50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship

246 Pages·1992·18.64 MB·English

by  Salvador Dalí

“Port Lligat Madonna Help Me”

50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship

SALVADOR DALÍ

Translated by Haakon M. Chevalier

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC., NEW YORK

Contents

Index of the Secrets
Clear and Brief Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

DEDICATION

At the age of six I wanted to be Napoleon—and I wasn't.
At the age of fifteen I wanted to be Dali and I have been.
At the age of twenty-five I wanted to become the most sensational painter in

the world and I achieved it.

At thirty-five I wanted to affirm my life by success and I attained it.
Now at forty-five I want to paint a masterpiece and to save Modern Art from

chaos and laziness. I will succeed! This book is consecrated to this crusade and I
dedicate it to all the young, who have faith in true painting.

INDEX OF THE SECRETS

1.
The secret of the five different movements of the five types of brushes.

2.
The secret of the springboard to be used for blending.

3.
The secret of the “slumber with a key."

4.
The secret of the sea-urchin slumber.

5.
The secret of the sleep with three sea-perch eyes.

6.
The secret of sleeping while awake.

7.
The secret of the sympathies and antipathies of the painter's retina.

8.
The secret of the favorable vegetations which the painter should plant
around his house.

9.
The secret of the periods of carnal abstinence and indulgence to be
observed by the painter.

10.
The secret of the painter's calendar, in accordance with which every
important work may be realized in six days.

11.
The secret of a telescope constructed with the Aristotle's lantern of a sea
urchin by virtue of which the painter may know when he must stop
working at his picture.

12.
The secret of the painter's marriage.

13.
The secret of why Gala loves Painting and why Painting loves Gala.

14.
The secret of the form of an olive by virtue of which the painter may be
guided in choosing the woman he must marry.

15.
The secret for constructing an aranearium.

16.
The secret of the retrospective utilization of araneariums.

17.
The secret, very simple but important, of a small roof to protect the picture
from dust.

18.
The secret of the painter's pointed mustaches.

19.
The secret of learning to paint before knowing how to draw.

20.
The secret of learning to draw models in reverse by the use of a mirror.

21.
The secret of the nine crutches serving to “fix” the most beautiful aesthetic
poses of nude models.

22.
The secret of oil-soaked strings serving to mark the geodesic curves of a
turgescent nude.

23.
The secret of the reason why a great draughtsman should draw while

completely naked.

24.
The secret for transferring the most immaculate tracings by means of oil
paint.

25.
The secret for becoming a great colorist by utilizing solely blacks and
whites.

26.
The secret of Naples yellow.

27.
The secret that a painting should dry slowly and naturally, without dryers
of any kind.

28.
The secret of using ivory black for the underpainting and blue black for
the song.

29.
The secret of the maulstick glued to the “Achilles callosity” of the
painter's hand by means of pitch.

30.
The secret of banishing burnt umber from the palette.

31.
The secret of blanc d'argent.

32.
The secret of Venetian red.

33.
The secret of the Mars colors.

34.
The secret of Veronese green.

35.
The secret of the cadmiums.

36.
The secret of vermilion.

37.
The secret of the incompatibility of ultramarine blue with the other colors.

38.
The secret of cobalt blue.

39.
The secret of cobalt violet.

40.
The secret of “dream-veil” imprimaturas.

41.
The secret of the “wasp” medium.

42.
The secret of artificially pigmented cowrie shells, extremely useful for
refining the painter's retina.

43.
The secret whereby a painter may become a very rich man, that is to say,
whereby he may produce gold with his colors.

44.
The secret of the hanging egg of Piero della Francesca.

45.
The secret of the sea urchin which the painter must have beside him for his
meditations.

46.
The secret of utilizing the golden section in perspective in order to obtain
very unique and excellent melancholy effects.

47.
The secret of the compass for projecting the golden section.

48.
The secret of the frames for the painter's models, excellent for guiding the
composition of his pictures.

49.
The secret of obtaining the most beautiful models of curves, exceeding in
harmony the logarithmic spirals of the nautilus.

50.
The secret of the angel.

CLEAR and BRIEF PROLOGUE

in which it is explained that the beginning of this book is to be found only at
the end.

"The two most fortunate things that can happen to a painter
are, first, to be Spanish and, second, to be named Dali.
Those two fortunate things have happened to me."

S. D.

SALVADOR, AS his very name indicates, is destined to nothing less than to
rescue painting from the void of modern art."

This categorical affirmation, though it would seem at first sight, by its

egocentricity, to have been written by Dali himself, is from the pen of the
famous Catalonian philosopher, Francese Pujols. In 1937, in the midst of the
surrealist chaos when he wrote this, I admit —modestly, for once—that I myself,
in spite of my ambitious imperialisms of very kind, did not place much faith in
it. Today I realize, however, that I have become, little by little, firmly convinced
of it.*

This is due essentially to the fact that my intelligence has never ceased to

grow in the course of my ambition which, as everyone knows, has always been
lofty and majestic since my tenderest childhood. I like to compare my ambition
to a century-old oak tree, and my intelligence to a loving vine which climbs
round its bark to reach its top. And if this oak tree seems to me to be immemorial
and immobile in its growth, so august and harmonious is its lofty height, the vine
of my intelligence, on the contrary, appears to me to have a biological
exuberance, to grow by leaps, inasmuch as each time I observe what is
happening to me at the moment of beginning or of completing a work, I am
always surprised by the bursting forth of vigorous new shoots.

And this is so true that I can say right now that in the three or four days since

I have begun to write this book I already feel myself more intelligent than
before. Fortunately so! For in order to be capable of writing this book—a kind of
culinary initiation to the Eleusinian mysteries of painting—and in order to make
translucid the most obscure technical secrets, which would seem to require the

art of magic in addition to the practice of painting itself, it does not suffice to be
terribly intelligent. Indeed I would go so far as to have the deeply rooted
suspicion that all the greatest intelligences combined would not suffice to
succeed in such an undertaking, and that consequently the writer who should
undertake such a task would have to possess, in addition, some other supra-
essential thing, and this other thing, this “quintessence” of the essential, which
happens to be exactly what is required to paint a beautiful picture, I must say at
once—and for the exclusive benefit of my readers—this other thing I also
possess. But I do not wish to say at once what this thing is: in the first place, for
fear of discouraging my readers by wearying them through a too great
presumption on my part, and in the second place because I have the catholic
habit of always beginning at the end. Is not “beginning with ends” the essence of
catholicity?

That is why “this thing” which I am not revealing, and which normally

would be announced at the beginning of this clear prologue, will be found by the
reader, as he has been forewarned, only after he has read the entire book and is
overwhelmingly convinced: he will find it exactly in the last two lines of this
book.

END OF THE CLEAR AND BRIEF PROLOGUE

* Quite apart from my intrinsic value as a painter—which I am one of the first to be ready to discuss—

one thing is certain: that if “painting” is to survive our epoch of barbarous mechanical progress, this
continuity of painting will have its starting-point in Salvador Dali; and it is for this reason that this book is
destined to have a daily-growing vital interest. For no person, whether directly or remotely interested in the
real phenomenon of painting, will be able to avoid consulting it.

CHAPTER ONE

The ear of Van Gogh, the left hand of Dali and the foot of Cézanne–Modern
painters, house painters and the ancients–What is a well painted picture?–
Definition of painting – Advice to the young art student to contemplate
philosophically the azure of an absolutely cloudless sky, preferably in a
Mediterranean country–Comparison of the head of the painter to an oil
lamp which illuminates all realms of knowledge.

AN GOGH was mad, and unconditionally, generously and gratuitously cut off
his left ear with the blade of a razor. I am not mad either, yet I would be
perfectly capable of allowing my left hand to be cut off, but this under the most
interesting circumstances imaginable: on condition, namely, that I might for ten
minutes be able to observe Vermeer of Delft seated before his easel as he was
painting. I should even be capable of much more than that, for I should likewise
be prepared to let my right ear, and even both ears, be removed provided I might
learn the exact formula of the mixture, which composes the “precious juice” in

which this same Vermeer, unique among the unique (and whom I do not call
divine because he is the most human of all painters), dips his exquisitely rare
brush; which, I have no doubt, was in his time as common, daily and usual as in
turn must have been the “precious juice,” the current coin of the ingredients of
the studios of the golden age of the arts, but which has become in our dull and
scatological days of artistic decadence a mysterious liquid gem which all the
gold in the world could not hope to ransom, for the simple reason that the
formulae of the “media” with which the painters of former times painted their
immortal works do not exist. All the hypotheses of the greatest experts in this
regard lead only to violent polemics and to flagrant contradictions which become
aggravated day by day.

This might seem merely another typical Dalinian exaggeration, yet it is a

rigorously objective fact: in 1948 a few persons in the world know how to
manufacture an atomic bomb, but there does not exist a single person on the
globe who knows today what was the composition of the mysterious juice, the
“medium” in which the brothers Van Eyck or Vermeer of Delft dipped their
brushes to paint. No one knows—not even I! The fact that there exists no precise
recipe of that period which might guide us, and that no chemical or physical
analysis can explain to us today the “majestic imponderables” of the “pictorial
matter” of the old masters, has often caused our contemporaries to assume and to
believe that the ancients possessed secrets which they jealously and fanatically
guarded. I am inclined to believe rather the contrary, namely that such recipes
must in their time have been precisely so little secret, so incorporated in the
everydayness of the routine life of all painters, so much a part of an
uninterrupted tradition of every minute of experience, that such secrets must
have been transmitted almost wholly orally, without anyone's even taking the
trouble to note them down or, if so, only by means of that elegiac charcoal pencil
with which the masters traced so many unknown, effaced and often angelic
ephemerides.

Thus there is not the faintest shadow of madness in claiming, as I do, that if

one places on one of the scales of a balance of pictorial justice a single drop of
the medium with which Vermeer of Delft painted, one should not hesitate one
second in throwing on the other scale of this same balance the left ear of Van
Gogh, the left hand of Salvador Dali and an impressive quantity besides of
viscera of all sorts, even the most intimate, snatched somewhat at random from
the most disorganized anatomies of our modern painters. And if all this freshly
cut raw flesh does not—as I strongly suspect—suffice to “make up the weight”
one should not then hesitate to add for good measure the two ponderous hands of
the touching Paul Cézanne. For the poor man, in spite of his wonderful and ultra-
respectable ambition to “paint like Poussin from nature” and thereby to become
the master and the greatest architect of nature, succeeded merely in becoming a
kind of neo-Platonic master mason, so that instead of edifying eternal palaces for
the princes of intelligence he was able only to build modest shacks capable, at
best, of sheltering the indigent Bohemians of modern art who are used to
sleeping under bridges or exposed to the elements of impressionism for a couple
of aesthetic summers. Since this book is to be the book of the justice of painting,
it will inevitably be cruel to modern painting, and if we owe an infinite respect to
the dramatic obstinacy of Cézanne in aspiring to build, to the authenticity of his
classicist torments, to the nobility of his ambitions, we do not regret having, at
the very beginning of this book, cut off his two clumsy hands as we have just
done, for in truth everything that he “realized” he could just as well have
achieved with his feet!

Five thoughts on art

1. The work of art must impress you without touching you.
2. If the classics are cold, it is because their flame is eternal.
3. The eclat of the romantics is that of a fire in a strawpile.
4. If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint

it.

5. Painting, as Leonardo da Vinci proved, is superior to all the other arts,

because it is directed to the most noble and divine of all the organs, the
eye. To compare the ear to the eye would be as absurd ae to compare
the nose to the ear.

"Post-Cézannism” has erected into a system every one of the clumsinesses

and the deficiencies of Cézanne and painted square mile after square mile of
canvases with these defects. The defects of Cézanne, in his fundamentally honest
character, were often consequences of his very virtues; but defects are never
virtues! I can imagine the profound melancholy of the master of Aix-en-