The Life of Forms in Art by Brandon Taylor;

Author:Brandon Taylor;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

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Monstrosity

Monsters played a deep role in European culture between the two world wars. Animal presences with oversized bodies, or bodies seeming to exist beyond the bounds of biological normality – such can be found in film, in fiction and throughout the popular imagination of modernity. In Hollywood classics such as The Lost World (1925), Stark Mad (1929) or King Kong (1933), giant apes or hairy-tentacled creatures would haunt the public mind – and entertain it too. But these are not the monsters that concern us here. In the culture of art, it was the human form in different degrees of deformation that led commentators to bemoan the morality – often the sanity – of the artists involved. To the artists themselves, freedom from the canons of biological normality could prove exhilarating, even necessary – as if extremity was the only result worth pursuing in an age devoted to limits of most other kinds.

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Picasso had acquired a reputation for re-arrangements of the human form well before the 1920s. The American journalist Gelett Burgess, on seeing the Demoiselles d’Avignon and other works in Picasso’s Paris studio in 1910, had spoken of ‘ultramarine ogresses … monstrous, monolithic women, creatures like Alaskan totem poles, hacked out of solid, brutal colours … sub-African caricatures, figures with eyes askew’. In describing Picasso as ‘a devil’ – but also as ‘exuberant’, ‘scornful’ and ‘humorous’ – Burgess saw the signs of a personality that a much younger Spanish artist, Salvador Dalí, would respond to in his turn.1 There were important differences in their backgrounds. Picasso was from the south of Spain and had been a child prodigy in art before a mercurial career, first in Barcelona and then in Paris. Dalí was a Catalan, and his attachment to the mysterious coastline near Cadaqués in northern Spain would be ever present. His junior by twenty-three years, Dalí’s first encounter with Picasso in person was at a moment when the older artist was in the throes of freeing himself from the Cubist manner that he himself had invented: it was in April 1926, in Picasso’s rue de la Boëtie studio in Paris, where could be seen a group of paintings in which a single detail seemed to fascinate the younger man. In a medium-sized table-top still-life entitled Studio with Plaster Head, painted by Picasso the previous summer at Juan-les-Pins, in the south of France, could be seen what most writers have called a ‘double-head’, done by painting the shadow of the plaster head itself on the wall behind, giving rise to both a frontal as well as a three-quarter view. Once back in Spain, Dalí himself began mimicking that form of visualization in paintings of his own – Homage to Erik Satie and Still Life by Moonlight, both of 1926, and Barcelona Mannequin of 1927 are all good examples. It was a spatial and imaginative trick that had an immediately liberating effect on Dalí’s work. His friend Sebastià Gasch wrote of the visit to Paris that Dalí, hitherto rendered timid

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