The exhibition on Dalí and Freud in Vienna
The exhibition at the Belvedere in Vienna, through more than one hundred paintings, surrealist objects, photographs, films, books, diaries and letters, presents the complex personality of Salvador Dalí and his obsession with Sigmund Freud, whom he tried to meet on several occasions
There are five chapters of the exhibition at the Belvedere in Vienna that open up the intimate spaces of the psychological analysis of Salvador Dali (Figueres, 1904-89).
The guest family includes portraits of his sister, including that of his sister Anna Maria, Retrat de la meva German, from 1925, the artist’s first muse. A section is then dedicated to the fertile years of Madrid, where he attended the Residencia de Estudiantes, a forge of the Madrid artistic avant-garde. Here you meet the poet Garcia Lorcaof which some drawings are exhibited, and collaborates with Luis Buñuel in the creation of surrealist works A chien andalù And L’age d’orboth shown on display.
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS AND THE INVENTION OF THE PARANOIC-CRITICAL METHOD
In this period Salvador Dalí discovers the writings of Freud, in particular the reading of The interpretation of dreams it is one of the defining moments in the artist’s life.
In the Freudian treatises Dalí finds the key to reading his most hidden fears and obsessions. This leads him to explore the poetics of Surrealism and to develop a unique new language in his work. Develop the paranoid-critical method, which is based on the consideration of paranoia as a sort of “state of grace” in which the artist can associate shapes and objects with meanings that go beyond what they superficially seem to be. Themes that we find in works such as Homme poisson of 1930. As the curator Jaime Brihuega points out: “Visual ambiguity in the form of double images is one of the essential elements of the ‘paranoid-critical method’. In these double images narratives are obviously taken up that are repeated in other paintings and drawings of these years. Exemplary is the monumental bust of a male figure whose head, around a central clock (Time and Memory), is combined with a collection of fish and whose collarbone merges with a high-heeled fetishist shoe. A phallic-looking cypress, reminiscent of Böcklin’s paintings (to which Dalí often alludes), stands in a lonely landscape where you can see the recurring motif of a high-heeled shoe, as well as a sphere that refers to works by René Magritte and Max Ernst. “
DALÍ TO EXHIBITION IN VIENNA
Dalí’s ambition then was to expose his method to Freud, and he went to Vienna with the aim of meeting him. But the meeting does not happen, and the artist remembers in his autobiography, published in 1942 and entitled The secret way of Salvador Dalía series of unrealized images and imaginary encounters with the father of psychoanalysis: “My three trips to Vienna were exactly like three drops of water that lacked the reflections that make them shine. On each of these trips I did exactly the same thing: in the morning I visited the Vermeer in the Czernin collection, and in the afternoon I did not visit Freud, who was in the country for health reasons. With sweet melancholy I remember how I spent those afternoons randomly wandering the streets of the old capital of Austria“.
THE MEETING BETWEEN FREUD AND DALÍ
The meeting finally takes place thanks to the intercession of the writer Stefan Zweig and the poet and collector Edward James. In the summer of 1938 Dalí arrives at Freud’s residence in London still full of expectations, bringing with him the work that is the symbol of his paranoid-critical method, The metamorphosis of Narcissus. During the meeting she also sketches a portrait of his idol. But the now elderly and sick Freud, who suffers from jaw cancer, disregards the artist’s expectations.
Dalí’s description of this encounter in his autobiography has paranoid overtones: “Eventually I met Freud in London. The writer Stefan Zweig and the poet Edward James accompanied me. Crossing the courtyard of the house where the elderly professor lived, I noticed a bicycle leaning against the wall, and saddle, attached to a rope, there was a red rubber hot water bottle, apparently full of water, and on the back of the hot-water bottle walked a snail! This ensemble in the courtyard of Freud’s house seemed strange and inexplicable. Contrary to my hopes, we spoke little, but we devoured each other with our eyes“.
FREUD AND SURREALISM
Instead, it is Freud who is struck by the artist. Until then he had considered the surrealists as “absolute crazy“, As one Zweig wrote:”The young Spaniard with his faithfully fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery gave me a different estimate“. And so he comments on the picture and the question of its manifest psychoanalytic content: “It would be very interesting to investigate analytically the genesis of a picture story. Critically, it could still be said that the concept of art refuses to expand if the relationship between unconscious material and preconscious processing does not adhere to a certain limit. In any case, there are serious psychological problems“.
Dalí reinterprets Narcissus’s reflection in myth, which ends fatally due to drowning, as a more fluid transformation process. He uses psychoanalytic theory to construct an elaborate and mythical biographical character. Stefan Zweig talks about the meeting ne The world of yesterdayone of his most famous novels: “… While I was talking to Freud, he made a sketch. I never dared to show it to Freud, because Dalí had already represented death in him in a clairvoyant way“.
The long-awaited meeting leads to the end of the exhibition. Freud’s death a year later put an end to Dalí’s Freudian phase.
– Giorgia Losio