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How might Whitehead’s scheme, based an prehensions, feelings, transfer of the past via eternal objects, and the generation of symbolic reference out of casual efficacy be applied to the determinedly “bizarre” narratives of European Surrealist painting? Let us consider a Dali masterpiece, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (pictured at top right), sometimes referred to as Premonition of Civil War. This painting is a near-overwhelming demonstration of creating thoughts and feelings of ecstasy, pain, destiny, decay, self-destruction, frenzy, fluctuations and reversals of meaning, the surface of the earth, sky, and other characterizations, such as the tiny “bourgois” man whose “bust” appears the top of the bony, gnarly, arachnid-like hand at lower left, and whose complex symbolic possibilities, fueled by the contexts of the painting, I will shortly take up in detail. When I saw the original picture I was jolted by the sheer power of Dali’s imagination and technique. |
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| This work overcame any doubt I had about his genius as a painter due to his notoriety for falling out of department store windows and into the newspaper headlines, and due to my concern that too many of his works seemed like “trademark productions” of his style rather than genuine explorations into the irrational and the unconscious. Among the ideas that Soft Construction gives us is the indelible ground of the earth’s surface and the adjoining atmosphere as the ultimate stage for human existence. How many times have we thought of ourselves traversing or gazing out at this setting for our lives? Consider Dali’s sky. Eternal objects of “hard” and “soft,” saturated blueness and whiteness, pale, luminous and delicate whiteness, and “perfect” cloud detail in commanding spatial perspective transfer my past experience of clouds and sky into “solid” feelings of clouds and sky. I have prehensions of historic time, destiny and beauty in the handling of sky, clouds, light, shadow and form, which provide poignant contrasts to prehensions of the grotesque, decay and frenzied self-destruction. | |
As I reflect on the painting I believe that Dali must have studied Goya’s Saturn (shown at right) with empathy. Both paintings exhibit a Spanish ability to image self-destruction that connects me to Berger’s insight on Picasso’s “Spanish destruction.” The elongated and fluid “knee-arm-desert dune” at upper right of the Dali much resembles the attenuated knees ad elbow of Goya’s Saturn, except the Dali knee-leg stands on the torso of its dismembered body in mocking triumph. There is a prehension of the ridiculous in the Dali that parodies the frenzy of self-destruction. Such is the complexity of the embodied experience of strain feelings, body metaphors, propositional feelings (recognition of triumph in the standing leg) and categorizations of history and the world that casual efficacy can bring to one’s concrescences of Dali’s knee. Like other painted objects in Dali’s works, his compelling rendering of texture, shapes, colors and light give us prehensions of permanence, even from the sky. All the better to contrast with prehensions of decay in the human body merged with a desert landscape in which details become exposed bones, entrails, rocks, gnarled tree, human figures and “anamorphic-like” distortions of human skulls and facial profiles. Notice the bony face of the featured, stretched-back woman. The left side of her face is formed into a self-satisfied profile face, as if found in a cloud, while the jaw is formed into a fragmented skull. At bottom center of the painting is a limb-torso. At the left end of the torso is a head facing up that is decaying, bony and mountain ridged. A tiny, face-up, human profile with vacuous smile appears at the right end. The animated beans could be maggots scurrying for sustenance. All these forms are held together with an undeniable symphonic mastery of form and color. |
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Underlying Dali’s essay is his preoccupation with a long history of European art that has attempted to show the objects of both actual vision and imagination as durable, substantive and concrete. Dali’s “realistic” modeling of light and shade, and his black shadows that take on a graphic-symbolic life of their own-becoming caves, figures and sensuous, curving lines-will, I think, become ever less puzzling in their break from realism as expression of the subjective-objective duality, and of metaphor as the necessity of seeing things in terms of other things, becomes ever more recognized in culture. See the vise-grip of the grotesque hand-stony and gnarled, with human figures as fingers-squeezing, puling the hyper-extenuated breast with engorged but spent nipple. This detail is powerfully orchestrated with the bony rock formations of the woman’s neck and face, which is pulled back in a smile and grimace of sexual pleasure, as if the creature is in ecstasy over its own pain as it pulls itself apart. Notice how the neck –head formation sits on the shoulder- breasts-arm-leg image, where the shoulder and breasts complete a human figure supine on the sand. One can enjoy the sensuous outline and recognize the supine figure extending magically into the projecting arm-leg. |
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| Are the abundant and intricately worked “subliminal” faces and figures in the face of Dali’s woman structurally similar to the shadow-hand in the Vermeer? (Shown at bottom right). For me the question raises the problem of merely applying logical categories to the actual world without sensitivity to the varying contexts in which the “hidden” images are found. There are structural similarities, but there are differences in the ways in which one applies values to the individual events in each painting. Believing, as I do, that both paintings exemplify peaks of human creative power, I am finally more sympathetic to the Vermeer. It is focused through a reference frame not of mere sentiment, but of projecting the feeling that optimism and spirituality are even more important for culture and human development than is the recognition of human anxiety, fear and our tendencies for self-destruction. There is a projection of Telesian tactility, or sense of touchable texture, in Woman Holding a Balance, encouraging feelings of affect that is lacking in Dali’s Premonition. I am also more surprised and interested by the hidden hand in the Vermeer. |  |
| The large scale of the and hand and its unexpected juxtaposition with the “beatific” face of the woman strengthen my mapping of harmonized meanings. With Dali, I know to look for “hidden” images and transformations as “rules of the game” stemming back to Giussepe Arcimboldo in the sixteenth century, who was famous in Europe for composite human figures built up of plant and food objects, and whom Dali admired for his double images and fastidious technique. Thus we are in pulsing or calm dialogue with our subjective aims as we commit to our apprehensions and satisfactions. Unlike my response to the Goya (shown at middle right)), I lose some energy in my closures of Dali’s projection of self-destruction because I have intermittent negative prehensions of the comic and the ridiculous intruding into his caricatured grotesques. These comparisons are not to diminish Dali, who is this painting takes my breath away. Consider how we fill the bust of the “bourgeois” man with meaning (located at the top and center of the bony creature-hand at lower left). This tiny detail provides an excellent starting point for the symbol making mind directed by datum (his cowed indifference and neutrality), superject (the self ravaging human creature), and subjective aim (the terrors, subconscious underpinnings and ironies of human self- destruction). The viewer concludes that the man is neither held by the apparition’s hand, nor does he appear to be standing on the land. We are not sure if the man is walking toward, backing away from, or is oblivious to the apparition. His body and head bow, suggesting humility and powerlessness. He is lighted and scaled to appear as if connected to the conventional scene of houses, villas and towns in the far distance. His rumpled suit and trim goatee suggest he is an urban “everyman,” in thrall to Dali’s pessimistic allegory of the human condition. Thus my preference for Vermeer only indicates that, because of my values, instincts and Whiteheadian lenses that assist me in examining my feelings, if I were allowed only one painting on a desert island it would have to be the Vermeer. For information or inquiries on purchasing Herb Greene paintings or drawings, please contact info@herbgreene.org copyright © Herb Greene |
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