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IN NOVEMBER OF 1954, Salvador Dalí sat for a series of portraits by Philippe Halsman. Halsman, with 101
Life covers to his credit, had a reputation both for his European good manners and his strange sense of humor. He had previously collaborated with Dalí on a portrait that Halsman called “Dalí Atomicus,” consisting of the artist, his easel, his furniture, a tossed bucket of water and his cats floating strangely in the air. This portrait had been laborious to create, requiring numerous assistants to throw each object into the air on Halsman’s cue. After several dozen takes, the cats were soaked and irritable. Dalí, however, adored the image.
Halsman wanted to focus on Dalí’s mustache for the new series of portraits. “With the death of Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler and Stalin, with Chaplin’s withdrawal from the screen. The era of great mustaches seemed to have come to an end,” Halsman wrote. “A desolate, whiskerless vacuum followed.”
Having noticed that Dalí’s mustache had now grown to meet his eyebrows, Halsman declared it “the great mustache of our times.”
Halsman spent several weeks shaping Dalí’s mustache, forcing it through Swiss cheese or hanging items from it, and manipulating the resulting photographs until he had completed a series of portraits. Dalí's mustache — and the man behind it — had become a celebrity.
Dalí and Halsman shared a love of Freud. Halsman thought of himself as something of a psychoanalyst, using his camera to strip away his subjects’ masks and reveal their hidden interiors. In one photographic session, he and two of his assistants backed Marilyn Monroe into a corner and took turns flattering her and making suggestive comments. Over an hour or so, Halsman photographed her responses, creating a portrait of Monroe that displayed both her fragility and her boundless sexuality. In the photograph, she leans forward from the wall, eyes half-closed, mouth open slightly, pouting. Her stance seems to suggest both desire and concession, as though Monroe had abandoned herself to the men photographing her. Unable to escape either their camera or their sexual innuendos, she had given in to both in a display of thrilling passivity.
Famous though this image might be, revealing a moment of sexual surrender that would have delighted the Marquis De Sade, we cannot know if Halsman had uncovered anything new about Monroe. Despite his psychoanalytical pretensions, Halsman was more a publicist than an analyst; The Monroe in his photograph was exactly the Monroe the public expected, and very likely the image that Monroe wanted. She had mastered her own public image, and controlled it with near ferocity. It was not Halsman who, with his photograph, discovered that Monroe was De Sade’s Justine — eternally naive, eternally experimental, eternally erotic. Monroe had always been those things for photographers, and would be again.
Likewise, despite such camera trickery as inserting Dalí’s face into a melting watch from “The Persistence of Memory,” Halsman’s portraits of Dalí reveal very little about the man. The photographs were a collaboration between the two men, with Halsman asking impertinent questions (“Confidentially, aren’t you an extroverted exhibitionist?”) and Dalí responding with equally impertinent answers (“Nonsense, I am an ingrown introvert”). The two would then concoct a photograph to dramatize their exchange; for example the photograph accompanying the preceding parenthetical exchange has Dalí’s mustache curling up into his nostrils. Had some previously hidden aspect of Dalí been reveled by this process? Hardly, although it made for a witty photograph.
Dalí’s collaboration with Halsman produced a charming, instantly popular book called
Dalí’s Mustache. It was an easy, audience-friendly piece of surrealism, and a precursor to Andy Warhol’s experiments with pop art. Warhol would abandon the pretense of psychological depth found throughout Dalí’s Mustache, instead opting for a public persona that was meticulously shallow. But, like Dalí, he shared a fascination with the artist as a celebrity and, again like Dalí, he was adept at manipulating the media.
George Orwell hated Dalí. In 1946, he published an essay titled “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí,” reviewing the artists’ recently published autobiography
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. “It is a book that stinks,” Orwell wrote. “If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would.”
Orwell was both horrified by Dalí’s artwork, which seemed to him to contain all manner of sexual perversity, and by Dalí’s life. Intensely political, Orwell balked at Dalí’s pronouncements about politics (at first apolitical, Dalí would eventually declare himself to be in favor of monarchy), his religious affiliations (Dalí’s work, in his later years, would come to be dominated by Catholic imagery), and his history (Orwell had participated in the Spanish Civil War, while Dalí fled the country). Most of all, Orwell was horrified at Dalí’s love of the grotesque. While conceding that much of Dalí’s autobiography might be fiction, he nevertheless was outraged by Dalí’s frequent descriptions of physical and psychological violence — for example, Dalí claims to have discovered a bat swarming with ants when he was a child. Seized by an uncontrollable impulse, Dalí bit the animal nearly in half. “If you say that Dalí, though a brilliant draftsman, is a dirty little scoundrel,” Orwell wrote in frustration, “you are looked upon as a savage.”
Orwell had little background in surrealism, and even less in Freud. But unlike Orwell, unlike Halsman, even unlike the surrealists, Dalí understood Freud. While the surrealists seemed to limit their obsession of Freud to his theories about the unconscious mind, using madness as a metaphor for artistic liberation, Dalí investigated the writings of Sigmund Freud with an artistic fervor that left his fellow artists a little unnerved. While they toyed with automatic writing and dream images for inspiration, Dalí used his mastery of classic artistic techniques to crack open his psyche with a realism that was dumbfounding. The painted canvas, traditionally a tricky medium for the expression of complex ideas, overflowed with savage, intellectually rich imagery when Dalí was at work. Of Dalí, Freud himself wrote, “Until now, I have been inclined to regard the Surrealists, who have apparently adopted me as their patron saint, as complete fools (let us say 95%, as with alcohol.)” But Dalí had struck Freud differently. “That young Spaniard, with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery has changed my estimate. It would indeed be interesting to investigate analytically how he came to create that picture . . .”
It is not certain which picture Freud refers to, but any of Dalí’s early works could have provoked such a reaction. Dalí’s artistic approach, which he called the “paranoiac-critical” technique, was dense with Freud. Dalí had a deeper understanding of paranoia than has entered into popular culture — he viewed it as an intelligent, active madness, where the paranoiac relentlessly seeks unrelated events to bind together into a single obsession.
“The only difference between myself an a madman,” Dalí wrote, “is that I am not mad.” As flippant as this comment might sound, in the context of his artistic approach it made sense. Dalí attempted to use the intelligence of a paranoiac to investigate his own soul, and as a result his paintings became thick with images that contained double meaning, as well as images that — viewed from a distance or another angle — turned into a second image. He drew ceaselessly from his surrounding, incorporating a variety of sources into his work. One painting might contain autobiographical references, images from art history, images stolen from surrealist poetry, even images drawn from the world surrounding Dalí — such as eroticized images of Adolph Hitler.
And it was here that Dalí started to get into trouble.
As much as Dalí understood the internal, unconscious world, he had very little grasp of anything beyond that. His confusion concerning money is legendary. As a child he would exchange large sums of money for smaller sums, believing he had found a method to make himself wealthy (even as an adult he believed that $500 worth of small bills was worth more than one $1,000 bill. His response to dire economic conditions was to “tip more.”)
The whole waking world seemed obscure to him, as just more fodder for his subconscious. Hitler, for example, existed less as a real man than as a recurring, dreamlike image, and his exploration of this image led to his break with the Surrealist movement in 1939.
The painting was called “The Enigma of Hitler,” and recast Hitler as a nurse seated in a puddle of water. Dalí defended his fascination with Adolph Hitler, saying the Fuhrer’s “fat back, especially when I saw him appear in the uniform with a Sam Browne belt and shoulder straps that tightly held in his flesh, aroused in me a delicious gustatory thrill . . . I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman.”
For the remainder of the Surrealist movement, Hitler was something more than a perverse psychological fetish. Led by Andre Breton, Surrealism had become suffused with Marxism. This was a bad fit, as the surrealist sought the abandonment of reason while Marxists prided themselves on their rationalism, but both sought a complete overthrow of the status quo. But the introduction of Marx into this artistic movement had begun to press at its already overstuffed fabric of romantic art, occult science and psychotherapy, and the seams of the movement were near bursting.
Dalí had been quickly embraced by the Surrealists, who respected his artistic skills and envied his powerful intellect, but Dalí remained iconoclastic even in a community of iconoclasts. He rejected their use of automatic writing and collective improvisation early on, and while the movement’s preferences lay completely within the romantic movement, Dalí began to fancy himself something of a neoclassicist. He spent much of his time, not with the theorists who made up the core of the movement, but instead with the so-called “fellow-travelers” of the Surrealist movement — artists whose approaches and philosophies linked them with Surrealism but remained distinct enough that they weren’t accepted by the movement. Despite attempts at reconciliation, the fellows travelers grew alienated from Surrealism, and a wide split developed.
This split was exacerbated by the Surrealist movement's reaction to Dalí’s portrait of Hitler: they took him to trial. “Dalí having been found guilty on several occasions of counter-revolutionary actions involving the glorification of Hitlerian fascism, the undersigned propose . . . that he be excluded from Surrealism as a fascist and combated by all available means,” read a flier circulated before the trial. It hadn’t helped that Dalí had painted a grotesque image of Lenin, with one buttock hideously elongated and supported by a crutch. Neither did it help that Dalí had told a friend, apparently in all seriousness, that whites must join together against darker-colored people.
The trial was a travesty. Dalí, suffering a fever, showed up swaddled in clothes and sucking on a thermometer. Through the course of the event, he obsessed over his temperature, removing or adding clothes to as he overheated or became cold. When he was called on to testify, he refused to remove the thermometer, making his testimony incomprehensible. This was probably for the best, as he told Andre Breton in his defense, “if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail.”
Breton demanded Dalí renounce his ideas about Hitler and swear he was no enemy of the proletarian. Dalí did so, but afterward there would be little to connect him to Surrealism. The artistic movement rapidly deteriorated, and Dalí himself turned increasingly to science for his inspiration. By the end of his life, his art was firmly in the classic tradition, with dashes of pop art and abstract expressionism tossed in for good measure. By the time Halsman photographed him, his most influential artistic achievements lay long behind him. Publicly he was most completely associated with a melted watch, and his participation in the creation of Luis Bunuel’s first two films (
Un Chien Andalou and
La Age d’Or) were almost forgotten in favor of a few incomplete discussions with Walt Disney and Dalí’s design for a dream sequence in a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Although Halsman ends
Dalí’s Mustache with a bland, badly informed discussion of Surrealism, Dalí had long ago stopped being a Surrealist and the movement had ceased to be contemporary.
Halsman was not interested in Dalí as an artist, however. None of the images in their first collaboration, “Dalí Atomica,” came from Dalí’s life or art. Floating cats and furniture do not appear in his paintings, but for Halsman it worked as an easy, humorous shorthand for Surrealism. “A Raphael sought harmony; a surrealist tries to disturb,” Halsman wrote in the postscript to
Dalí’s Mustache, explaining that surrealism uses a deliberately subconscious method of creating art. “If you wince, it is proof positive that he has scored a direct hit on you libido.”
It did not matter to Halsman that this was a simplified vision of Surrealism. Neither did it matter that this discussion was unimportant. Dalí had long ago declared of himself, “I am surrealism,” and that was enough for Halsman to build from. He took pleasure in goofily off-kilter pictures (such as his later photograph of Richard Nixon, in which he instructed the then-vice president to “jump”), and with Dalí’s help his was able to create dozens of them.
Halsman was obsessed with fame. His photographs for the cover of
Life included Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Louis Armstrong, and a picture of Janet Leigh with 11 fezzes propped on her head (among his more usual photos of twin debutantes and “bubble bath girls”), and he had a powerful eye for images. In an America that was becoming increasingly obsessed with the celebrity, he was the perfect photographer (in 1958 P
opular Photography Magazine voted him among the 10 greatest living photographers), as he was able to create unusual, instantly recognizable images from the easy anonymity of the human face. He made those faces indelible, unforgettable, even when the subjects of the portrait would eventually slip out of the public eye (we’ll never remember the models for “Tricky Beach Towels,” but the image retains its fascination).
With celebrities, Halsman could take this a step further. The public owns a shared knowledge of a celebrity, and Halsman played on that, toying with our sense of knowing and expanding it. With comics, he frequently placed them against a bold white background. He would talk endlessly with his subjects, tossing out offhand questions and photographing their responses, and with the comics this frequently produced both a humorous image and a surprising sense of fragility.
Dalí was Halsman’s perfect subject. The public understood that he was a Surrealist, and understood that he was shocking. They needed to understand no more, and Halsman explored nothing more. “Warning,” reads the back of
Dalí’s Mustache, “This book is preposterous.” Preposterous, yes. Surreal — no, and neither is it a biographical exploration of Dalí.
It does not matter, though. Dalí, while continuing to make complex, personal paintings, loved his status as a celebrity and exploited it for the remainder of his life. He would appear in television commercials and public lectures, portraying an oversized caricature of his public persona — a persona Halsman had helped him create.
Dalí’s last photographs from the 1970s are difficult to look at. An old man, he had been severely burned in a house fire and his health had deteriorated. Additionally, he had developed a psychological aversion to swallowing, and so was fed by a plastic tube that was inserted through his nose, and he wore this tube all the time. Fragile and terrified, these photographs seem to peer farther into Dalí’s soul than Halsman ever approached. This is the Dalí of the real world, wracked by pain and facing death. But this was a world Dalí did not understand well, and he was a man of endless self-invention. In the end, the photograph that Dalí selected as representing him best was one of Halsman’s: the artist’s face, photographed from an angle and then paired with a mirror image of itself. It has turned cyclopean as a result, with once eye suspended above a bulbous nose that seems to hang in the air. It is an image entirely separated from nature. The publisher notes of this image that “the mayor of Malaga, Spain. asked him for permission to build a statue of him, Dalí gave this picture as the model to be used. A three-dimensional effigy was built, 30 feet high, and then burned . . . in honor of St. Macarius.”
Dalí, whose real face would eventually be burnt in a very different fire, must have seen this and been delighted by it. There, in Spain, to a Saint, Halsman’s image of his face was devoured by flame.
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STAR Adam Sandler and director Frank Coraci have pieced this film together out of fragments of Sandler’s earlier films, so completely that The Waterboy plays almost as a greatest hits album. This should draw critical ire, as original movies should not function as de facto sequels to previous successful films, but such ire would be misplaced. Sandler is the first modern film star to engage in deliberate serialism, each new film drawing from its predecessors and building upon it. It’s a painstaking, minimalist approach to filmmaking, and the closest artistic comparison would be composer Philip Glass, whose compositions consist entirely of multiple variations on very simple pieces. But Glass plays to Carnegy Hall, while Sandler plays to football stadiums, and each artist must rise or stoop to the level of their audience. From the grunts and cheers of the letter-jacket bedecked audience that showed up in droves for The Waterboy’s opening weekend, it is obvious that Sandler’s serialism stoops to conquer. 
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