Dali, Metamorphosis of Narcissus

Dali, Metamorphosis of Narcissus Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937, oil on canvas, 51.1 x 78.1 cm (Tate Modern, London) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

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Dali, Metamorphosis of Narcissus

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We are looking at a painting by Salvador Dali in the Tate Modern.
It’s Methamorphosis of Narcissus and it dates to 1937. It’s pretty well painted.
So what I see is this hand that seems to be emerging from the earth
that holds an eggfrom which seems to be hatching Narcissus.
Except that so many of Dali’s paintings and rendering in Dali’s paintings
which are painted in a kind of classical manner in terms of it’s sort of… It’s very realistic.
It’s precision, it’s careful, it’s rendering of space even if that space is distorted of shadow, of line,
If we look at the egg from which the flower is emerging it seems to be emerging from a crack
that is also the shadow of the flower at the same moment.
And so it’s both of those things simultaneously.
And in fact the whole painting seems to be about forms being one thing and at the same moment another.
Because there is behind that hand another hand that seems to be emerging from a pool of water.
This time not rock, but something because it’s brown and seems more earth – like
and holding also an egg- like shape but actually looks a bit more like a walnut
but it also has a crack and from seems to emerge hair that looks like a flame.
Because the hand is in that second iteration not so much hand as actually a crouching body.
The body of Narcissus. You can see knees and arms.
But what’s wonderfull is that whereas the figure that is yellow on the left
slightly further back is the body where the head is a walnut,
on the right it’s more clearly a close up of a hand holding an egg
and yet there are precisely the same forms.
It’s that doubling, it’s that mirror that is so incredibly disconcerting.
All these needs to be contextualized – what in the world is Dali doing.
Well, what he said he was doing, while Andre Breton have lauded him for,
he was writer and often seen as one of the leaders or the surrealism movement.
And he wrote the surrealism Manifesto. Right, all of those surrealism Manifestos, there is a number of them, yes.
They called the ability of Dali to do this, to see things simultaneously, as more than one thing.
It is a result of a psychological state, which they call a paranoid critical activity. Sounds scary and dangerous.
Well I think they loved the fact that it was scary and dangerous and it was based on some kind of willful misreading of Freud.
You know, Freud talked about the filters that kept the conscious and unconscious mind apart.
But Dali claimed that in the state of paranoid critical activity
he could actually embrace both the conscious and unconscious simultaneously
so that his conscious mind could actually do the painitng,
the brilliance of understanding that form is both the hand and the body,
it’s flash and stone simultaneously, that Dali would have claimed was absolutely result not of a rational mind,
impossible in the rational it was a result of the irrational, of a conversation between those two states.
In the state of paranoid critical activity… Ok, it was incredibly important to the surrealists
– to access that unconscious, to access something that was more authentic, that lacked the control of the conscious mind.
– And for them that was the engine of creativity, absolutely, it was this motherload of the creative,
I mean, when we think back to the nineteenth century, we think back to the artist like Gauigain, wanting to get back to nature,
of Courbet wanting to get back to the nature – the unconscious for the surrealists that was the great goal, you know, that was it.
So what is so interesting is the surrealists go after this, for a number of different points of view.
People like Miro will try to, in a sense of – allow for the unconscious to emerge and paint using the automatic methods
that is not allowing the conscious mind to interpret, whereas Dali is sort of wanting both
– he wants the perfection of the academic style to render the inspiration of the unconscious.

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Dada & Surrealism

Dali, Metamorphosis of Narcissus Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937, oil on canvas, 51.1 x 78.1 cm (Tate Modern, London) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

Dali, Metamorphosis of Narcissus

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