Was Salvador Dalí a genius?

The monumental biography written in English by Ian Gibson has just been translated into French. We discover that Dalí was an authentic surrealist, before being a true Catholic believer, although his last years were inglorious.

The biographical genre now has its own conventions. The time is long gone when La Fontaine, wanting to write the life of Aesop, began with a cautious: “We have nothing certain concerning the birth of Homer and Aesop. We hardly even know what the most remarkable thing happened to them. » Nowadays,a biographer could not be so restrictive. He must say everything, put forward all the facts, and his investigation journalistic left nothing in the dark. In his summary on Salvador Dalí, which has just been translated into French, the Irish writer Ian Gibson offers to tell us, day by day, “the frenetic life” by the surrealist painter. An ambitious undertaking to attack someone who claimed to be a ” genius “the equal of Picasso or Raphael. It takes Ian Gibson more than 600 pages (we are far from Aesop) to reveal the emblematic personality of the inventor of “soft watches”.

A surrealist painter above all

One of the most interesting aspects, in my opinion, of Ian Gibson's book consists of claiming for Dalí an indisputable belonging to the surrealist movement. Dalí, in reality, owes everything to this major influence, which brought him back to his most intimate concerns. The important figure of the time, for him, was André Breton, the thinking head and unifying authority of the movement. Ian Gibson notes, for example, about the young Dalí: “Not only did Dalí follow Breton's work with great attention, when he appeared in The Surrealist Revolutionbut he got his books…” The Second manifesto of surrealismGibson indicates, had a profound impact on the painter. For his part, Breton did not hesitate to let it be known how important the production of his younger brother was to him, from the end of the 1920s. As Gibson explains very well, to summarize this state of mutual fascination, of less on this date: “For Breton, Dalí's current work makes a devastating contribution to the surrealists' attack against the values ​​of contemporary society and against conventional reality. » This relationship between the two men, this “friendship of stars” as Nietzsche said, is truly a very beautiful thing, even if, subsequently, Breton distanced himself from “ Avida Dollars ».

His dazzling meeting with Gala

Ian Gibson believes that these surrealist years of Dalí, until his departure for America in 1940, were the best of his career. Ian Gibson is more a journalist than an art critic. He lists Dalí's paintings, occasionally describes them, but never tries to bring out their indescribable beauty. However, all the elements are mentioned, everything which could have had a direct imprint on the master's creation. Ian Gibson, thus, does not fail to emphasize Dalí's sexuality which, as we know, was based, to a large extent, on onanism (see his painting The Great Masturbator1929). His dazzling encounter with Gala was an unforgettable erotic dazzling. Ian Gibson, incidentally, does justice to the extraordinary character that Gala was. This is one of the best passages in the book.

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The paranoid-critical method

Ian Gibson dwells at length on an essential invention of Dalí, which he called the “paranoid-critical method” and which he described on several occasions, notably in an article published in the journal Surrealism at the service of the revolution (July 1930) and titled “The Rotten Donkey”of which Jacques Lacan was an admiring reader. In his Diary of a GeniusDalí gave the following explanation: “Generally speaking, it would be the most rigorous systematization of the most delusional phenomena and materials, with the intention of making my most obsessively dangerous ideas tangibly creative. » Gibson relates that Dalí's grandfather suffered from paranoia. And Dalí had also read certain books by Freud, recently translated into Spanish, in particularIntroduction to psychoanalysiswhere the Viennese affirmed that paranoia appeared in the individual to “repelling excessively strong homosexual impulses”. Homosexual desire was one of Dalí's obsessions.

The “advertising” Dalí

And then, of course, there is Dalí “advertising”that of the frivolous 70s especially. Ian Gibson despairs at seeing such a great artist plunge into such abysses of vulgarity. He writes, in my opinion very correctly: “Excellent taste was indeed the last thing that characterized the painter, whose aim, as he later admitted, was to stupidize the public. » It is true that Dalí was able to deliberately shock his admirers, for example by rallying around Franco, when in 1948, with Gala, he returned to Spain. But why, on another question, reserved for everyone's strict conscience, do I want to talk about religion, calling into question, as Ian Gibson does, Dalí's sincerity? In his old age, Dalí, deeply desperate, sought, I quote: “the signs of a spiritual renaissance with the Church of Rome at the forefront”. Now, here is what this does not please his biographer – whose book, however, I believe, must be read, because it transmits to the reader the authentic madness of Dalí, whose echo, now more familiar to our ears, propagates an indestructible resonance of truth .

Ian Gibson, The frenzied life of Salvador Dalí. Ed. Le Cherche Midi, 664 pages, €89.