I’m not gonna lie: when it came to writing about Salvador Dalí for the first time on this site I had to fight back the urge to write about The Persistence Of Memory. (For those of you who may not recognize the title, The Persistence Of Memory is the painting that has a few melted watches gracing it.) Persistence is so synonymous with Dalí that I ultimately decided to go into a different direction because, well, what more could I offer about his most famous painting that hadn’t been written before?
So I decided to write about Raphaelesque Head Exploding instead, a painting that, much like his take on the Last Supper and the crucifixion of Jesus, is an adaptation of an original piece (in this case, a painting by Raphael of Madonna).
What makes Salvador Dalí so important not only within the world of art but within society in general is that he visually unlocked what Sigmund Freud tried to capture in words with The Interpretation Of Dreams. In mainstream culture, Freud has become (to a degree) a crazy Austrian who thought that you always want to subconsciously have sex with your mother. Of course, this is an extremely broad view of the man, but you get the picture. The term “Freudian slip” could have never come into our mainstream lexicon if we all didn’t agree that the guy was prone to some round-peg-in-square-hole type thinking. The Interpretation Of Dreams, though, has its moments of profound clarity: in particular, the idea that dreams are essentially the product of your subconscious collecting things throughout the day, only to expunge them at night in random intervals. This idea is pretty much taken as a given nowadays but in the 19th century this was extraordinarily groundbreaking. Freud (at the time) brought a clarity to something that was previously unclear (or in some cases, completely not thought of).
The same goes for Salvador Dalí. There were plenty of painters before him who painted obscured, abstract, or nonsensical things that would become the precursors to Surrealism, but Dalí brought a clarity and exactness to the method that was groundbreaking. The detail that Dalí was capable of painting on canvases is astonishing, made all the more so because his landscapes and abstractions seem so real.
Which brings me back to the painting in question. This looks like something that could appear in one of your dreams. The front and top of the face is made up of many small geometric, molecular, and watery shapes, whereas the inside back of the head is a cathedral ceiling complete with an opening at the top of the dome/head. The background is a nice color that somewhat resembles an old map. Now, reading this description only it could be easy to think of this image as being absurd. What point is an exploding head trying to make? Is there something deeper going on in the background with the presence of the cathedral wall and light? What does it all mean?
The background story behind this painting is that Dalí believed that the makeup of certain people contained otherworldly elements. He once said about this, “there are residues of substances; it is for this reason that certain beings appear to me so close to angels such as Raphael and Saint John of the Cross. Raphael’s temperature is like that almost chilly air of spring, which in turn is exactly that of the Virgin and of the rose. I need an ideal of hyper-aesthetic purity. More and more I am preoccupied by a idea of chastity. For me, it is an essential condition of the spiritual life.”
What you see in this picture may be different than the source inspiration, but you cannot deny that the attention to detail here is very dreamlike which, in turn, makes it seem familiar. And just like our own dreams, we may not always know what they intrinsically mean, yet they somehow make sense to us in some capacity more often than not (i.e.–typically, the strangest dreams you will have will be because of stress, and not because you are genuinely afraid that a fedora-wearing llama that smells like ginger is going to press a button and cause you to be hunted down by men who look like post-Wrestler Mickey Rourke).
And so this exploding head of Madonna, burnished with warm colors and accented with a bright orange-yellow slant of light that brings the nose and mouth into focus, it may not make sense on the surface but underneath there are plenty of things to dissect and find an intangible connection with.
And I’m sure Freud would have been intrigued that Dalí chose Mary as the source image of a piece that involves explosion.
by Salvador Dalí
Oil on canvas
1951
I had every intention of writing a separate introduction for this site. I really did.
But I kept going back and forth as to how to even start the first paragraph. I wrote what felt like fourteen different variations of how to explain the significance of the stationary fine arts (i.e.–paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures) but none of them felt right. Then I thought about starting off with an anecdote from my art student days but that felt a little too solipsistic. Finally, I thought about starting the introduction off with a story about how I was first genuinely introduced to art; about how my junior high and sophomore year high school art teachers influenced me but I thought that that might come across as too cliché. So I decided to scrap an introduction altogether and allow The Starry Night to act as my introduction.
In my mind there is no painting more beautiful than Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. In fact, I would rank this painting just beneath Anna Karenina in terms of the greatest artistic achievement that any member of genus Homo has ever created. And I write that last sentence without any hint of irony or hyperbole. The Starry Night has so many beautiful qualities about it: it has a sense of movement (the edges that make up the swirls of wind, the outer strokes surrounding the stars); it is comprised of so many wonderful shades of blue and green which conspire to make such a breath-taking palette; the oversized, dark cypress tree that acts as a focal point and a counterbalance to the sun-like moon (which in turn provides a unique balance to the piece as a whole); the exaggerated spire on the cathedral that towers over the rest of the village which always makes me think of a subconscious projection of trying to find meaning in life (which in turn makes me see the painting as being far more profound than it seems at first glance). And this is not to say that because there is a disproportionately large church and spire in the piece that religion is a central theme (though you may certainly feel free to see it this way). To me, the placement of the church and its spire represent a kind of desire to want to achieve balance. If you were to draw imaginary lines down the middle both horizontally and vertically you would see that the spire is almost at the midpoint of the painting (it would occupy the lower right quadrant). Add to this that the scenery takes place at night (when a church would presumably be closed) and what we know about Van Gogh’s personal struggles and it looks like the kind of touch that someone looking for stability in their life would add to their picture. While the painting itself can be seen or interpreted as being almost dreamlike in nature, its point of view was very much grounded in a realism that Van Gogh saw with his own eyes. It is an exaggerated projection of a real place, which in turn makes that place more real than a photograph.
Anyone who knows only the Cliff’s Notes version of modern art history knows the outline of Van Gogh’s life—that the only paintings he ever sold while he was alive were brokered by his brother to people who were not really interested in them in the first place; that he cut off his ear; that he might have been crazy, irrespective of the whole ear cutting-off chapter of his life; that he died a broke and (mostly) forgettable artist. I could use the previous sentence as a segue into how Van Gogh’s life is a metaphor of struggle, or how it’s a minor tragedy that people don’t always recognize great art when it is in front of them. But to do so would be unfair, especially the last half of the previous sentence. Anyone can assign a declaration of praise (or an abusive condemnation) towards any piece of art, even if they are unaware of “the whole story” behind it.
Case in point: if I chose to do so I could plumb through some books and websites about Van Gogh and this painting and find out what exactly the meaning of the church is or why the cypress tree is larger than it should be. But, quite frankly, I don’t want to know that stuff. This is a painting that is visually beautiful to me for my own reasons, and it is so visually pleasing to me that my mind compiled its own thoughts and back story about it.
And at the end of the day this is one of the defining features of what fine art is: when you see something that is beautiful you begin a process—sometimes subconsciously, sometimes consciously—whereby you wind up taking ownership of its meaning. What I mean is that sometimes great art speaks to you instantaneously and without any back story whatsoever, and other times its greatness grows with multiple viewings and a delving in to the artist’s personal life and/or struggles. For me, The Starry Night had me the first time I saw it in fifth grade before I ever knew anything about Van Gogh and his struggles, and his friendship with Gaugin.
So, with all of this in mind I present Van Gogh’s most recognizable masterpiece to serve as the introductory post for this site. The aim of this site is to offer up critiques of art through a prism of different voices. Future posts may only be 100 words, or near 1,200 words like this one, or beyond. Whether it be timeless, beautiful, or haunting, great art affects everyone differently and this site will allow people to write about how their favorite pieces affected them or made them see a facet of their world differently.
Van Gogh saw a typical nighttime setting and instead of painting it as is, he opted to turn the sky into a sea of harsh lines that, when put together, evoke movement and grab your eyes and make them follow their path around the piece. He made stars look like miniature suns being reflected on ripply water. He created something that taps into the part of our mind that mostly lays dormant in our day-to-day lives, and can only be coaxed out of its cave when something truly inspiring conjures it out.
by Vincent Van Gogh
Oil on canvas
1889