The Great Masturbator In Retrospect: Salvador Dal� at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Edward Rubin
Salvador Dal�, Little Cinders (Cenicitas), 1927-1928. Oil on panel, 25 x 19 in. Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia
No artist, not Picasso, Frances Bacon, or even Andy Warhol, in many ways our American Dalí, documented their sexual obsessions, fears and anxieties as publicly as Salvador Dalí. And yet, as his biographers knew, no matter how frank and in your face Dalí appeared to be in his interviews, writings and paintings, we are not getting the whole story. We never will. The artist’s deliberate acts of free association teasingly tinged with Freudian overtones and fraught with suggestive images of masturbation, fellacio, copulation, and possible child abuse and shit eating, all cleverly encoded into his work, allowed Dalí the freedom to expose himself in public while still hiding behind a carefully constructed mask.
It is this same frisson—a dangerously threatening yet totally safe ambiguity—that kept Dalí’s fellow Surrealists, the public, and his family and friends riveted on the artist’s every move. Who was the real Dalí and what would he do next? Nobody really ever knew. His mantra, “the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad,” did much to quell speculation that he wasn’t totally in control. “I have no choice,” he liked to say, but to “paint my obsessions in order to remain sane.” True to his word, after he stopped painting he went bonkers. Sort of. Was he a madman or a genius? Was he really a coprophiliac? A heterosexual or homosexual? Like most things, if you have to bring it up, the answer is a little bit of all. He is a sliding scale.
The facts of Dalí’s life (1904-1989), not unlike his surrealist paintings—or for that matter, the artist’s three autobiographies, My Secret Life, The Dairy of a Genius and The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí –when not being glossed over or totally ignored, are cleverly embellished fabrications. And yet, however approximate, between the lines, from story to story, image to image, there is more than a grain of truth to be harvested. In retrospect everything that Dalí was to carry with him to the grave, all his fears and sexual obsessions were etched in stone at an early age. They also found themselves painted, part and parcel, into his art.
For those who require visual inoculation, the work of The Great Masturbator, that is the title of one of Dalí’s most famous paintings, is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, through May 15th. Organized by the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, it is the only venue in this country that chose to take this show. I suggest bringing a magnifying glass as many of the images, some painted with three strands of sable hair, are minute.
The roots of his work are embedded not in the medium but in the fiber of his being. Whatever a normal child is, Dalí was certainly not that and he played this card his entire life. As a child, if hysterical fits and tantrums didn’t get him what he wanted he would wet his bed and leave his turds around the house. You can well imagine that he got his way. On top of this, making for a combustible and erratic mix, Dalí was morbidly shy. Salvador Dalí the father, mercurial himself, though an autocrat by disposition, realizing that his son, however exasperating, was special, was totally supportive of most anything the young Dalí wanted to do.
However good the senior Dalí was to his son, they had a tumultuous relationship. Given that Dalí’s favorite fantasy was “sodomizing his dying father” one could well imagine the tension that existed between them. The elder Dalí appears in countless paintings. Often he is seen holding the younger Dalí’s hand or as in the painting William Tell (1930), threatening to castrate his son with a pair of scissors. Felipa, Dalí’s beloved mother, having lost her first son, who was also named Salvador, was doting, so much so that years later the artist, in what he admits may be “false memory,” wrote that he used to climb into his mother’s bed so that she could suck his penis. This was the beginning of the artist’s fear of sex.
Dalí’s introduction to sex, he writes, which turned him off to women’s genitalia for life, was a medical book, complete with horrific photos of venereal diseases, which his father left on the piano. This fear, translated into putrescent body parts and rotting donkeys, was to become a major motif throughout the artist’s surrealist period. Along with his mother, he would blame his father for his impotence. There is further supposition that one of his teachers, who used to have Dalí sit on his lap while he stroked him, may have molested him, resulting in the artist’s lifelong hatred of being touched. Another biographer implies that Dalí’s relationship with his sister Ana Maria, the subject of twelve of his early paintings, a number of which tellingly depict her from the rear, may have been an incestuous one. This is a lot of baggage to carry; he painted it all.
After a childhood crush on one of his classmates, where his fascination was “centered on the boy’s buttocks,” Dalí’s first full-blown love affair, however consummated, was with Frederico Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish poet playwright. They met in 1922, while the artist was studying in Madrid. Dalí was 18, Lorca 23. It was love at first sight and the feeling was mutual. For the next three years, whether together or not, they were inseparable. Lorca was writing odes to the artist and Dalí was painting Lorca into his canvases. In Cenicitas (Little Ashes), 1928, one of Dalí’s most striking works, we see both Lorca’s and Dalí’s heads floating in space. Dalí was to write, “He tried to screw me twice. I was extremely annoyed because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. Deep down, I felt he was a great poet and that I did owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí’s asshole.” His obsession with Lorca, who was murdered during the Spanish Civil War, was to last a lifetime. Late in life, after Dalí’s wife Gala died, Dalí admitted to one biographer that his relationship with Lorca was considerably more complicated than he had written. The poet’s love for him had been intensely physical, he said.
The great love of Dalí’s life, and he trumpeted it everywhere, was Gala. It was 1929 when they met in Cadaqués, Spain, where Dalí’s family regularly summered. At the time, Gala, a Russian émigré, with one daughter who she mostly ignored, was married to Paul Éluard, the surrealist poet. She was 35, sexually adventurous and looking for a way out of her marriage. Dalí was 25 and still a virgin. For the Éluards free love was the rule, possessiveness taboo. They loved threesomes and group sex. For a number of years, they shared their bed with the artist Max Ernst. For Dalí and Gala, whose moral compass was the Marquis de Sade, the attraction was mutual and immediate. Both were cold, selfish, cruel, calculating, terribly ambitious and indifferent to the pain and suffering of others. And both had a lifelong tendency to move between the poles of lucidity and madness. Equally, if not more important, certainly for Dalí, Gala catered to the artist’s unique sexual tastes. Gala also saw fame and fortune in his future and she wanted in. Dalí would say that their meeting was predestined.
Whether he ever penetrated Gala, at least frontally (an act Dalí found loathsome and all of his biographers like to weigh in on) is up for grabs. Given that Dalí, a self-confessed worshipper of the female posterior, always insisted that he loathed large breasts as much as women’s genitals, the consensus is that he didn’t. One thing is certain, as Dalí wrote, Gala did help him to “refine his masturbatory technique, to make it easier for him to achieve good emissions.” The theme of fellatio and masturbation, as well as his obsession with shit and the buttocks of both men and women, worked their way into many of his early paintings. In The Great Masturbator (1929), a painting he kept until he died, we see what may be Gala and Dalí contemplating fellatio. Whether he was coprophagic or not (he tended to deny this to the Surrealists, who were seriously concerned with his preoccupation with shit) is debatable. However in The Visible Women (1930) he wrote the year fater meeting Gala that “true love would be to eat one’s partner’s excrement.” In his painting The Great Paranoiac (1936) we actually see Dalí with his nose in Gala’s ass.
Eventually, the Éluard’s divorced. Paul married a homeless prostitute who was an ex lover and model of Picasso’s, and Gala married Dalí. He was 30, she 40. Lorca, astounded to hear that Dalí found the woman of his life, told a friend, “It’s impossible! He can only get an erection when someone sticks a finger in his ass.” He knew Dalí. But he didn’t know Gala. Dalí’s marriage, one is tempted to compare it to that of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, was to last a lifetime. For 53 years Gala, between countless facelifts and young lovers and Dalí’s staged orgies (“his greatest pleasure was persuading boys to drop their pants and masturbate while he watched, sometimes masturbating himself”) remained his lover, muse, business manager and caretaker—until they both went gaga. It was a very ugly and pathetic ending, involving fraud, forgery, theft, a fire, mutual hate, rumors of attempted murder, hints of a bogus last will and a serious dwindling of the artist’s reputation. However, the paintings, many of them masterful, do remain. Make of them what you will.
