Annual Appeal 2023

How long is it since we stretched out on a grassy patch to gaze at clouds? Remember Shakespeare’s Hamlet and his question to Polonius, ‘Is that not a camel, I see in yonder cloud’? He goes on: ‘Methinks, it is a weasel’ and later adds ‘or like a whale’.¹ In this passage Hamlet not only teases the sycophantic Polonius, but also conjures up three unrelated images in as many minutes. Ever since, writers, philosophers and psychologists have found this bamboozling exchange to be altogether fascinating – so did Salvador Dalí.  

Similar sentiments were expressed by Leonardo da Vinci when he advised that looking at the stains on walls was for inspiration (‘therein you find marvels’). The German artist Max Ernst did the same when inventing the technique of ‘decalcomania’; Chinese artists and scholars also practised such visionary processes when looking at mountain rocks or the markings on polished jade tablets. They all aimed to free the mind – to seek and see connections and conceive afresh; that is, to peer and perceive. 

Salvador Dalí’s head-turning creation Mae West Lips Sofa of 1937–38 is a direct descendent of such related procedures. This seemingly odd and distant connection begs for elaboration.  

 The original idea for the creation of the Mae West Lips Sofa arose at Edward James’s lavish mansion Monkton Hall set on an over 3000-hectare property at West Dean in Sussex, England, where the Eton/Oxford-educated James asked Dalí to conceive, rather than design, an item of furniture for his private dining room. James, the illegitimate grandson of King Edward VII and once married to the ballet dancer and actress Tilly Losch, who through remarriage became the Countess of Carnarvon, was a wealthy supporter of British and European Surrealists and a close friend of artists Sir Roland Penrose and René Magritte. During the Second World War, James sheltered Dalí and his wife Gala at the famous Villa Cimbrone on the Amalfi Coast in Italy and, after returning to England, he moved to Mexico to build Las Pozas, a jungle garden retreat near Xilitla, where various notables (including actress Anita Ekberg of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita fame) found sanctuary. He died at Italy’s San Remo in 1984 of ‘the sound of green’, as he called it.  

Edward James’s life may be instructively viewed as being emblematic of a nowadays unattainable and unfathomable prewar age – one where fey elegance was leavened by artistic daring – in many ways, Dalí was its fêted darling. 

Dalí’s Mae West Lips Sofa rightly belongs in an elevated niche in cultural history. There are only seven Surrealist objects that sit in the upper stalls of Surrealism. Namely: Alberto Giacometti’s Suspended Ball of 1931 (Guggenheim, Bilbao); Man Ray’s Indestructible Object of 1923 (Tate Modern, London); Man Ray’s The Gift of 1921 (Tate Modern, London); Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel of 1913 (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem); Meret Oppenheim’s fur teacup titled Object of 1936 (Museum of Modern Art, New York); Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone of 1936 (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) and, of course, the Mae West Lips Sofa of 1937–38, which sits very comfortably in such first-rate company. 

This lofty artistic alliance was not based upon style (Surrealism was never a ‘style’) but upon a strong conviction in the imaginative power of special kinds of connections. That is, connections that ‘spark’ – or, as the Surrealists put it, are ‘marvellous’. André Breton, the ‘voice’ of Surrealism asserted it dazzlingly in Paris in 1924: ‘Let us not mince words: the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful’.  ² 

The driving force of this fervent impulse originated from two obscure sources. Firstly, the Dadaist Pierre Reverdy writing in the French literary journal Nord-Sud in 1918: ‘The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison, but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be – the greater its emotional power and poetic reality’. ³ Secondly, the obscure nineteenth- century French writer Comte de Lautréamont in his immensely spirited and derisive novel The Chant of Maldoror of 1868, whose phrase ‘electrified’ the Surrealists: ‘as beautiful as the fortuitous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine upon an operating table’. ⁴ 

It is to the credit of the Surrealists that they were able to grasp the significance of this contrapuntal artistic device – one most probably first detected in Pablo Picasso’s magisterial painting Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), where material and paint seemed to optically ‘collide’ in pictorial space – the visual lesson was memorable; the effect – its ‘poetic reality’, to use Reverdy’s phrase – was bracing.  

This seemingly arcane observation is made clearer by using an analogy: imagine a live electrical wire with a current of 6 volts, being made to almost touch a wire carrying 12 volts – the resultant spark is small, and the distance is short. Imagine now a wire with 12 volts being brought close to a wire with a current of 240 volts – the spark is larger, and the distance is longer; the ‘impact’ of the connection is correspondingly stronger – recalling Reverdy’s words, ’The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image’. The impactful marvel of the ‘spark’ is proportional to the difference in potential and distance. So it is with images and objects – our imaginations and perceptive responses are ‘jump-started’ by such discordant connections. At its core, this is the ‘secret’ behind Duchamp’s precociously early Bicycle Wheel assemblage sculpture. It both forms and informs the ideational armature of all the above-mentioned Surrealist objects, including Dalí’s Mae West Lips Sofa. 

Dalí often attributes his creativity to his ‘Paranoia-Critical Method’, which was first translated into English by the famous Irish writer Samuel Beckett in England in 1932, and was therefore much celebrated there, and later in other English-speaking countries. Despite this, Dalí did not ever explain his method and it has not been academically analysed – save for one publication by Chaim Finkelstein in America. For our purposes it is instructive to consider Dalí’s Paranoia-Critical Method as a lateral offshoot of Breton’s ‘Pure Psychic Automatism’ and his concept of ‘Objective Chance’. In other words, Dalí’s method is based upon a highly personalised use of subjective associationism and happenstance – a distant conceptual cousin of the free-wheeling visualisations we once conjured up in the shapes of clouds. As noted above, the procedure was undertaken to free the mind and to engender new associations that shift perception beyond the retinal and towards the mental. 

All things considered, what we have in Mae West Lips Sofa is a strikingly original, dashingly free and spontaneously generated double-image visualisation – a blushing transmutation with a glamour buzz. Not only does it embody the insouciant flash and marvellous chicness of its period, but also it outwits and outperforms the creativity of Nature herself – it creates rather than recreates – and thereby twins two of the most precious of human attributes: imagination and visualisation.

 

 

Dr Ken Wach is an Associate Professor and former Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts at the University of Melbourne.  

Notes