From Spain, by way of Paris, comes this intriguing artist who paints portraits of personality rather than of appearance.
Mary Anderson, Who-When-Where, Belleview Biltmore, Belleair, Florida, May 24, 1941, 1.
As a young man, Dalí was a prolific portrait painter, producing numerous likenesses of friends, family and those he admired. “Even as a child,” writes Dalí’s early biographer Fleur Cowles, “he was never able to resist the urge to paint the people around him.”[1] Using various experimental styles and techniques as he developed as an artist, these works introduce us to Dalí’s immediate circle during different times of his life; the people he loved, admired and emulated, or perhaps who were simply willing to act as his models. Indeed, one of the pleasures of Dalí’s early portraits is to be found in viewing those close to him through the eyes of the painter.
Dali also produced a quantity of highly accomplished self-portraits, ranging in style from Impressionist to Cubist, as well as dabbling with humorous drawing and caricature. 1929 was a momentous years for the artist, having met his beloved future wife Gala in that year, which initiated a lifetime of recording her likeness. That same year he also painted her husband at the time, the poet Paul Eluard, stating “I felt it incumbent on me to fix forever the poet from whose Olympus I had stolen one of the Muses.”[2] About that time Dalí and his father acrimoniously broke relations for many years, in part, because his father was scandalized by a drawing Dalí exhibited in Paris with the caption “Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother’s portrait.”[3] Although he had already been influenced by the Surrealists for about two years, it was also in 1929 that he finally joined the Surrealist movement.
All these events were to greatly impact Dalí’s life, and put him on the course that was to make him a world-famous artist. Moving from Spain to Paris in the early 1930s with Gala, Dalí rapidly became the star of the Surrealist roster, and began moving in the city’s most artistic and aristocratic circles. In Paris he very much embraced the world of fashion and design, and his quirky Surrealist style and approach quickly became de rigueur in Parisian society. As he wrote in his autobiography, with a characteristic lack of modesty, “I was able to perceive my imprint here and there merely in walking about the streets; laces, night clubs, shoes, films — hundreds of people were working and earning an honest living as a result of my influence . . .”[4]
While Dalí’s career progressed, however, his relations did not run smoothly with the Surrealists. A committed Communist as a young man, Dalí’s politics began to shift, and by 1934, André Breton had become alarmed by the Spaniard’s fascination with the rise of Adolf Hitler. Calling him before a “court” of fellow artists to explain his political affinities, he demanded Dalí explain what he believed was an unhealthy interest in Germany’s then-Chancellor. Stating his “case” through an absurd and comedic performance, Dalí managed to vindicate himself and stay within the fold, although he continued to be viewed with suspicion by many of his Surrealist colleagues, and especially by Breton.
As the decade wore on, Dalí became increasingly interested in the fruits of capitalism, especially as made manifest in American culture. As his biographer Ian Gibson wittily quipped, “Dalí had come to the conclusion by this time that Karl Marx was out and the Marx Brothers were in.”[5] The artist was immensely intrigued by America, which he was determined to “conquer,” and writes in his autobiography that before his first voyage, while in Paris he would thumb through copies of The New Yorker and Town and Country and would “sniff, so to speak, with the voluptuousness with which one welcomes the first whiffs of the inaugural fragrances of a sensational meal of which one is about to partake.”[6]
Aided largely by his American art dealer Julien Levy, Dalí made three highly publicized voyages to the U.S., in 1934, 1936 and 1939. Thanks to his intensely original artwork, his outrageous antics, and a few choice scandals, Dalí did succeed in making a deep impact on the American cultural imagination, and enjoyed tremendous celebrity in the U.S. as a result. As in Paris, he quickly grew to be seen as an immensely amusing eccentric and fashionable figure, and all of his public antics, his dabbling in popular culture, and the style and quality of his paintings were minutely detailed in the American newspapers and magazines. In two short years, his popularity in fact became so great that in December of 1936, he found himself on the cover of Time magazine. His most blatant and notorious concession to contemporary American culture occurred at the end of the decade, when he was engaged to design a Surrealist funhouse-cum-girlie show that was located the midway section of the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
While Dalí’s outlandish antics and popular appeal delighted audiences in both Europe and the U.S., they increasingly embarrassed the Surrealists for whom Dalí was, in the public eye, the official spokesperson. This was exacerbated by the fact that as the Spanish Civil War progressed, the artist increasingly embraced Catholicism and monarchism, and his politics shifted incrementally to the right. Consequently, by the end of the decade, Breton officially ousted Dalí from the movement, and gave him the epithet that has lasted nearly a century, of “Avida Dollars,” meaning “greedy dollars,” referring to the artist’s apparent love of American currency.
In his 1942 autobiography Dalí made it perfectly clear that he had no intention of being a “starving artist,” and throughout the 1930s he actively sought and relied upon patronage to fund his work. His first benefactors were a collective of twelve moneyed individuals in something called the Zodiac group, who banded together in Paris in 1932 to help the struggling artist. The arrangement was that each would sponsor Dalí for one month of the year and in return would receive a choice of his artwork. Among the group were five individuals from the Americas, including the writer Julien Green and his sister Anne, publisher and inventor of the brassière, Caresse Crosby, Marquesa Tota Cuevas de Vera (not to be mixed up with Margaret Rockefeller Strong, wife of the Marquis de Cuevas, whom Dalí painted in 1942), and Cuban architect and designer Emilio Terry. Several portrait commissions ensued from connections with the Zodiac, and when it dissolved in 1936, Dalí turned next to the immensely wealthy English poet Edward James, an occasional collaborator, who purchased what was officially all of Dalí’s work for the following two years. James too had his portrait painted by Dalí, appearing as a tiny standing figure in a work entitled Swans Reflecting Elephants, of 1937.
For Dalí there had always been close ties between patronage and portraiture, and this no doubt informed his desire to showcase his portrait painting during his first visit to the U.S. This was accomplished at Julien Levy’s commercial New York gallery at 602 Madison Avenue, where two of his portraits were shown privately for three days between January 10 and 13th, 1935. Notably, both subjects were from the Americas, a fact that clearly signalled that the artist was “open for business” in New York as a portrait painter. Indeed, it turned out to be the beginning of a very lucrative venture for the artist on the American continent. Having established a name in portraiture there in the 1930s, for the following three decades Dalí enjoyed a steady stream of commissions from Americans, Canadians and South Americans, as well as expats and émigrés from other continents who were living in the Americas.
The subjects for this small showing were Americans Edward Wassermann, and Isabelle Baker Woolley. A reporter for The New York Times attended a preview, which he covered with the headline “Surrealists’ Art is Puzzle No More: You Don't Have to Know What It Means, Because Painter Doesn’t Either, Dalí Says.” This humorous approach very much reveals the bemused view many people held of Surrealism at the time: that it did not make much sense, but was fun and novel just the same. At the press preview Dalí apparently spoke in French, which was interpreted by Julien Levy. He told reporters that “In my painting I aim to portray the subconscious as realistically as other artists depict the objective world,” and it was explained that he had “trained himself to remember dreams in great detail and at times records these on canvas — not always realizing their meaning . . ."[7] Dalí further revealed that his method was to first paint the model realistically, and that once this was complete, the model’s personality would generate symbols of itself in Dalí’s mind, which he then painted around them.[8]
Portrait of Edward Wassermann/Waterman, 1933. Oil on canvas on cardboard, 39.5 x 30.5 cm (15.55” x 12.01”). Private collection.
This explanation helps inform the reading of Portrait of Edward Wassermann, Dalí’s earliest society portrait featuring an American subject, executed in 1933. The portrait is sometimes entitled Portrait of Edward Waterman, as Wassermann changed his name to Waterman in 1942. Meticulously executed on canvas attached to a small piece of card, its dreamscape format and Freudian-style symbolism recalls the artist’s similar early Surrealist portraits such as Portrait of Paul Éluard of 1929 and Portrait of Marie-Laure de Noailles of 1932. The subject Edward Wassermann (b. circa 1904) was a millionaire banker from New York, who had inherited part of a fortune, via his mother, from the financial empire of the Seligman brothers, a Jewish-American family with roots in Bavaria.[9] His father was an art collector who specialized in antique Chinese porcelains, and like his father, “Eddie,” as he was known, was a cultural enthusiast and art collector, as well as being an accomplished writer and literary critic. Well connected to a number of other writers of note, his circle included the likes of Muriel Draper, Gertrude Stein, and Somerset Maugham. He was also an avid patron of the Harlem Renaissance, and was particularly good friends with Harlem School novelist Nella Larsen.[10]
An energetic bon-vivant, Wassermann appeared frequently in New York’s society pages, particularly in relation to the elegant dinner parties he hosted at his East Thirtieth Street residence. He also spent a good deal of time in Paris where as a young man he was stationed as a sergeant in the American army during the First World War. A lively part of this period was detailed in a memoir he wrote about his close friendship with the writer and poet Anatole France.[11] A keen traveller, the wealthy banker also documented an account of his trip around the world in 1937. Unabashedly partaking of nothing but the finest each country had to offer, the tome was aptly titled Velvet Voyaging. In the introduction Wassermann explains that, as he made his way through Bombay, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, China, Japan and other “exotic” locales, he “travelled as expensively as [he] could, and had every luxury available wherever [he] went.”[12]
Carl Van Vechten, Portrait of Edward Wassermann/Waterman, black and white photograph, dated February 23, 1933. See Wassermann, Edward” folder, Box v. 36, Wagner-Westley Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Paris is presumably where Wassermann first encountered Dalí and commissioned the portrait, as it was completed in 1933, a year before the artist took his first journey to America. It is not surprising the two would cross paths, as Dalí and Wassermann moved in similar literary and artistic circles of the epoch, and both, it should be noted, were photographed by American arts photographer Carl Van Vechten. Photographs taken by Van Vechten of Wassermann in 1933 are in fact so similar to his likeness in Dalí’s painting that it is quite probable the artist worked from one of these, rather than from life.
Whatever the process may have been, Portrait of Edward Wassermann was in America in early 1935, where it was part of the weekend-only showing of Dalí’s work at the Julien Levy Gallery. A New York Times review, written January 12th, 1935, describes the work in detail. “Wassermann is a bust, with a crack in one shoulder,” it begins.“This bust has been placed beneath a kind of arch, part of which is suffused with a lovely red light. There are greenlighted rocks beyond and, facing them, a tiny figure of a nude woman. In the foreground birds are flying; Mr. Wassermann’s tie is lavender, and it becomes, as you look at it, a hand with varnished red fingernails.”[13]
The subject is a dashing, modern figure, with his dapper suit, smooth, handsome features, and fashionably brilliantined hair. Wassermann’s torso, comprised of a pierced rock, is shaped to evoke a classic bust. The necktie, which transforms into a manicured female hand, is a familiar Surrealist trope, reflecting the group's fascination with the uncanny appeal of the disembodied hand or glove. As evinced in period literature, Wassermann was gay, which perhaps lends the lavender tie and woman’s hand specific meaning, suggesting effeminacy. While this may be an unsubtle allusion to Wassermann’s sexual preference, it is worth noting that in a 1935 portrait of him by the French painter Marie Laurencin, Wassermann’s hands are depicted as remarkably delicate.
The bean-shaped object perched precariously on the arch above the subject is a familiar fixture in Dalí’s work of the 1930s, often paired with a converse one in a yin-yang configuration, and sometimes in the context of birth or rebirth. Its precise significance is uncertain, but variations of it can be found in a number of Dalí’s portraits until the end of the 1960s. Of note, the rocky outcropping above it to the right has a spoon protruding from it, as if it were feeding a baby. This, along with the appearance of the wooden bedside table into which a small flock of birds is flying, is another curious addition. In Dalí’s visual lexicon, the bedside table appears almost exclusively in works that have to do with the Spanish Civil War and events leading up to WWII. The most well-known of these is his controversial The Weaning of Furniture Nutrition of 1934, depicting what he described as a “Hitlerian Nurse” sitting next to a night table, and his Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War of 1936, in which the “soft construction” also rests upon a night table.[14] (The night tables of the day were usually commodes, containing chamber pots. And as such, the illusion may have to do with excrement and its symbolism.) Its inclusion in this portrait is surprising but, considering Dalí’s well-known fascination with what he described as the “Hitlerian phenomenon” around 1933-34, it is possible he was alluding to current political events.
Preliminary sketches for the portrait have survived, and a paper tag marked “Julien Levy Gallery, 602 Madison Avenue” is still attached to the back of the portrait’s frame. The canvas itself, adhered to card, has regrettably not weathered well, and sustains noticeable cracking on the top left quadrant.
Portrait of Mr. Emilio Terry, 1934. Oil on wood panel, 34 x 27 cm (13.39” x 10.63”). Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres.
The year after painting Edward Wassermann, Dalí limned another artistic figure from the Americas who was also living in Paris. This was José Emilio Terry y Sánchez (1890–1969), a member of Dalí’s Zodiac group. Better known under his professional name Emilio Terry, his family made its fortune through the ownership of sugar plantations in Cuba, where Terry was born. Despite considerable personal wealth, Terry worked as an architect, decorator and designer of furniture, textiles and decorative objects that fused classical, baroque and modern styles in novel and often whimsical ways. His chic and elegant works were much sought after, and remain highly collectable to this day.
Terry lived in both Havana and Paris, where he kept an apartment at 2, Place du Palais-Bourbon. In the same year he received Dalí’s portrait, he purchased from a relative the magnificent eighteenth-century Chateau de Rochecotte in Langeais, France, which he meticulously renovated over the course of many decades.[15] Terry was at the centre of Paris’ vanguard in 1920s Paris, and counted among his peers and friends Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Jean-Michel Frank and numerous other artists and designers key to modernist aesthetics. He also enjoyed many wealthy and titled clients, such as the eccentric multimillionaire Carlos de Beistegui, host of the sumptuous Beistegui Ball which Dalí attended in 1951, and ship merchant Stavros Niarchos, whom Dalí was rumored to have painted around 1957. Another notable client was Rainier III, Prince of Monaco and husband of American actress Grace Kelly, whom Dalí was lso rumored, at one time, to be slated to paint.
In the mid-1930s, Dalí and Gala took a house in suburban Paris, in Neuilly out beyond the Lion de Belfort at 101 bis, rue de la Tombe Issoire. Here Dalí maintained a studio, and it was also a place where he and Gala could entertain guests and showcase Dalí’s work. The building was of white stucco, both inside and out, similar to the couple’s Mediterranean-themed quarters in Port Lligat. Already a desirable locale, it was rendered chicly modern due to Terry, who helped with the remodeling.[16] Thanks to research on Dalí’s Zodiac group conducted for her doctoral thesis, Dalí scholar Marijke Verhaar carefully documented Dalí’s relationship with Terry as well as their business arrangements. Accessing the designer’s personal memoirs, and interviewing his relatives, she meticulously records the conditions of the portrait commission and notes that when the two first met in early 1930, Terry remarked that he found Dalí created an atmosphere that was “very intimidating,” and that the artist was “too doctrinaire.”[17]
Permission Pending.
Salvador Dalí, “Emilio,” erotic drawing, ink on paper, 1932.
Despite these early reservations, the two apparently became good friends, and Terry was said to be quite captivated by Dalí’s personality, ideas and art. He was not always impressed by the artist however, and Verhaar documents that after reading Dalí’s 1932 screenplay for his proposed film Babaouo at the Dalís’ one afternoon, Terry described it as nothing less than “presumptuous nonsense.”[18] Also notable is an amusing drawing of erotic figures spelling out the designer’s first name which Dalí drew and gave to Emilio as a gift; an offering which Verhaar believes Dalí made to encourage Terry’s patronage.[19] She records that Terry first posed for Dalí on December 20th, 1932, and two or three times after that, but suggests the portrait was a commission separate from Terry’s Zodiac allotment. Also noted was that Terry and Dalí visited a photographer together in order that the artist could continue working on the portrait using photographs during a visit to Spain. On May 7 1933, Terry visited Dalí in Cadaqués, and upon seeing his unfinished portrait, remarked that the head was “very similar” to his own.[20] Not long after this, Dalí showed the unfinished work in an exhibition at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris, from the 19th to the 29th of June.[21]
While today Portrait of Mr. Emilio Terry is still often documented as unfinished, the artist did in fact complete the work. In May 12, 1934, when the Dalís had just returned again from Spain, Terry writes that he visited the couple and viewed the latest works, including his finished portrait. Terry, it seems, was not enthusiastic about the results, and ruefully wrote in his memoir that there was “little resemblance.”[22] Nevertheless, he lent the portrait to Dalí to be shown later in 1934 in Paris, at the Exposition Dalí at the Jacques Bonjean Gallery, and once again in 1936 in London at the Alex, Reid & Lefevre gallery. By this time their friendship was fading, and Verhaar reports from various sources that by 1934, Terry and Dalí saw little of each other. The last time Dalí is mentioned in Terry’s memoir is November 27, 1936. A relative of Terry’s explained that at that time Dalí’s career was rising in the U.S., the artist was much less often in Paris, and the patronage of the Zodiac had been replaced by that of Edward James.[23]
Portrait of Mr. Emilio Terry depicts the subject sitting across a long table in a room that is defined in sharp, elongated perspective. Wearing a flame-hued smoking jacket and his signature round-framed glasses, Terry sits at his desk or work table and peers up at the viewer, having just, it seems, been interrupted from his sketching. Renowned for his meticulous and fanciful architectural drawings, this is an apt pose for the designer. Verhaar suggests that for the composition Dalí makes reference to academic painters of the late seventeenth century, such as Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743) and Jean-Louis David (1748-1825), who produced portraits of gentleman architects in their studies, surrounded by the accoutrements of their profession.[24] Terry’s surroundings do evoke a study, with the desk or worktable, and the bookcase against the wall, atop of which perch classical busts which were a feature of Terry’s decorating style. This library-like setting is apt, as Terry’s library at Chateau de Rochecotte, full of beautiful and rare books, was to become one of its most notably aspects.
As in Portrait of Edward Wassermann, Dalí has painted birds in the foreground, and here two peck at the ground, while another flies away. Placed upon the table directly in front of Terry is an intricately-shaped object resembling driftwood, inside of which is nestled a tiny piano, complete with sheet music. While one might assume this instrument is a reference to Terry’s musical proclivities, as Verhaar points out, the piano appears frequently in Dalí’s Surrealist works of the 1930 and ‘40s, where its function seems to be that of an uncanny object in an irrational setting. Unique in Dalí’s oeuvre, the surrounding amorphous object may also be a Surrealist inclusion, although as Terry appears to be sketching it, it perhaps represents his inspiration or objects of his imagination.[25]
Clipping from LIFE magazine, December 14, 1936 showing Emilio Terry's architectural maquette for the Maison Colimaçon, “The Snail,” 1933. Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris.
This seems more likely when compared to the object next to it, which is a maquette for one of Terry’s designs of 1933, Maison Colimaçon, otherwise known as “The Snail.” A caption for a photograph of the maquette that appeared in LIFE magazine in December of 1936, regarding the Museum of Modern Art show Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, reads “This is a surrealist house, designed by Emilio Terry,” and claims Terry “boasts that such a house would have all its rooms on the outside.”[26] Those familiar with Dalí’s views on architecture will find this very Dalínian, and Verhaar believes that Terry was deeply influenced by the artist’s ideas about architecture. In particular, those laid out in his 1933 treatise, Concerning the Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Art Nouveau Architecture, which appeared in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in 1933, and lauds the turn of the century “modern style,” and its organic, erotic and “edible” forms.[27] Maison Colimaçon was never built, although the maquette survives in the Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris. Portrait of Mr. Emilio Terry is now owned by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation in Figueres, Spain.
Portrait of Bettina Bergery, 1934. Oil on wood panel, 25.4 x 18.7 cm (10.00” x 7.36”). Balogh Family Foundation. NB: when it was sold by Parke-Bernet Galleries in NYC on October 22, 1952 it came from the Collection Daumerie, Paris.
In the same year as he completed his portrait of Emilio Terry, Dalí produced a portrait whose subject has remained a mystery for many decades, but one of the authors has now identified as the artist’s good friend Bettina Bergery.[28] Bettina was born Elizabeth Shaw-Jones in 1902 in Staten Island, and after visiting Paris in the early 1930s with her two sisters, she decided to stay on. Quickly becoming a fixture of the Paris cultural scene, Bettina knew many of Dalí’s dearest friends, including his benefactor Edward James. She was also close to Caresse Crosby and Marie-Laure de Noailles, members of Dalí’s “Zodiac.” Dalí biographer Meredith Etherington-Smith suggests that Solange de Cleda, the heroine of Dalí’s 1944 novel Hidden Faces, is a combination of Bettina and these two other women.”[29]
In Paris Bettina worked as a window dresser and occasional mannequin for the vanguard fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. In her autobiography Shocking Life, Schiaparelli recalls how Bettina repeatedly showed up at her shop on the Rue de la Paix seeking employment. Apparently “A very beautiful girl with a thundering personality — what the French call a personalité de tonnerre — came to ask for a job.”[30] She was eventually hired, and turned out to be a witty and talented window dresser, making “Schiap’s” windows a succès de scandale. Bettina, writes Schiaparelli, “made them the laughable, impudent, colourful last-born of the quartier, upsetting every tradition.”[31]
Photograph of Bettina Bergery modelling a white ensemble, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of American Literature 1930.
Schiaparelli is famous to this day for her collaborations with artists such as Jean Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti, and others, and it was with Dalí that she devised the famous “shoe hat” and “lobster dress,” among other iconic Surrealist-inspired garments. It may well have been Bettina who introduced Dalí to the couturière. Writing in TheSecret Life, he describes Bergery as one of his best friends, and as “the soul and the biology of the Schiaparelli establishment . . . one of the women of Paris most highly endowed with fantasy.” Despite this adulation, the artist also hinted at Bettina’s fiercer personality traits, claiming she “exactly resembled a praying mantis, and she knew it,” alluding perhaps to the female mantis’s habit of devouring its mate after copulation.[32] Their mutual friend Caresse Crosby also notes Bettina’s “viperess”-like aspect, recalling a ghastly incident at a party at Le Moulin de Soleil, Crosby’s French country estate where the rich, titled, and artistic were always welcome. Apparently in a fit of jealousy caused by fellow guest the Duchess de Gramont’s “subversive” glances at her husband Gaston, Bettina “accurately extinguished her glowing cigarette between the Duchess’s bare shoulder blades as she and Gaston danced by cheek to cheek.”[33]
The husband at the centre of this unfortunate incident was the French publisher and politician Gaston Bergery, who later served as the Vichy government’s ambassador to the U.S.S.R. and Turkey.[34] In 1934 Bettina became his third wife and, as her portrait was painted the same year, it may have been a wedding gift from Dalí or another close friend of the couple, or commissioned perhaps by the betrothed to mark the occasion. Compared to other Dalí portraits of this period, Portrait of Bettina Bergery is decidedly romantic, with its soft, billowing clouds and golden light. Bettina’s shawl is also golden, although beneath it she dons a delicate white dress perfectly à propos as a wedding gown for a fashionable woman living in Paris in 1934. While a number of Dalí’s now-familiar surrealist motifs appear in the portrait’s background, including the cypress tree, the tower, and the horse and rider, in this context his use of the pole with the white flag might well refer to his good friend’s surrender to love and marriage.
Portrait of Madame Ducas, 1935. Oil on panel, 41 x 33 cm (16.14” x 12.99”). Private collection.
Dalí’s next commission, Portrait of Madame Ducas was, like Portrait of Bettina Bergery, still very much in the small format, and very much part of Dali’s Surrealist idiom. In it, the subject sits in front of a long table or board, upon which rests a stone-like object topped by a horizontally-balanced piece of wood, a configuration similar to that in Portrait of Edward Wassermann of two years earlier. A long stone wall punctuated with cracks and accretions dominates the background, followed by a sienna-hued beach, over which hangs a sky dotted with spindly clouds. The canvas is populated by a number of Dalí’s motifs of the 1930s, including a large rocky outcropping punctured by a hole, a tiny figure in the background for scale, low mountains, cypress trees, and a few buildings. Most striking is the enormous blue ball in the distance, which adds a dollop of the uncanny to the work.
The sitter is a porcelain-complexioned woman of early middle age, with short-cropped black hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and rouged lips. The artist has draped her with a red wrap, exposing her shoulders, while around her front sweeps a brown blanket or shawl. For many years the subject of this painting -- one R.N. Ducas -- has been a mystery, although research for this project uncovered her identity as that of Rachelle Ducas (1880 – 1946), née Rachelle Netter in Mulhouse, Alsace-Lorraine. This woman came to America as the wife of Benjamin Paul Ducas, the wealthy head of the drug and chemical house of B.P. Ducas Co, whom she married in 1900.[35] They had one son together, then separated in 1906 after what was evidently a very incompatible six years. A great deal is known about this relationship because their divorce was exceptionally acrimonious, and the proceedings and outcome were minutely detailed in the newspapers and court documents of the day.
During the divorce trial, it appears that Mr. Ducas’s primary complaint was that his wife had claimed to come from a respectable family, but he was to discover later that her father was, as he described it, a mere “junk dealer.” Rachelle, in turn, claimed her husband was cruel to her, and that when they married he promised to “make her the richest woman in the family.” After they moved into the Hotel Savoy, however, things went sour, and he allegedly became insufferably penny-pinching. Rachelle maintained that he told her she could live on half of what she ate, and refused her violin lessons because she was “too lazy.” She also complained that he only took her to the theatre three times, and “would not make friends because he said it cost money.”[36]
On the first of December, 1906, the couple entered into an agreement which stipulated they were to live apart; that Mrs. Ducas was to have custody of their son; and that Mr. Ducas was to pay her a tidy annual sum of 6,000 per year (about $150,000 in today’s currency). After finding it impossible to support herself and her son on this amount, in 1913 Mrs. Ducas commenced a second action petitioning for significantly higher compensation.[37] During the trail, la belle Française made headlines because she “offended the dignity and sense of propriety of Justice Gavegan.” This infraction was apparently caused, the Philadelphia Evening Ledger explains, by her “showing too much of a pair of light grey silk hose — that is, the Justice who was facing Mrs. Ducas, thought there was too much ankle exhibited.”[38] The suit was successful, and she evidently lived very well afterwards, as when she died in 1946, her estate was larded with luxuries, furs and jewels with precious stones.[39] It should be noted, however, that when Mr. Ducas passed away in 1921, he left three million in trust for his son Robert, and not a penny to his former wife.[40]
Plainfield Daily Press, May 3, 1913.
Rachelle Ducas, dressed in high fashion of the 1910s. Photograph courtesy Liz Bonham
While this all paints a portrait of Rachelle as a rather racy figure, today her relatives remember her as a very stylish and accomplished woman, who was a fine player of the violin, and who travelled extensively. This included a visit to Egypt around the time of the famous opening of King Tut’s tomb in 1923. The 1920s may well be the time Mrs. Ducas considered her prime, as she appears in Dali’s portrait as noticeably younger than the fifty-five years she was in 1935, when the work was painted. Indeed, the bee-stung lips, pencil-thin eyebrows and short-cropped hair were characteristic of 1920s high fashion, making it likely Dali painted from a photograph taken when Rachelle was considerably younger. In a 1913 article in the San Francisco Call shockingly titled “Skirt May have Slipped to Knee,” it should be noted, however, that Rachelle is described as a “slight, trim little lady” who looked ten years younger than her actual age.[41]
A letter in the Julien Levy archives documents the commission and suggests that work could have been done on the portrait without Rachelle’s presence, presumably using a photograph, as was Dali’s wont. The dealer writes, “I wish . . . to confirm my understanding of the arrangements made for your portrait. The price is $750. If your portrait is not completed by the time the plane [sic] to leave the country, I understand that he is to finish it in Europe and ship it to you collect, unless you yourself go to Europe, and so notify me.” The letter also includes notification that Levy had enclosed invoices for the Dalí painting L’Homme Invisible, and mentions his client’s interest in a work entitled Le Monument Cosmique (possibly Hypnagogic Monument, 1934).[42] Levy then excuses himself for missing her that morning, explaining that he had been held up by “Mme. Dalí,” who was an hour late for an appointment to meet with him regarding the upcoming year.[43]
Portrait of Mrs. Clarence M. Woolley(Portrait of Isabelle Baker Woolley), 1935. Oil on canvas, 59.7 x 50.8 cm (23.62” x 20.07”). New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. Carrington Woolley in memory of Isabelle Baker Woolley, 2002.
Unlike Dalí’s portraits of Edward Wassermann and Bettina Bergery, which are believed to have been painted in Paris, Portrait of Mrs. Clarence Woolley of 1935 was the artist’s first likeness of an American to be painted in the Americas. The subject was the Tennessee-born Isabelle Baker Woolley (born c. 1892), the wife of Clarence Mott Woolley (1863-1956), founder of one of the United States’ most powerful companies during the first half of the twentieth century. This was the American Radiator Company, which later merged with the Standard Sanitary Corporation to become American Standard, a multinational conglomerate that continues to this day to provide heat and plumbing to millions of dwellings worldwide. The famous American Radiator Building (now the Bryant Park Hotel), a New York City landmark erected by the company in Manhattan in 1924, is another enduring monument to Clarence Mott Woolley’s success.
Almost thirty years his junior, Isabelle Baker was Clarence Woolley’s second wife, and the couple were married in 1914. Avid patrons of the arts, at some point the Woolleys came into contact with Dalí, likely during his first trip to America in 1934. As with Portrait of Madame Ducas, the commission was arranged through the Julien Levy Gallery, and the Woolley's descendants believe the portrait was painted at Sunridge Farm, the Woolley’s Greenwich estate. The seven hundred and fifty-dollar invoice for the work, dated January 14, 1935 is retained in the Levy archives.[44]
Permission pending.
Study for "Portrait of Mrs. Clarence M. Woolley (Portrait of Isabelle Baker Woolley)", 1935, misidentified as portrait of Gala (Provenance: Galerie André-François Petit, Paris). Sold by Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris, on October 27, 2014, Lot 20.
By the time Portrait of Mrs. Clarence Woolley was completed, the subject was about fifty-three years old, and Dalí evidently decided to highlight her advancing age. Contrary to traditional society portraits of women, which invariably flatter their subjects and render them more youthful and glamorous than nature had perhaps intended, Dalí limned Mrs. Woolley in an earthy palette with her grey hair pulled severely back. She is denuded of jewellery or fine clothing, and wears only a simple woollen blanket reminiscent of a monk’s robe. He placed her in a barren landscape, and the shape and colour of the wrap make her blend in with the cypress and rocky ruins behind her. She sits with her eyes closed as if weary or in a dream state, a well-known Surrealist trope, while another Surrealist touch can be seen beneath the sitter’s arm, mirrored in a small carved arm and hand on the chair’s armrest. Mrs. Woolley is lit with a low light emanating from the bottom right, and behind her looms a bright yellow cloud that functions as a sort of amorphous halo. The portrait has an otherworldly feel to it, and considering the references to age, decay and the heavens, in this context the prominent cypress reminds us of its traditional role as a symbol of death and resurrection. From this perspective, the work may be read as something of a memento mori. Notably, when Isabelle died, ten years after Dalí painted her portrait, her gravestone marked an uncanny resemblance to her portrayal.
Tombstone of Isabelle Baker Woolley at the Elmwood Cemetery Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan.
Portrait of Mrs. Clarence Woolley was displayed together with Dalí’s Portrait of Edward Wassermann at the private showing at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York between January 10 and 13th, 1935. After that, it hung for many years in the living room of La Mesita, the Woolley’s sprawling one hundred and forty-four acre equestrian estate near Santa Fe; a complex which Isabelle was apparently a driving force in designing.[45] Today the portrait is part of the collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, where it was gifted by the family in memory of the sitter.
Permission pending.
Private showing of the portrait at Julien Levy Gallery, January 1935.
During his visits to America in the 1930s, and particularly during his exile in the 1940s, Dalí developed a relationship of sorts with some of the prime movers and stars of Hollywood and the film industry. Earlier in his career he had been involved in making avant-garde films with Louis Buñuel, and gave audience to other experimental film-makers such as David Cornell, but he also adored commercial cinema, and frequented popular films throughout his life. The artist was evidently also interested in the celebrities and movie stars of the day, and perhaps most surprisingly, very much admired the comedy team the Marx Brothers, whom he viewed as inherently Surrealist, and as being "situated at the summit of the evolution of comic cinema."[46] In particular, Dalí was infatuated by the mute, mischievous silent brother Harpo, who wore a brightly-hued clown's wig while performing the harp from which his stage name was derived.
Harpo, née Adolf -- but later changing his name to Arthur -- Marx (1888-1964) was born into a Jewish family and grew up in an inner city immigrant neighbourhood in New York. Possessed, like his brothers, with a genius for comedy, together they would become favourites with the American public as well as the Surrealists. As early as 1932, Dalí rhapsodized in an essay about "the one with the curly hair, whose face is that of pervasive and triumphant madness."[47] Five years later in an article he wrote for Harper's Bazaar, aptly entitled "Surrealism in Hollywood," Dalí enthused that "If one were to turn out the light, Harpo, the spectre, would continue to shine . . ."[48] Dalí's infatuation was, in fact, so apparent that years later, the comedian's brother Groucho was to say that "Dalí was in love with my brother -- in a nice way."[49] The curly-wigged brother's stage persona certainly appealed to Dalí, who evidently saw in him a kindred spirit: a lover of the incongruous and the absurd, a trickster and comedian very much in the public eye, but also someone who had mastered his métier in the finer arts. Harpo was indeed an accomplished, albeit self-taught, harpist, making a clear parallel with Dalí's path to becoming a painter.
While Dalí had admired Harpo on screen for years, when he caught wind that Harpo was in Paris in person in 1936, he sought him out at a party and, with Gala acting as the translator, the encounter apparently went famously. Viewing Harpo as the most Surrealist of the brothers, it was fitting for him to send to Harpo a suitable Surrealist object that Christmas: a harp strung with nothing less than barbed wire, and festooned with spoons. According to one newspaper account of the period, "It is a harp strung with barbed wire. It is played with a spoon and a fork which are hung on the frame of the harp. Also hanging on the frame are a pad of cotton and a small bottle of iodine," [50] the latter, no doubt, to disinfect wounds incurred from playing the instrument. In recognition of this extraordinary gift, Harpo responded by sending Dalí a photograph of himself in front of the instrument in question, with a maniacal expression and clumsily bandaged fingers, as if he had cut them on the barbed wire. Harpo also sent Dalí a telegram stating ""if you are coming west would be happy to be smeared by you have counter proposition will you sit for me while I sit for you," and expressed his admiration for Dalí's Persistence of Memory. [51]
While visiting the U.S. in 1937, Gala and Dalí decided to accept Harpo's invitation. That February they went to Hollywood and met with the comedian while he and the other Marx brothers were making the film A Day at the Races. Well aware that this meet-up of the two known eccentrics would be a prime public relations opportunity, Dalí announced his meeting to the press, and in particular, that he intended to create a portrait of Harpo.[52] Determined to present the meeting as a profoundly irrational encounter, he later claimed that when he entered Harpo's garden, he found the comedian "naked, crowned with roses, and in the centre of a veritable forest of harps (he was surrounded by at least five hundred harps). He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan and feeding it a statue of the Venus of Milo made of cheese, which he grated against the strings of the nearest harp.[53] The actual event was no doubt more prosaic, although the two gleefully hammed it up for the photographers, most notably including a shot of Dalí pretending to paint Harpo on a dinner plate.
Permission pending.
Dalí drawing Harpo Marx on a dinner plate, 1937.
Dalí apparently also took time during the visit to render his new friend in earnest, resulting in a delicate 17 x 14 inch sketch of the comedian sitting strumming his harp. In this work, now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dalí has added the requisite Surrealist touches, including a tongue-like lump of what may be meat atop the instrument, while Harpo's curly wig is crowned by a lobster, on top of which sits an apple familiar from Dalí's "William Tell" series of paintings. A number of publicity photographs of this sketching session, some of which appeared in the Los Angeles Examiner and other period newspapers, survive. One in particular shows Dalí sketching the portrait in situ, with Harpo not surprisingly wearing a top hat rather than a lobster. According to George Shaffer, who wrote about it in the Chicago Daily Tribune, “The portrait is supposed to reveal Harpo’s subconscious mind and Dalí has already titled it ‘A Prince of Fantasy.’" [54] About the conversation between the two, Schaffer explained that with "Dalí speaking no English the two limp along conversationally in rusty German."[55]
Dalí produced at least two images of Harpo, and possibly more. Records show that a "Portrait of Harpo Marx" was on sale at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1939, although it is not known if this was the work the Tribune refers to as "A Prince of Fantasy."[56] It also suggests that the portrait may not have been a commission, but simply a drawing Dalí did of his own accord.
Certainly one of the drawings fell into the possession of George Davis, the fiction editor of Harper's Bazaar. In his autobiography, writer Paul Bowles reminisces about how Davis occasionally got to bring home original drawings, after they had been photographed for the magazine, which he framed and hung in his rooms.[57] He remembers that "George had left the picture on his windowsill and gone out, and a rainstorm had come up. When he returned to the house, he found his Dalí drenched and stained just where he had left it, and the window still wide open." Apparently, he "rushed to Susie the maid, and began to recriminate with her, pointing at the picture and repeating: How could you, Susie? It's ruined! Ruined!" Susie was apparently accustomed to this sort of outburst, and offered a reply worthy of the Marx brothers themselves. "Yes Mr. Davis, you right," she said. "It sure is too bad, and it was such a beautiful picture of your mother, too."[58]
Permission pending.
Left: Harpo Marx, 1937. Graphite and ink on coated card stock, 17 3/4 x 14 inches (45.1 x 35.6 cm). Right: Dalí sketching a portrait of Harpo Marx in 1937.
MARIANNE, March 31, 1937
During Dalí's interactions with Harpo, he had the idea to create the screenplay for a film he hoped to make with the Marx brothers, which would feature Harpo prominently. Known as Giraffes on Horseback Salad, there are two extant copies of the screenplay, both of which demonstrate an elaborate plot full of familiar Dalínian devices, mysterious Surrealist women, men on bicycles with loaves of bread on their heads and giraffes bursting into flames. Scenes from this screenplay were likely the inspiration for another portrait of Harpo by Dalí, also dated 1937. It is unclear if this portrait was taken from life, and also embellished, but in it Harpo wears flowers in his hair, and sits surrounded by several giraffes whose long necks are all aflame. The burning giraffes, which appear a number of times in Dalí's work of the later 1930s, were also a key element of Giraffes on Horseback Salad.
Other ideas for the proposed film appear in an article in the October 1939 issue of Theatre Arts magazine. These were of from sketches in Harpo's possession which were produced by Dalí for the film, and have been described as an "abstract storyboard of sorts."[59] Hanging on the wall in the living room of the comedian's Los Angeles home, these included the portrait of Harpo, as well as a humorous piece depicting Groucho as a Hindu god with numerous arms answering telephones at his desk, and captioned in the magazine as "Groucho Marx as the Shiva of big business."[60]
Permission pending.
Left: Portrait of Harpo Marx with Flaming Giraffes, 1937, 62x48 cm - (24 3/8x18 7/8 in.). Sold at auction June 30, 2003. Watercolour and pencil on paper, signed and dated bottom right. Present owner unknown. Right: Groucho Marx as the Shiva of business, originally from the collection of Harpo Marx. As seen in Marie Seton, "S. Dalí + 3 Marxes =," Theatre Arts Monthly, October 1937, p. 738. Current whereabouts unknown.
The Theatre Arts article was also the source of the misattribution of a portrait. In it there is a photograph of a portrait of Harpo, hanging in the comedian's house, which had been painted to resemble that of Frans Hals' famous Laughing Cavalier, of 1624. While the caption attributes it to Dalí, the portrait was painted by another European expatriate, the German artist Leopold von der Decken, who went under the name of John Decker in the U.S. This misattribution was perpetuated, among other places, in Fleur Cowles' 1959 autobiography of the artist, and today is still occasionally referred to as a "lost" Dalí. The Decker portrait is now in the possession of Harpo's son, Bill Marx. [61]
Left: Original Theatre Arts publication which wrongly attributes a portrait by John Decker to Dalí. Today the work is in the collection of Bill Marx. Right: the original by Frans Hals, 1624.
While the misattribution stands, Dalí's relationship to Decker should be noted in terms of the Spanish artist's direction in portraiture. Decker, who was a bon-vivant and regular in Hollywood, great friend and drinking partner of John Barrymore and W.C. Fields, among others, was the goto portraitist for the Hollywood. Using his facility at imitating old master styles (which, it has recently been discovered, Decker also used to forge numerous works), he was commissioned to paint countless celebrities' likenesses, although mostly in the style of famous paintings. Clients included Charlie Chaplin, Fanny Brice, James Cruze, Gaston Glass, Lew Cody, Betty Compson, John Wayne, Mickey Rooney, Beatrice Lillie, Carole Lombard, and of note, Greta Garbo as the Mona Lisa, WC Fields as Queen Victoria, and second portrait of Harpo as Gainsborough's The Blue Boy. [62]
In his autobiography Harpo Speaks! Harpo wrote that "John Decker was an artist who was unbelievably facile with brushes and oils. . . . He had a genius for reproducing the feeling, the lights and shadows and depths, of the originals." As his well-publicized portrait of Harpo suggests, Dalí may have, at some point, aspired to become a painter of the stars. However, it is clear that Hollywood already had an official portraitist, and one who was equally as adept at academic painting, with a comparable sense of humour to Dalí's. Notably, Decker also sported a turned-up pencil-thin moustache like the one Dalí would increasingly wear in the 1930s. As such, while the position of Hollywood Portrait Painter was already filled, Decker's example may have played a role in Dalí's turning away, in the later 1930s, from a Surrealist style of portraiture to that of a more classical one that made reference the old masters and other art historical precedents.
Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937. Oil on canvas, 51 cm x 77 cm; 20 1/8 x 30 3/8” in. Private collection.
Swans Reflecting Elephants is a painting that Dalí completed in 1937, It was an early example of the trompe l’oeil that informed some of his most remarkable output of the last few years of the 1930s, including his famous Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937).[63] The work shows a rocky landscape surrounding a pool of water in which swim three swans whose reflections appear to be those of elephants walking on dry land. While not normally considered a portrait, per se, this canvas is included here because Dalí’s one-time patron, Edward James, is depicted in the far left of the work. Although this figure is sometimes misidentified as Marcel Duchamp, Dalí in fact made careful sketches of James in preparation for the picture. There are several good reasons as to why Swans Reflecting Elephants might be seen to reflect aspects of James’s character. James certainly saw these himself, naming his 1982 autobiography Swans Reflecting Elephants: My Early Years. [64]
Edward William Frank James (1907-1984) described himself a poet, and is best remembered for his patronage of the Surrealist movement, and for the extraordinary Surrealist-inspired gardens he had built in central Mexico. His father was an American railroad magnate, and his mother a Scottish socialite whose biological father was rumored to be the Prince of Wales. The young James inherited an enormous fortune which he spent mainly on artistic projects of his own and others, and West Dean House in Sussex, the mansion he inherited in 1912, is now home to the Edward James Foundation, an institution which promotes education in conservation and the visual arts.
James was notable for his small stature and delicate bearing, which is likely why Federico García Lorca dubbed him the “hummingbird poet.”[65] In his memoir Julien Levy describes him as “a pretty and well-proportioned, very miniature young gentleman.” “[W]hatever he said never fell short of utter extravagance,” he continues, adding that he was “Virtually a present-day adumbration of the mad Ludwig of Bavaria, capaciously rich and richly capricious, he was only a little less than Ludwig in wealth and eccentricity.”[66] Levy’s comparison of James with King Ludwig is a loaded one, especially considering that Ludwig was known as the Swan King, and as a child lived in the Castle Hohenschwangau (“High Swan County Palace”), a fantasy castle his father had built near the Schwansee (Swan Lake) near Füssen, Bavaria. It is conceivable that Dalí was making a similar comparison with James and the “mad king,” as he depicted James next to a lake afloat with elegant swans.
Levy’s comparison also likely alludes to James’s homosexuality, another trait he shared with King Ludwig. The poet was, however, interested in both men and women, and he married the Austrian dancer Tilly Losch in 1930, although they were to divorce acrimoniously four years later. James was also romantically involved with Marie-Laure de Nouailles, another patron of the Surrealists, of whom Dalí also made a portrait in 1932. It was, in fact, at Nouailles’s house that the poet first encountered Dalí’s painting. “It was the first time that I had seen really good modern art,” he writes in his autobiography. “[T]here was a portrait by Dalí, of all people, whom nobody had heard of at that time . . .” [67] Eventually, Dalí and the poet became good friends, and according to James, who confided to the musician and writer George Melly, James and Dalí had also had a brief affair in Paris.[68]
Not simply friends or occasional lovers, for many years Dalí also enjoyed what Julien Levy described as James’s “indefatigable patronage.” [69] This included a well-known one-year contract, drafted in 1936, and deployed in 1937. The document stipulated that Dalí would receive 200 pounds a month from James, and was intended to give Dalí a regular income that would enable him to concentrate on creating high quality work. Among other things, the contract also required that Dalí was to sell all work created during this period to James.[70] Swans Reflecting Elephants was painted during this time, and stands as a visual testament to James’s contribution to Dalí’s painting career. Once the contract ended, James remained an avid collector of Dalí’s work, and by 1939 he owned over one hundred and eighty Dalí pieces, in addition to those by Bosch, de Chirico, Klee, Picasso, Ernst, and other important modernist painters. [71]
Further notable connections between Dalí and James are the latter’s sponsorship of the Surrealist journal Minotaure, in which Dalí published, and of the Surrealist decor of Monkton House, located on the poet’s West Dean estate. This residence famously housed Dalí’s sofa designed in the shape of Mae West’s lips, and his Aphrodisiac Telephone, better known as the Lobster Telephone, in which a crustacean forms the mouthpiece of the device. While Dalí often came up with ideas for fantastic Surrealist structures, and even for a Surrealist theme park on the estate of his good friend Caresse Crosby, it was ultimately James who realized this dream, in a Mexican rain forest. Known as Las Pozas (“the pools”), James took almost forty years to create his “Garden of Eden,” outside of the town of Xilitla north of Mexico City, which is preserved today by regional authorities. The park spans eighty acres and includes water features such as pools and waterfalls around which sprout fantastic concrete sculptures, such as stairways leading nowhere, monsters and startling anthropomorphic elements. Notably, parts of the garden very much resemble the extraordinary landscape of Swans Reflecting Elephants.
Permission pending.
Study by Dalí for a portrait of Edward James, 1936 (begun in Ravello, Italy). The Edward James Foundation.
James’s diminutive figure nestled in the Surrealist landscape in Dalí’s painting duly reflects the position of this small man who owned such large buildings and gardens, including West Dean, and later, Las Posas. “Dalí . . . knew me pretty well,” the poet wrote in his autobiography. “I mean he observed me,” and apparently one of his observations – however it might be interpreted – was that James suffered from a “complex of space.”[72] Dalí’s unusual portrait of James makes an interesting comparison to two other “portraits” of him painted in the same year by fellow Surrealist René Magritte, who was staying with James at the time. These are The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James), in which the poet’s head is obscured by a flash of light, and Not to be Reproduced, in which the back of James’ head is seen in front of a mirror, which also reflects the back of his head. Swans Reflecting Elephants also has an interesting history independent of Dalí, James, or Magritte. Although it belonged to the poet, during WWII the canvas was stored in Dalí’s apartment in Paris. Together with several other works, it was confiscated by the German Army during the French Occupation, and remained in La Salle des Martyrs at the Jeu de Paume, Paris from 1940 to 1944. [73] Apparently it was in a shipment of artworks that were on their way to Germany one day after the liberation of Paris. However, there was a pitched battle that raged when the train reached the German lines, and as a result the painting was pierced by bullets. James engaged the services of Gaston Bergery, the husband of Bettina Bergery, whose portrait Dalí painted in 1934, to locate some of Dalí’s works, and Swans Reflecting Elephants was one of three that were recovered. James subsequently had the damage repaired, although he apparently stated that he thought the scars added “a touch of historical interest” to the work.[74]
Permission pending.
Detail of Swans Reflecting Elephants, showing a bearded Edward James between the rocks.
ENDNOTES
[1] Fleur Cowles, The Case of Salvador Dalí (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1959), 223.
[2] Ades, Dalí, 77-8.
[3] See Salvador Dalí, The Sacred Heart, 1929, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and discussion of the controversy in Fèlix Fanés, Salvador Dalí: The Construction of the Image 1925-1930 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 154-157.
[4] Dalí, The Secret Life, 290.
[5] Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 369.
[6] Dalí, The Secret Life, 327.
[7] Staff writer, “Surrealists’ Art is Puzzle No More: You Don't Have to Know What It Means, Because Painter Doesn't Either, Dalí Says,” New York Times, Jan 10, 1935, n.p.
[8] J.-L. Gaillemin, Salvador Dalí : désirs inassouvis du purisme au surréalisme, 1925-1935 (Paris and New York: La Passage, 2002), 22, as quoted in Marijke Verhaar, Salvador Dalí et le Mécénat du Zodiaque, doctoral thesis, Utrecht University, 2008.
[9] Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 231. Bulletin of Yale University Obituary Record of Yale Gradutes, 1922-23 (Newhaven: Yale University), August 1, 1923, No. 22, p. 830, accessed August 18, 2015 http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1859_1924/1922-23.pdf.
[10] Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, 283.
[11] See Edward Wassermann, “A Young American’s Friendship with Anatole France,” The Bookman, April 1925, 197-206.
[12] Edward Wassermann, Velvet Voyaging (London: The Bodley Head, 1940), 11.
[13] Edward Alden Jewell, “Surrealiste Art Marks Week-End,” The New York Times, Jan 12, 1935, L 13.
[14] The extent to which Dalí’s night-table imagery was associated with fascism in his Surrealist oeuvre is made evident in André Breton’s “Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else” of 1942, in which he describes Dalí, who showed signs of supporting Franco’s regime, as a “neo-falangist-night-table.” See André Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed., Franklin Rosemont (New York: Monad Press, 1978), 210.
[15] “Emilio Terry,” Biblioteque Nationale de France, DataBNF website, accessed January 1, 2016, http://data.bnf.fr/12541085/emilio_terry/; Sotheby’s London, “Sotheby’s London to offer the collection of Prince and Princess Henry de la Tour d’Auvergne Lauraguais, on May 3rd 2012,” press release, n.d., accessed January 1, 2016, http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/BID/0x0x561663/6a7f692e-216d-42fe-9859-693aa7b96edf/561663.pdf.
[16] Secrest, 159; Etherington-Smith, 203.
[17] Emilio Terry Archives, Mémoires d’Emilio Terry, Dalí section, note 15, and François Buot, René Crevel, biographie (Grasset: Paris, 1991), 308, as quoted in Verhaar, 9, author’s translation.
[18] Emilio Terry Archives, January 23, 1933, as quoted in Verhaar, 106, author’s translation.
[19] Verhaar, 100.
[20] Verhaar, 104-106.
[21] “Portrait of Mr. Emilio Terry,” Salvador Dalí Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (1910 – 1964), Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, accessed January 1, 2016, http://www.salvador-Dalí.org/cataleg_raonat/fitxa_obra.php?text=Terry&obra=249.
[22] Emilio Terry Archives, May 12, 1934, as quoted in Verhaar, 106, author’s translation.
[23] Verhaar, 91.
[24] Verhaar, 108.
[25] In this regard, it should be noted that this object resembles mock-ups of imaginary buildings designed in the late nineteen-tens and early 1920s by the visionary German Expressionist architect Hermann Finsterlin. In 1919, Finsterlin also proposed a house shaped like a snail, and as such, the dark amorphous mass might suggest the earlier artist’s impact upon Terry’s own work.
[27] Verhaar, 103; see Salvador Dalí, “De la beaute terrifiante et comestible de l’arhitecture modern style,” Minotaure (Paris), 3-4 (December 12, 1933), 69-76.
[28] This identification was verified by Elsa Schiaparelli specialist Dilys E. Blum, curator of the exhibition and writer of the accompanying catalogue for Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003-2004. Interview with Julia Pine, November 23, 2010. It should be noted that the portrait was erroneously identified as Caresse Crosby in a recent auction at Sotheby’s New York, in November, 2016.
[29] Etherington-Smith, The Persistence of Memory, 283.
[30] Elsa Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 47.
[31] Schiaparelli, Shocking Life, 65.
[32] Dalí, The Secret Life, 340.
[33] Caresse Crosby, The Passionate Years (New York: Ecco Press, 1979), 307.
[34] Edward Burns, ed., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten: 1913-1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 478 n. 4.
[35] Anon., “Society is Costly: Divorced Woman Declares Income of $6,000 Too Little. Court Decision is Won,” The Sunday Oregonian, Portland, May 9, 1915, 5, accessed April 26, http://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn83045782/1915-05-09/ed-1/seq-23/ocr.txt.
[36] Anon., “Hides her Dainty Ankles for Sake of the Judge: New York Woman Sues for Separation Annuity,” Evening Ledger – Philadelphia, December 4, 1914, 6. Available at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045211/1914-12-04/ed-1/seq-6.pdf.
[37] See “Ducas v. Ducas” (1912) and “Ducas v. Guggenheimer” (1915), Casetext, Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, First Department. Accessed April 2, 2017, https://casetext.com/case/ducas-v-ducas-2, and https://casetext.com/case/ducas-v-guggenheimer; Anon, “Hides her Dainty Ankles,” Evening Ledger-Philadelphia.
[38] Anon, “Hides her Dainty Ankles,” Evening Ledger-Philadelphia.
[39] Parke-Bernet Galleries Auctioneers, Valuable Precious Stone Jewelry, Including the Property of the Late Rachelle N. Ducas, auction catalogue, January 25, 1950.
[40] Anon., “Ducas Bars Wife in 3,000,000 Will,” The New York Times, October 22, 1922, accessed April 26, 2015, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F00715FF345D1A7A93C5AB178BD95F468285F9; Ducas v. Ducas, (1916), Casetext, Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, First Department. Accessed April 26, 2015, https://casetext.com/case/ducas-v-ducas.
[41] Margaret Watts de Peyster, “Skirt May Have Slipped to Knee,” San Francisco Call, 2 May 1913, p. 7, accessed April 2, 2017, https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SFC19130502.2.86.
[42] Records show that The Man with the Head of Blue Hortensias of 1936 (now in the Salvador Dalí Museum in Florida) was originally owned by Mrs. Ducas, so she evidently owned a few works by Dali.
[43] Invoice from Julien Levy to Mrs. Ducas, dated January 15, 1935, Julien Levy Gallery records, Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives, Philadelphia.
[44] Invoice, dated January 15, 1935, Julien Levy Gallery records, Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives, Philadelphia. Addressed to Mr. Woolley at the Hotel Delmonico in New York, it reveals the portrait was 750 dollars, the frame $17.50, and city sales tax 14.35. The bill was marked as being promptly paid two days later.
[45] Anon, “Family History at la Mesita,” accessed April 26, 2015, http://dorianescott.corinnasee.com/index#/family-history/.
[46] Salvador Dalí, Short Critical History of Cinema (Abrégé d'une histoire du cinéma, 1932) in Haim Finkelstein (ed), in Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.140.
[47] Ibid, 141.
[48] Salvador Dalí, "Surrealism in Hollywood," Harper's Bazaar, vol. 71, no. 6, June 1937, pp. 68, 132, trans. George Davis, as reproduced in Michael R. Taylor, "Giraffes on Horseback Salad," p. 140 - 153, in Dalí and Film, exh. cat., London: Tate Publishing, 2007, p. 155.
[49] Stefan Kanfer, Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx, New York, Knopf, 2000, p. 227, as quoted in Taylor, p. 143.
[50] George Shaffer, Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 19, 1937, p. 25.
[51] Reproduction of original telegram in Robert Descharnes, Salvador Dalí: The Work, The Man, trans. Eleanor R. Morse (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.), 1984, p. 158.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Ibid, 143.
[54] Shaffer.
[55] Ibid.
[56] I forgot to record this reference -- will have to back-track to find it. XX In the catalog for the Dalí exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery (March 21 - April 17, 1939) the drawing "Portrait of Harpo Marx" is listed as number 26.
[57] Paul Bowles, Without Stopping, An Autobiography, 234. Bowles remembers the drawing as one of Harpo playing the barbed-wire harp surrounded by burning giraffes, but it is more likely to have been the one which appeared in the June 1937 issue of Harper's Bazaar, where George Davis worked and had access to the images.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Wes D. Gehring, Film Clowns of the Depression: Twelve Defining Comic Performances (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2007), p. 134.
[60] Marie Seton, "S. Dalí + 3 Marxes =," Theatre Arts Monthly, October 1937, p. 736.
[61] Roger Fillary, Marx Out of Print website, September 18, 2012, available at http://www.marxoutofprint.org.uk/Dalí/Dalí.htm.
[62] Stephen C. Jordan, Bohemian Rogue: The Life of Hollywood Artists John Decker (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2004), pp. 39-40.
[63] While these works refer to Dalí’s so-called “paranoid critical” method, which involves the viewer’s interpretation of visual phenomena according to the dictates of their subconscious, these works are more rightly described as optical illusions or trompe l’oeil.
[64] Edward James, Swans Reflecting Elephants: My Early Years, edited by George Melly (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).
[65] Sharon Michi-Kusunoki, “Edward James (1907-84)", in Ades, Salvador Dalí: The Centenary Retrospective, 439.
[66] Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 175.