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Larger Image	Larger image may be viewed by UofL faculty, staff, and students only (log-in required using ULink username/password) at: http://echo.louisville.edu/login?url=http://vrc-web.louisville.edu/Jpegs/2440/2447-19.jpg
Title	Outskirts of the Paranoiac-Critical Town.
Creator	Dali, Salvador (Spanish painter and printmaker, 1904-1989)
Date	1936
Cultural Context	Spanish European Western European
Style/Period	Surrealist Modern (styles and periods) Modernist
Theme	Paintings (visual works) Oil paintings (visual works) Panel paintings (painting by form) Avant-garde Fantasy Imagery Symbols Symbolism (artistic concept) Motifs Fear Anxiety Sex Sexuality Eroticism Phallic Motion Gesture Figurative art Figures (representations) Front views Women Portraits Wives Children (people by age group) Girls Costume (mode of fashion) Shirts Blouses (main garments) Skirts (garments) Necklaces Neckwear Jewelry Dresses (garments) Towns Townscapes (representations) Cityscapes (representations) Streets Roads Streetscapes Architecture (object genre) Buildings Façades Exterior views Architectural elements Exterior walls Walls Porticoes Cupolas Belfries (equipment spaces) Bell towers Towers (building divisions) Bells (idiophones) Arches Arcades (structural assemblies) Archways Ruins Crutches (equipment) Amphorae (storage vessels) Storage vessels Vessels (containers) Vases Containers (receptacles) Keys (adjusting equipment) Safes (storage containers) Skull (skeleton component) Fruit Food Horses Animals Back views Chairs (furniture forms) Seating furniture Furniture Armchairs Arms (furniture components) Armrests (object genre) Backs (furniture components) Slipcovers (furniture coverings) Coverings Upholstery Clouds Sky Eye-level views
Subject	Paintings Oil paintings Fantasy Symbols Fear Anxiety Lust Sex Invitations Gestures Locomotion Human locomotion Women Portraits Spouses Children Girls Clothing & dress Shirts Necklaces Neckwear Jewelry Dresses Cities & towns Cityscapes Streets Roads Architecture Buildings Facades Architectural elements Walls Porticoes (Porches) Cupolas Bell towers Towers Bells Arches Arcades (Architectural components) Ruins Crutches Containers Vases Keys (Hardware) Keyholes Safes Skulls Grapes Fruit Food Horses Animals Backs (Anatomy) Chairs Seating furniture Furniture Upholstery Clouds
Description	"The painting belonged to Edward James. The 'paranoiac-critical town' is composed of elements principally from Cadaqués and Palamós." (Caption); "The reference was to Outskirts of the Paranoiac-Critical Town, one of Dali's finest and most complex paintings of this period, which [Edward] James had undertaken to purchase. The picture was begun in Palamós just before the tragedy (Dali later said that it was 'painted' there), and contains two architectural elements taken from the town: the tall portico of the building on the left (reminiscent of De Chirico) echoes that of the Casino la Unión, and the cupola that crowns it is a stylized version of the dome that topped the imposing Art Nouveau mansion belonging to the Ribera family. Both buildings were demolished in the 1970s. The painting, of modest dimensions (46 x 66 cm), is almost an anthology of the motifs currently obsessing Dali, and contains a plethora of precise detail. At the right, a picture-postcard-style evocation of the Carrer del Call in Cadaqués shows that Dali's village forms an integral part of the 'paranoiac-critical' town which a friendly Gala, proffering a bunch of black grapes, invites us to enter. But why did Dali choose to represent Cadaqués by this particular street? Not, presumably, because, as its name shows, it was once the hub of the Jewish quarter (call means ghetto). Nor only because of its picturesqueness (Cadaqués has any number of charming corners and perspectives). A more likely reason is that, as Dali well knew, his paranoiac grandfather Gal Dali had lived only a few steps away. On top of the safe in the foreground lies a golden key, and in the keyhole we see the minute image of a child echoed by the figure lingering under the archway at the end of the street. Might the suggestion not be that Gal is the key, or one of the keys, to the understanding of Dali's personality? It seems a reasonable hypothesis. Cadaqués, which according to Dali boasts 'the greatest paranoiacs produced by the Mediterranean', was the birthplace of the unhappy grandfather who, in a burst of madness, had killed himself in Barcelona. How could the painter ever forget that? Or not worry that he himself might have inherited a paranoid tendency from his ancestor? […] The crumbling portico to the 'paranoiac-critical' town, held up by a crutch and containing a visual trick indebted to Magritte, is echoed by the tower behind with its bell in the shape of a girl. It seems that Dali maintained that the tower evokes that of Vilabertran, the village a few kilometers outside Figueres which as an adolescent he had often visited with his friends. But it is difficult to see any similarity, for the tower in question is Romanesque. As for the bell-girl, she was inspired by the campanile of Anna Maria Dali's convent school in Figueres, which, as is shown by Girl from Figueres (1926), was visible from the family terrace. It had a classical pediment and round arch, although no ball finial, and was destroyed during the civil war. […] We have seen that Dali explained on several occasions that as an adolescent his masturbatory fantasies were habitually set in three superimposed belfries: those of Sant Pere in Figueres, Sant Narcís in Girona and a church in Delft painted by Vermeer. The belfry of Anna Maria's convent was a later addition to these, and it seems fair to assume that the swinging girl-bell, so ubiquitous in the artist's work from 1935 onwards, represents Dali as Masturbator. […] In the foreground [of Landscape with a Girl Skipping (1936)], as in Outskirts of the Paranoiac-Critical Town and so many other pictures and drawings done over the years, a girl in a white dress runs skipping. Dali told Antoni Pitxot that she represented his cousin (in fact aunt) Carolineta, who […] died in 1914 when Salvador was ten, occasioning grief in the family. […] Many elements in Outskirts of the Paranoiac-Critical Town serve deliberately to confuse and disturb the viewer. Gala's bunch of grapes is echoed in the delineation of the horse's rear parts (not least in its testicles); the eye sockets of the skull on the table correspond to the spaces within the handles of the nearby amphora; the arcaded building is repeated in miniature on top of the cushion at bottom left; the keyhole of the drawer above this is equivalent to that of the safe at bottom right; the tiny bells relate to the figures on top of the arcaded building; and so on. If paranoia, in Dali's conception, involves the 'delirious association' of images, there could be no better example than this of his determination to express the phenomenon in his art and, in the process, to induce in the viewer, if not a paranoiac delirium, at least a dérèglement des sens." (Excerpts, pp.404-406)
People Pictured	Dalí, Gala
Location Depicted	Cadaqués (Spain) Palamós (Spain) Spain
Material	Oil on panel Oil paint (pigmented coating) Paint Panels (wood)
Measurements	46 x 66 cm
Technique	Oil painting (technique) Painting (image-making) Panel painting (image-making)
Work Type	Oil paintings Paintings Panel paintings (painting by form)
Repository	Private collection
Source	Gibson, Ian. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. New York; London: W.W. Norton, 1998. (Color plate XXVII)
Rights	Photograph reproduced in Gibson courtesy: The Bridgeman Art Library International, Ltd., London, New York.
Digital Publisher	University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center
Format	image/jpeg
Digital File Name	VRC 2447-19.jpg
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