The New Criterion

The first difficulty in reviewing this book is that its subjects, Salvador and Gala Dalí, really were quite unappealing people: self-centered to the point of extreme pathology, greedy, and remarkably philistine. Ian Gibson has revealed their repulsive habits and extravagant excesses in submicroscopic detail. Much that we find objectionable about today’s art scenes in New York, London, Paris, and elsewhere had its outstanding original incarnation in Dalí—above all, unrestrained self-advertisement as a substitute for creative application, such as has made Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, and Jeff Koons, among many others, infamous.

Yet Dalí and the academic Surrealist style he exemplifies remain, for all his many bad qualities, a significant component of twentieth-century art history—important enough that a serious examination of his place would be extremely useful. Gibson’s bloated concoction has gained an astonishing degree of critical acclaim from reviewers and been accompanied by a similar video on television. Nevertheless, it is anything but the authoritative biography its author and publisher obviously hoped it would be.

To begin with, although it has been hyped as a definitive monograph comparable to John Richardson’s biography of Picasso, this tome is not really a biography. It is a swollen polemic against its subject, concerned first and foremost with the scandalous—i.e., the “shameful”—aspects of Dalí’s career, which the author has made his sole theme. Yet there is nothing original about such an approach, for once one accepts the basic premise of Dalí’s life— flamboyant narcissism camouflaged as, among other things, “paranoiac criticism” —the rest follows logically and predictably, from the money-grubbing to the fascination with sexual depravity. In addition, one must ask if there is not an ethical problem involved in a production of this kind, one that relentlessly assaults the personal character of an artist while at the same time offering purchasers luxurious, full-color reproductions of the artist’s main works.

The text of this book is a clip job. An Irish-born writer who has acquired Spanish nationality, Gibson has assembled his narrative by excerpting prior books on Dalí, and adding to that foundation news stories about the more ridiculous public displays engaged in by the artist during his decades-long decline, backed up by gossip-mongering interviews with minor characters. This volume would probably not have come into existence had Gibson not published a fairly successful book, Federico García Lorca: A Life (Pantheon 1997). That the poet wrote a long ode to Dalí, very likely during a sexually intimate relationship, made Dalí the obvious next target for Gibson. The author has lately announced that he will follow these titles with a study of the third member of this group of friends, the film director Luis Buñuel.

Gibson offers nothing new in the way of meaningful research on Dalí, although he has put together a lengthy list of aggravated complaints, which he considers a substitute for analysis. These “issues” mainly involve amateur psychologizing about Dalí’s weird sex life, alleged shame caused by his purported homosexual tendencies, and guilt over the death of García Lorca.

García Lorca, who remains the outstanding figure in twentieth-century Spanish literature, died in obscure circumstances at the beginning of that country’s civil war (1936–39). From the first report of García Lorca’s death, the tragedy was blamed on “the Fascists.” It is true that the poet was killed in the Andalusian city of Granada, under occupation by the troops of General Francisco Franco, a month after Franco’s rebellion against the Spanish Republic had begun. But the ensuing propaganda campaign of the worldwide left falsely painted García Lorca as a Communist, or near-Communist, and asserted that he had been executed for political reasons. This has not been taken seriously in Spain itself for years, by scholars of either the right or the left. Whether his death was caused by politics, envy, a homosexual quarrel—for García Lorca was a rather flamboyant “queen”—or some unknown motive has never been established. Gibson is not concerned with factuality, but with legend—in particular the recusant “progressive” myth of Spanish Republican virtue and Francoist evil. Thus, García Lorca’s death interests him because it is the easiest way to engage readers in the revival of Spanish leftist nostalgia.

His previous book, which he has repeatedly asserted “solved” the García Lorca mystery, actually did nothing of the sort. In investigating García Lorca’s death, Gibson mainly accumulated vague statements from interviews long after the events, mostly with marginal personalities. Gibson seems unaware, in the García Lorca and Dalí cases alike, that the extensive archives of both sides in the Spanish Civil War are now open to historians; in any event, he cites nothing from them. That is because Gibson’s purposes are much better served by the recycling of hearsay than by careful examination of primary documents. His central obsession regarding García Lorca and Dalí is simple: although the Fascists killed García Lorca, Dalí ended up supporting Franco, a despicable action, according to Gibson, for which Dalí felt, or should have felt, ashamed; and Dalí even had the nerve to return to Spain at the war’s end. Further, because Picasso stayed in Paris and did not go back to Spain after Franco’s victory, he is held up as morally and artistically superior to Dalí. Although this seems a ridiculously simplistic message to be clothed in so outsized a presentation, it really is all Gibson has to say.

In describing his painting Autumn Cannibalism as a reflection of the civil war, Dalí commented: “These Iberian beings devouring each other in the autumn express the pathos of civil war considered as a phenomenon of natural history, as distinct from Picasso, who considered it a political [phenomenon.]” This relatively anodyne statement elicits a huffing and puffing from Gibson that is typical of this book: “One looks in vain for any statement by Dalí supporting the Republic or condemning the infamous Non-Intervention Pact signed by the British and French governments while Germany and Italy were supplying aircraft and other equipment to Franco.” A few pages later, Gibson adds,

As the civil war raged on in Spain there could be no question of Dalí’s returning to Catalunya, where, he must have felt, anything might happen to him… . Perhaps it was known that he had done nothing to help the Republic. Altogether there was no option but to wait until the hostilities ended, when, no matter who won, he would probably be able to talk himself out of any difficulties.

Gibson here commits several familiar sins borrowed from the methodology of “political correctness.” First, he presumes to judge the whole Spanish intelligentsia based on whether or not they took specific positions during the civil war. Second, he assumes without evidence that the Republicans—or, for that matter, the Francoists—imposed such general political tests on intellectuals. In reality the García Lorca case, whatever its origins, was an exceptional one in wartime Spain. The Barcelona leftists committed numerous atrocities against the Catholic church and the propertied bourgeoisie, and the pro-Soviet Communists, as described by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, killed anti-Stalin leftists. But a considerable roster of right-wing Catalan intellectuals survived in Barcelona by keeping silent, as did a fairly substantial number of leftists in Franco territory. In neither the rebel nor the Republican zone were intellectuals routinely killed for insufficient support to the regime, hoary propaganda notwithstanding.

Furthermore, Dalí himself commented with remarkable common sense and sincerity on García Lorca’s death:

At the very outbreak of the revolution my great friend, the poet of la mala muerte, Federico García Lorca, died before a firing squad in Granada, occupied by the Fascists. His death was exploited for propaganda purposes. This was ignoble, for they knew as well as I that Lorca was by essence the most apolitical person on earth. Lorca did not die as a symbol of one or another political ideology; he died as a propitiatory victim of that total and integral phenomenon that was the revolutionary confusion in which the civil war unfolded.

But attention to the nuances and details of authentic Spanish civil war history—its truth, in a word—is entirely foreign to the personality of Ian Gibson. He is interested in a simple, ideological message: Franco and Dalí, bad; Republicans and Picasso, good. Above all, Gibson is the uncrowned emperor of the method that depends on the author’s poorly informed surmises about others’ motivations, supported by phrases like “he must have felt.” This was his approach in investigating García Lorca’s death and it is on full display here.

Gibson’s affection for conventional wisdom and shopworn clichés is not limited to the topic of the Spanish Civil War. There is virtually no real art history in this book; the universe of painting consists, for Gibson, of Dalí and Picasso. The very interesting relationship between De Chirico’s and Dalí’s work is reduced by Gibson to little more than a single sneering line: “Dalí maintained that De Chirico, so admired by the Surrealists, had employed academic means to achieve his ‘revolution of the anecdote.’ So why should not he?” Otherwise, we are told that this or that detail in a Dalí painting showed De Chirico’s influence, or was borrowed from him, but nothing more. For Gibson, De Chirico is far more important as a target of innuendo than as a predecessor of Dalí in Surrealist imagery. In the full grip of his habitual speculation, Gibson argues that Gala Dalí “probably” seduced Giorgio De Chirico. He produces no evidence of any kind for this claim, derived from nothing other than Gibsonian “insight.”

Gibson’s understanding of Surrealism— which would seem to be the main subtextual theme in the life of Dalí—is no better than what might be acquired in a one-semester survey course in twentieth-century art history. He knows the highlights, but that is where his scholarship ends. That academic Surrealism represented an artistic dead end, that the succeeding generation of painters, in France, the United States, and Spain turned away from Surrealism in large part because of the insipid outcome of Dalí’s career, should have been a major topic in this book. But about such matters Gibson is mute. To Gibson, the painters and poets with whom Dalí was associated are mere names, except when they are subjects of spurious, as well as salacious, “revelations.” In this reading, whether García Lorca was really a leftist martyr is far less relevant than whether Amanda Lear, a hanger-on of the Dalís in the 1960s, was or was not a transsexual.

In discussing Dalí’s paintings, Gibson applies the inventory method of criticism, combining it with his persistent parlor Freudianism. The index of this book includes, under the heading “Dalí, Salvador, works of,” such items as “ants in,” “breasts in,” “fellatio in,” “gadgets in,” “keys in,” “lions in,” “locusts in,” “masturbation in,” “parrot-nose in,” and “shadows in,” along with references to various places and relatives.

One must imagine with horror how such a system would be applied to the work of Dalí’s mentor Joan Miró. But of course, that is the point: a book on Miró, especially a large-format volume of hundreds of pages with rich reproductions, would have to be accompanied by serious critical writing. Gibson believes such writing is superfluous in the Dalí case, and, unfortunately, he has been proven to some extent correct in this assumption.

Gibson castigates Dalí for going back to Spain in 1940, under Franco. But Gibson never mentions, and obviously does not know or care, that Miró, who had done much more than most Spanish artists to assist the Republic, moved from France to Mallorca the same year. There he went unmolested, even though the island was one of the first places in Spain to fall to Franco’s forces and remains even today a bastion of Francoist tradition. Gibson also endorses André Breton’s condemnation of Dalí for rallying to Franco. But he does not know or care that Breton was equally if not more critical of Picasso’s loyalty to the Stalinist French Communist Party in the late 1950s, “even after Budapest,” in the words of the Surrealist founder. Similarly, while Gibson adulates Picasso for refusing to go back to Francoist Spain, he never considers the possibility that there was something morally compromising about Picasso’s remaining in Nazi-occupied Paris throughout World War II. After all, both Dalí and Miró went to Spain to escape the German invasion of France. Gibson is so Picassophilic he even jeers at a naïve but harmless opinion of the author Stefan Zweig, who introduced Dalí to Freud. Gibson declares, “Zweig told Freud that in his opinion Dalí was ‘the only painter of genius of our epoch, and the only one who will survive.’ It was as though Zweig had never heard of Picasso.”

A critical comparison of the careers of Dalí and Miró, against the background of the very distinctive Catalan culture as embodied in Barcelona, would be extremely valuable. But to Gibson, even Miró is a cipher, treated herein only as a supporter of Dalí. That Miró, older than Dalí, contributed a great deal more to the education of the painters who succeeded them is beneath consideration by Gibson. He notes that the 1941 Museum of Modern Art retrospective of the two elicited an eloquent comment from Robert M. Coates, writing in The New Yorker: “Going from the Dalí section to the Mirós is like moving from some dark, solemn chamber—say, a room where clinical photographs are being studied—to the gaiety and light of a children’s nursery.” But even this invitingly open door stimulates nothing from Gibson but utterly flat phrases about Surrealism’s accommodation of “both the dark and light sides of human nature.”

The culture of Catalonia—not only incredibly sophisticated, reflecting considerable wealth and past cultural achievement, but also incredibly provincial—embodied these “dark and light” aspects and might have provided a beginning point for an intelligent survey of these two careers. But Gibson is ignorant of Catalan culture and he is contemptuous of it. He writes as a resident of Granada, in Andalucía, and therefore as a “real Spaniard” who hates Catalans. In what seems a self-parodying exercise in Irish humor reminiscent of Flann O’Brien, he tells us that

Other Spaniards consider Catalans the country’s meanies (the Scotsmen of Spain), as is shown by thousands of jokes on the subject, and it is a fact that Catalunya is the only part of Spain where people do not buy rounds of drinks, for example, and the fact that there are more savings banks in Catalunya than in all the rest of Spain has already been alluded to.

This comment summarizes the pathos of Ian Gibson’s book. He wants to be a Gerald Brenan or Robert Graves—an expatriate from the British Isles who delves brilliantly in the Iberian culture he has adopted—but he has much more in common with Hemingway on a bad day. Thus, although Gibson frequently mistranslates simple Spanish and Catalan words and phrases, he also revels in pseudocritical “corrections.” For example, he jabs at the British poet Francis Scarfe, whom he fails to detect behind a misprint identifying him in the English-language edition of Dalí’s 1937 pamphlet, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, as “Scarpe.” Scarfe, according to Gibson, mistranslated the Spanish word “desembarcadero,” taken from a poem of García Lorca, as “wharves,” when Gibson would prefer “landing stage.” But “desembarcadero” can mean either “wharves” or “docks” or “waterfront,” while in contemporary English, “landing stage” is clumsy and unfamiliar. Many of the footnotes accompanying this book are similarly pretentious and dubious.

Did Dalí live a shameful life? In some respects, yes. He was inordinately selfish, cruel, manipulative, opportunistic, unprincipled, and disloyal. Does he deserve condemnation for not accepting his putative homosexuality? No; such a claim, repeatedly made in this book, reflects nothing other than Gibson’s pandering to current fashion. Should Dalí have felt guilt for his Francoism? Perhaps, but no more than Picasso should have felt for his unrepentant Stalinism. Perhaps Dalí deserves no better than the shambles Gibson has created, but art history assuredly does.