired by photographs from India. It depicts the works of a delirious but genius mind through straight, sharp lines, earthy colours and dream-like figures.
The collection, currently on show at Massarrat by Bruno Art Group, has his works from the mid-1960s till early 1970s, a period when Dali extensively worked on etchings, exploring mythical figures, Christianity, and interpreting Faust and Appolinaire.
“Dali was at first somebody who was very workaholic. He would work in a very precise manner. From 6 in the morning until 5-6 pm and then he would meet people. Until 1965, he did a very meticulous kind of work, very well thought, reflected. Not spontaneous,” Argillet told PTI.
The gallerist would often accompany her publicist father on his trips to Dali’s house in Spain. Argillet, who was in her early teenage years in the late ‘60s, would spend her summer holidays at the painter’s house.
Dali and Pierre Argillet’s association produced nearly 200 etchings, some of which are exhibited at the current show. These include works from “la Mythologie”, “Les Hippies,” “Goethe’s Faust” and “Poemes Secrets d’Apollinaire”. It was in the mid-1960s, when not only his art style changed but also the way he worked on his pieces. ' At the “peak of his maturity”, Dali would rapidly etch with more spontaneity and confidence.
“He would read on a topic for a long time then he would work very rapidly, almost in a movement. In the late ‘60s, beginning of the ‘70s when the Hippies were done it’s even more spontaneous, more rapid. It’s a few lines sometimes. But what lines! Just one line that says a lot, so it’s really marvellous,” Argillet said.
Before Dali became perhaps the most recognisable names in surrealism, he trained at Madrid’s School of Fine Arts and was drawn simultaneously to Academicism, Impressionism, Futurism, and Cubism.
After reading Freud, his passions turned to dreams and the unconscious, something that was reflected in his works helped him formulate the ‘paranoid-critical’ method - inducing a state of paranoia to create art.
The dead octopus was just one of the means of Dali’s creative expression.
Throughout his career, Dali is known to have employed rather unconventional tools to paint, including using rubies and diamonds as engraving tools, a technique that lent an incomparable delicacy to the design.
These elements made Dali “fun and unexpected”. Once at a restaurant, someone asked Dali to draw something and nobody had a pen. The painter quickly borrowed a lipstick from Argillet’s mother to draw.
“We asked the waiters, nobody had a pen, the owner of the restaurant didn’t have a pen. So he said to my mother, ‘give me your lipstick’ and he started to draw a very funny hippy with the lipstick. Everything was unpredictable, always very charming and full of poetry,” she recalled.
Dali’s "Mythology" series draws very closely upon the symbolism of the ancient Greek legends.
Using a technique that he called “hasard objectif” (the meaningful manifestation of chance), he would often start with an abstract smudge, created in a single motion.
This is particularly noticeable in his etchings, including “Oedipus and Sphinx”, “Theseus and Minotaurus”, "Jupiter", "Pegasus", and “The Milky Way”, where Dali experimented with unusual tools like chisels, nails or wheels for the “Birth of Venus”. And a real octopus for his “Medusa”.
“What I loved even as a child or teenager was to see him use anything in his environment to do something else,” Argillet said.
She recalled another instance of Dali’s atypical way of looking at things and bringing two objects together that could have never existed with one another.
“He would have an ashtray that would travel around the room, and when you looked down, there was a silver stick attached to a real live turtle. So the turtle would go and bring the ashtray everywhere but it was fun. So everything was playful and for a child it was a dream.” The painter, who would appear in dashing suits and a moustache that could have been a paintbrush in another universe, was in fact very quiet and shy at home.
“You would see him in slippers and shorts, working on many projects. At the same time he was somebody very playful, charming, and elegant, but very shy also, which is quite unknown because in public he was a very different person, kind of overwhelming,” Argillet said.
The collection, and Dali’s association with Pierre Argillet, came to an end in 1973 when the painter couldn’t etch anymore because of failing eyesight.
The artist, one of the world's best known, died in 1989 at the age of 85.
The exhibition at Massarrat by Bruno Art Group will come to an end on March 16.