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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) |
