Salvador Dalí's Interiors with Heraclitus' Concealment

Author: Simon Weir Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 24 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/weir_2018-dali-interiors-heraclitus-concealment.md

Summary

Simon Weir's chapter reads Salvador Dalí's surrealist objects of the early 1930s and the Oval Room of Dalí and Gala's house at Port Lligat through Heraclitus's aphorism φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεί ("it pleases nature to conceal itself," "nature loves to hide"), transmitted to Dalí by Alberto Savinio's 1919 theory of metaphysical irony. The chapter's central claim is that Dalí's edible decor — the egg-built table, the egg-built Venus de Milo, the Lobster Telephone — does not reveal what appearance hides, as Savinio's metaphysical art demanded, but reproduces nature's concealment: desire is displaced from the hidden soft interior onto the elegant concealing shell, and the objects "arouse hunger and affirm themselves as desirable objects, but they cannot satisfy the desires they provoke." Two decades later the theme is interiorized in architecture: the Oval Room, "conceived as an architectural analogue of the egg" and entered through a cupboard door whose passageway is "effectively imperceptible," contains hunger in an intrauterine paradise where "bodies and the space surrounding them are perceived as a single, unified interior."

Key Claims

Dalí's theoretical and representational premise was Heraclitus's fragment φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεί ("nature loves to hide"), which he subtitled "The Tears of Heraclitus" as the fourth and final section of The Conquest of the Irrational (1935); by then the fragment had appeared in five of his published essays, from the opening sentence of his 1927 debut essay "Saint Sebastian" in L'Amic de les Arts — subheaded "Irony," "a foundational step toward the complex representational ironies of surrealism."
The aphorism's obscurity has a classical pedigree: around 45 BCE Cicero described Heraclitus as obscure by inserting the Greek σκοτείνός (dark) into his Latin text.
Alberto Savinio (Andrea Francesco Alberto di Chirico, younger brother of painter Giorgio de Chirico) supplied Dalí's interpretive frame in 1919 (Valori Plastici): irony is "the most important theoretical principle in painting," "the ethical consequence of nature's nudity," leading artists "to develop modes of morality that conceal the 'terribly clear appearances' they perceive" — morality taking "the form of distortions in their representations of nature's appearance."
Savinio's second interpretation: nature seeks to hide from herself through "self-directed modesty," so that in reality — "not only in representation" — "natural objects do not reveal themselves through their appearance"; painters "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."
Dalí internalized Savinio within months of his debut: the 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'" (1927) — irony understood not as painterly distortion but as "nature's self-concealment and the necessity of ironic representation."
Dalí's 1932 essay The Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment categorizes surrealist objects "based on the desire that the object generates," measured by the action induced — four increasing levels of engagement: taking no part in them; the object acting upon contemplation; the object operating symbolically and able to be acted upon; and finally the object "bring[ing] about a desire to be eaten [sic]." See surrealist-object.
Man Ray's photographs of figures wrapped and tied with string bridge the stages between contemplation and action: the wrappings "produced the urge to explore them tactilely, so that one might identify through touch what their wrappings concealed."
Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical paintings supply the first surrealist objects — "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" (Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits, 1916, reproduced as Figure 24.1). See metaphysical-art.
The desire behind the objects is unifying and total: "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'" — the surrealist preoccupation Weir names "cannibalism of objects."
Dalí posed the hunger as a production problem: "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'" (Psychoatmospheric-Anamorphic Objects, 1932); a year later the "half made of stone, half of poached egg" table has its triumphal moment "cooling slowly in the late afternoon breeze while suspended between two poplar trees in the forest of Ermenonville."
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942) gives the edible table's full manufacturing recipe — a celluloid mold of "a Louis XIV table," poured egg whites hardened in a hot-water bath, yolks introduced "by means of tubes," a coating of pulverized egg shell and resin polished with ground pumice — alongside the proposal for a Venus de Milo similarly made of eggs: "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 Lobster Telephone (1936; working versions made for collector Edward James) shares the structure — "rigid structural exoskeleton and soft nutritious interior" — and exposes the mechanism: "only the elegant concealing shell is visible; vision is displaced from the true object of desire to that which conceals it."
Consumption would make the displacement "terribly clear" (Savinio's term); hence abstinence: "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. The operative moral position, which Savinio described as a response to nature's nudity, is abstinence" — an abstinence that is "only feigned," "our moral and theatrical demonstrations of abstinence" resisting an interior ("the imagined egg and lobster flesh") that is "unambiguously implied, but only imagined."
The surrealist act was methodological, not culinary: "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." See paranoiac-critical-method.
The chapter's thesis on the objects: "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."
The Oval Room interiorizes the displacement of desire in architecture: in the labyrinthine hillside house at Port Lligat (built progressively over five decades), the approximately hemispherical Oval Room was "conceived as an architectural analogue of the egg" — continuous pink couches interrupted only by the entry passage and broad fireplace, sight lines directed by form and curvature across the center of the floor, posture oriented away from the exit, windows that "admit no views outside," a thermal environment separated from the prevailing weather, and a low-domed ceiling that "exclude[s] outside sound and amplify[ies] the noises of the room's occupants. The total effect is a powerful sense of enclosure and interiority." See intrauterine-paradise, interiority, enclosure.
The room's concealment is itself designed: "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" (to Gala's bathroom, and via a windowed exterior door to a private perimeter passageway); its remaining walls carry photographs and magazine covers of Dalí and Gala's public life, and among small deliberate irregularities (a chamfered corner, a suspended cupboard with a short stepladder, a recessed cupboard) "it is effectively imperceptible that the recessed cupboard door in the corner conceals a short passageway leading to the Oval Room."
The architectural resolution of the concealment premise: "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." See intrauterine-paradise.
The room domesticates the aphorism's universalism: "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."
Hunger is finally contained rather than resisted: "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."
The chapter's closing: "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."

Connections

Concepts: surrealism · concealment · surrealist-object · cannibalism-of-objects · intrauterine-paradise · paranoiac-critical-method · metaphysical-art · interiority · enclosure · inside-outside-dialectic · anamorphosis · symbolism Authors: Simon Weir · Gregory Marinic (ed.) Debates: truth-and-illusion — the shell's unbroken illusion as the deliberate maintenance of appearance over truth Related source notes: La Coe — Quadrature — the Baroque prehistory of concealed images (anamorphosis as "a vehicle for concealment"), which Dalí's "psychoatmospheric-anamorphic objects" carry into the designed object · Fuss & Sanders — Berggasse 19 — the other designed room housing a psychic program: Freud's consulting room vs Dalí's Oval Room · Treadwell — Oceanic interiorities — the "uterine immersive interior" as the permeable counterpart of Dalí's sealed intrauterine room · Bachelard — The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the intimate interior whose "finitude is a capacity to be grasped" · Manack — Fabricating interiority — interiority as manufactured artifice vs Weir's interiority as designed concealment.

Direct Quotes

Page numbers are not available in the chapter text; quotes are located by section and content.

"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.'" (opening)

"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." (on Savinio, 1919)

"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." (on Savinio's second interpretation)

"Thus, the deeper aim of metaphysical art was to use representative painting to reveal what is hidden by appearance." (on Savinio)

"an elevated concept of irony [that] is the equivalent of naked reality … [and] that may be seen at present in my works." (Dalí, 1927, quoted)

"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." (framing)

"what matters is the way in which the experiments revealed the desire for the object, the tangible object." (Dalí, 1932, quoted)

"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 [sic]." (Dalí's four levels, quoted)

"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." (Dalí, quoted)

"to form a whole with it, to dissolve the separation between the desired and desirer; 'their existence brings us to want to eat them.'" (on the general urge to unify with the desired)

"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.'" (Dalí, 1932, quoted)

"the well-known and much desired table that is half made of stone, half of poached egg" … "cooling slowly in the late afternoon breeze while suspended between two poplar trees in the forest of Ermenonville." (Dalí, 1933, quoted)

"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." (Dalí, The Secret Life, 1942, quoted — the edible-table recipe)

"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." (Dalí, quoted — the egg-built Venus de Milo)

"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."

"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."

"The operative moral position, which Savinio described as a response to nature's nudity, is abstinence."

"The surrealist act was the invention of the method to produce such objects, not the preparation and eating of the objects themselves."

"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." (thesis on the objects)

"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."

"One of the most extraordinary spaces, the approximately hemispherical Oval Room, was conceived as an architectural analogue of the egg."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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." (closing)

Open Questions

The chapter's Notes list sources (Dalí, Diary of a Genius, pp. 159–160; The Secret Life, pp. 82–83; Breton, What Is Surrealism?, p. 59) whose in-text passages are not preserved in this excerpt — the chapter evidently continues beyond the sections preserved here. What does the fuller text add on the egg symbolism and the intrauterine paradise?
The eggshell table and egg-built Venus were never produced, and the lobster "is only a painted replica": is the objects' unproductability structural (abstinence as the work's operative moral position) or accidental to manufacture?
The Oval Room survives as part of the Dalí house-museum at Port Lligat: what happens to a concealment designed for the occupant's intrauterine paradise when it becomes the visitor's destination? See house-museum.
Does Savinio's demand that art "reveal what is hidden by appearance" get fulfilled or abandoned by Dalí's objects that "reproduce nature's concealment" — is reproduction the program's completion or its ironic failure?

Notes

The chapter is Chapter 24 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge, 2018); written for the Reader, not a reprint.
The chapter's key sources on Dalí: The Conquest of the Irrational (1935); "Sant Sebastia" and other L'Amic de les Arts essays (1927–28); Savinio, "Anadymenon: Principles in the Evaluation of Contemporary Art," Valori Plastici nos. IV–V (1919); "The Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment," This Quarter 5, no. 1 (1932); "Objets psycho-atmosphériques-anamorphiques," Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution no. 6 (1932); letter to Breton (Galerie Pierre Colle, 1933); The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942); Diary of a Genius (1964); Breton, What Is Surrealism? (1936).
Figure credits: di Chirico's Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits (1916, The Menil Collection, Houston); the Lobster Telephone (1936, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Purchased 1994); the Oval Room photographed by Simon Weir.