(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 24

Salvador Dali's Interiors with Heraclitus' Concealment

Simon Weir

Salvador Dalí’s sweeping surrealist essay, The Conquest of the Irrational, was a summation of his theoretical and representational aims during his engagement with André Breton’s Parisian Surrealist movement. The fourth and final section of the essay was curiously subtitled “The Tears of Heraclitus.” Living in Ionia (now part of Turkey) some 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus produced a written legacy that has long been little more than a collection of aphorisms, fragments, and second-hand quotations; nonetheless, they have been the subject of perennial study. Around 45 BCE, the great Latin orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero described him as obscure by inserting a Greek word into his Latin text, σκοτείνός (dark).

The Heraclitian aphorism that Dalí selected for this essay was φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεί, which may be translated as, “it pleases nature to conceal itself,” or “nature loves to hide.” By 1935, when Dalí completed The Conquest of the Irrational, this fragment had already been the subject of long contemplation, appearing in five of his previously published essays. Dalí had referred to the aphorism in the opening sentence of one of his

earliest published writings, a 1927 essay for a small Catalan journal, L’Amic de les Arts, during the early days of his interest in surrealism. Dali’s essay, titled “Saint Sebastian,” began with the apt subheading “Irony,” a foundational step toward the complex representational ironies of surrealism. After the opening Heraclitian quotation, Dalí reflected on the interpretation given to this fragment by Alberto Savinio eight years earlier. Alberto Savinio was the assumed name of Andrea Francesco Alberto di Chirico, younger brother of painter Giorgio di Chirico, both of whom had considerable influence on the development of surrealist painting and the surrealist object.

In 1919, Savinio explored this aphorism in terms of irony and interpreted it as describing two aspects of the relationship between man and nature. Savinio insisted that irony was the most important theoretical principle in painting. Irony, he explained, is the ethical consequence of nature’s nudity. This leads artists to develop modes of morality that conceal the “terribly clear appearances” they perceive. This morality takes the form of distortions in their representations of nature’s appearance. Savinio added a second interpretation of the aphorism: nature seeks to hide from herself through “self-directed modesty.” This suggests that in reality, not only in representation, natural objects do not reveal themselves through their appearance. Artists, therefore (and especially painters, because they deal exclusively with the visual), must reveal through appearance alone that things are not as they appear. Thus, the deeper aim of metaphysical art was to use representative painting to reveal what is hidden by appearance.

Savinio’s musings appear to have had deep resonance for Dalí. Although he mentioned Savinio only once, he continued to write about Heraclitus’s aphorism in precisely these terms. In another essay for L’Amic de les Arts published later that year, as Dalí was deepening his experiments in surrealist technique, he explained that this aphorism may reveal “an elevated concept of irony [that] is the equivalent of naked reality … [and] that may be seen at present in my works.” This irony is clearly not the relatively simple explanation of a painter’s distortions of representation, but rather nature’s self-concealment and the necessity of ironic representation.

This theoretical premise, natural and inevitable concealment, is a key theme in the early development of Dalí’s surrealist objects and images. In this chapter, some of Dalí’s surrealist objects developed the early 1930s, and later architectural ideas will be interpreted through this premise of concealment and the surrealist preoccupation with the displacement of desire.

Desire for surrealist objects

In his 1932 essay The Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment, Dalí categorized surrealist objects based on the desire that the object generates: “what matters is the way in which the experiments revealed the desire for the object, the tangible object.” This desire is measured effectively by the kind of action that the desired object induces, which Dalí separated into four increasing levels of engagement: first, when we take no part in them; second, the object acts upon our contemplation; third, the object operates symbolically and can be acted upon; and finally, the objects brings about a desire to be eaten. Bridging the stages between contemplation and action, Dalí referenced the concealment in Man Ray’s disturbing photographs of figures wrapped up and tied with string. These images suggested the preparation of more wrapped objects, as they produced the urge to explore them tactilely, so that one might identify through touch what their wrappings concealed.

The first example Dalí gives of a manifestation of the desire to consume surrealist objects is:

the appearance of eatables in the first surrealist things painted by di Chirico – crescents, macaroons, and biscuits finding a place beside T-squares and other utensils not to be catalogued … [and] artichokes or bananas which, thanks to the exceptional cooperation of circumstances, form on their own, and without any apparent modification, actual surrealist articles. (Figure 24.1)

Figure 24.1 “Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits (Interno metafisico con biscotti)”, oil on canvas by Giorgio di Chirico, 1916. Photographed by Hickey-Robertson, Houston. (Courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston)

Image credit: © Giorgio di Chirico/SIAE; licensed by Viscopy (2015)

This insistent desire to engage progressively more and more with the object is symptomatic of a general urge to unify oneself with the desired,

to form a whole with it, to dissolve the separation between the desired and desirer; “their existence brings us to want to eat them.”12

Edible decor Developing the principle that the most desirable of surreal objects generate a real and visceral hunger in his 1932 essay, Psychoatmospheric-Anamorphic Objects, Dalí described what are ostensibly practical problems of production: “It was a question of knowing how one could end up making, for example, a table edible, to satisfy at least partially the imperious desires of ‘cannibalism of objects.’”13 This was not a passing caprice. A year later, Dalí referred to a design of “the well-known and much desired table that is half made of stone, half of poached egg” and described its triumphal moment as cooling slowly in the late afternoon breeze while suspended between two poplar trees in the forest of Ermenonville.14

A decade later, Dalí brought together two ideas in his autobiography without an explanation of their association. First, he described the period of experiments with the surrealist object as one governed by a growing irrational hunger, which ultimately revealed itself as a desire to eat everything. Having stated this, he then gave the manufacturing recipe of the edible table:

The first thing to do is make a mold of a table out of celluloid (preferably a Louis XIV table), exactly as if one were going to make a cast. Instead of pouring plaster into the mold, one pours the necessary quantity of white of eggs. Then one dips the whole into a bath of hot water, and as soon as the white begins to harden one introduces the yolks into the mass of the whites by means of tubes. Once the whole has hardened, the celluloid mold can be broken and be replaced by a coating of pulverized egg shell mixed with a resinous or sticky substance. Finally this surface can be polished with a ground pumice until it acquires the texture of egg shell.15

Dalí then moved on to a potentially more beautiful and disturbing proposal for a replica of the famous ancient Greek sculpture, the Venus de Milo, similarly made of eggs, explaining, “you would then be able to break the egg shell of the Venus… [dipping] a blue silver spoon into one of the breasts of the Venus, exposing the egg yolk of her insides to the light of the setting sun.”

The same combination of rigid structural exoskeleton and soft nutritious interior is also found in another sculptural project, the Lobster Telephone, of which Dalí created several working versions in 1936 for collector Edward James (Figure 24.2). These sculptural projects can be explained in terms of the over-enlarged desire to consume objects and Savinio’s interpretations of Heraclitus’s aphorism.

The presumed edibility of these sculptures, prompted by their appearances, promises nutritive fulfillment, yet the actual object of nutrition (the soft interior) is concealed. When looking at an egg or lobster with desire for the object, only the elegant concealing shell is visible; vision is displaced from the true object of desire to that which conceals it. The externally perceived object, the apparent object of the desire, will be destroyed and abandoned during consumption. As the shells are cracked and torn apart, the fact of the displacement is made, as Savinio put it, “terribly clear.”

Averting this terrible clarity, the lobster of the Lobster Telephone is not consumed. Indeed, it cannot be since the lobster is only a painted replica and the eggshell table and Venus were never produced. Allowing the shells to endure unbroken, like leaving di Chirico’s painted biscuits untouched, maintains the illusion that the desired object is its apparent external form, neither a visual and libidinal displacement nor a concealment. Thus, the shells are able to present themselves as desirable objects without the violent scrutiny of a terribly revealing consumption. The operative moral position, which Savinio described as a response to nature’s nudity, is abstinence.

As Dalí noted, “it was a question of knowing how.” The surrealist act was the invention of the method to produce such objects, not the preparation and eating of the objects themselves. Surrealism, as André

Breton had defined it, was a method by which one revealed the true nature of thought, and the paranoiac-critical method that Dalí used in designing these objects was defined as the generation of knowledge. In these cases, the knowledge is a dissimulated presentation that conceals the objects’ nature. Dalí’s objects do not reveal themselves and what is hidden by appearance, but reproduce nature’s concealment. They arouse hunger and affirm themselves as desirable objects, but they cannot satisfy the desires they provoke.

Figure 24.2 “Lobster Telephone,” painted plaster, telephone, by Salvador Dalí, 1936, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Purchased 1994.

Image credit: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí/VEGAP; licensed by Viscopy (2015)

The concealment of the exterior As clarified by the theorization of Dalí’s surrealist decor, the artistic materialization of the premise of natural concealment is compromised by

any action that reveals the concealment. This is because the objects themselves are mere synecdoche for the grand desire to eat everything, and this desire must be resisted morally through a carefully positioned abstinence – an abstinence that is only feigned. The interiors of these objects, like the reality of this desired “everything,” are unambiguously implied, but only imagined. It is this imagined “everything,” the imagined egg and lobster flesh, which we resist through our moral and theatrical demonstrations of abstinence.

Two decades after his early experiments with surrealist objects, Dalí produced an architectural interior in his own home that continues this theme, but positions the displacement of desire in an interior space. Dalí’s house, sited organically into the hillside of Port Lligat, is a labyrinthine residence built progressively over five decades. One of the most extraordinary spaces, the approximately hemispherical Oval Room, was conceived as an architectural analogue of the egg.\footnote{The design of the room and its connection to the adjacent neighboring spaces is a coherent realization of the metaphor and reality of the egg. The entry passage leads toward the broad fireplace, and these two are the only interruptions to the perimeter’s continuous pink couches. Upon sitting down, due to the hemispherical form of the room and the curvature of the couches, the line of sight is directed across the center of the floor to the opposite couch. The room directs the orientation of posture away from the room’s exit. Windows allow light to enter, but they admit no views outside. The lack of sunlight and heavy construction produce a thermal environment separated from the prevailing weather. The acoustic qualities of the low-domed ceiling exclude outside sound and amplify the noises of the room’s occupants. The total effect is a powerful sense of enclosure and interiority (Figure 24.3).} The design of the room and its connection to the adjacent neighboring spaces is a coherent realization of the metaphor and reality of the egg. The entry passage leads toward the broad fireplace, and these two are the only interruptions to the perimeter’s continuous pink couches. Upon sitting down, due to the hemispherical form of the room and the curvature of the couches, the line of sight is directed across the center of the floor to the opposite couch. The room directs the orientation of posture away from the room’s exit. Windows allow light to enter, but they admit no views outside. The lack of sunlight and heavy construction produce a thermal environment separated from the prevailing weather. The acoustic qualities of the low-domed ceiling exclude outside sound and amplify the noises of the room’s occupants. The total effect is a powerful sense of enclosure and interiority (Figure 24.3).

From the outside, the Oval Room has no recognizable entrance. The single access point is concealed within another unusual room, the Room of Cupboards, which itself has two entrances. There is a door in the southwestern corner leading to the bathroom of Dalí’s wife, Gala. A windowed exterior door in the middle of the southern wall opens onto a narrow, private passageway leading to the property’s perimeter. All of the

remaining wall space is covered with cupboard doors, onto which are pasted photographs and magazine covers of Dalí and Gala’s public life. There are many small, unexplainable irregularities to this room: one corner is chamfered at a slight angle, one cupboard is suspended slightly off the ground and has a short stepladder before it, and one cupboard is slightly recessed. With these small irregularities, and the overwhelming visual declarations of the photographs, it is effectively imperceptible that the recessed cupboard door in the corner conceals a short passageway leading to the Oval Room.

Heraclitus’s aphorism that Dalí mused upon three decades earlier resonates clearly in this extraordinary architectural invention of the hidden, enclosed interior. Combining a skillfully designed concealment and an extreme experience of peaceful interiority, the room fulfills Dalí’s interpretation of the egg as a symbol of intrauterine paradise. Although Heraclitus’s aphorism carries a tendency toward grand universalization, this project limits the subject to a sensed interior world. Thus, what is recognized internally as the world conveys a sense of wholeness; its finitude is a capacity to be grasped and eaten. Yet the desire to eat the containing architecture is again restrained, not out of modesty or eternal abstinence, but with the patience of self-affirming pleasure. In the intrauterine paradise, there is no unfulfilled hunger and no registration of a greater exterior totality that would generate a displaced synecdochic appetite. After years developing surrealist objects that express a growing universal hunger, this small space where hunger is contained and interiorized directs desire back toward the body. Bodies and the space surrounding them are perceived as a single, unified interior.

Figure 24.3 “Oval Room.” Salvador and Gala Dalí’s home in Port Lligat, Spain. Photograph by Simon Weir.

Notes

Salvador Dalí, The Conquest of the Irrational (Paris: Éditions surrealists, 1935).
“M. Tullius Cicero, de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, 2.15”, Perseus Digital Library, 1915, http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0474.phi048.perseus-lat1 (accessed 13 July 2014).
John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd edition (London: A & C Black Ltd., 1920), p. 104.
Salvador Dalí, “Sant Sebastia”, L’Amic de les Arts (Stiges) 16, no. 2 (1927): 52–54; Salvador Dalí, “Els meus quadros del Saló de Tardor”, L’Amic de les Arts (Stiges) 2, no. 19 (1927): unpaginated supplement; Salvador Dalí, “New Limits of Painting – Part 2”, L’Amic de les Arts (Stiges) 3, no. 24 (1928): 185–186; Salvador Dalí, L’Ane pourri (Paris: Éditions surrealists, 1930).
The history of the journal and Dalí’s association with it are described in Felix Fanés, Salvador Dalí – the Construction of the Image 1925–1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 48–50.
Dalí, “Sant Sebastia”.

7 Alberto Savinio, “Anadymenon: Principles in the Evaluation of Contemporary Art”, Valori Plastici (Rome), nos. IV–V (1919). Reprinted in: Massimo Carrá, Metaphysical Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), pp. 155–162.

8 Savinio, “Anadymenon”, p. 162.

9 Dali, “Els meus quadros del Saló de Tardor”.

10 Salvador Dalí, “The Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment”, This Quarter (Paris) 5, no. 1 (1932): 197–207.

11 Dali, “The Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment”.

12 Ibid.

13 Salvador Dalí, “Objets psycho-atmosphériques-anamorphiques”, Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution no. 6 (1932): 45–48.

14 Salvador Dalí, Letter to André Breton (Paris: Galerie Pierre Colle, 1933).

15 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (New York: Dial Press, 1942), pp. 319–320.

16 Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, p. 342.

17 André Breton, What Is Surrealism? (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), p. 59; Dalí, The Conquest of the Irrational, p. 4.

18 Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (London: Creation Books, 1964), pp. 159–160.

19 Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, pp. 82–83.