Maniac Eyeball

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Authors: Salvador Dalí
Tags: Art/Surrealism/Autobiography
design the sets. (It was staged in Barcelona, at the Goya Theatre, by Marguerite Xirgu.) I can still hear his vibrant voice hammering out,
    I remain alone, the while
    Beneath the flowering acacia
    In the garden, death waits for me.
    My life is here.
    My blood is moved and trembles
    Like a tree of coral
    Cradled by the deep.
    We even danced the sardana on the rambla in his honor before he left. I at the time was painting Cadaqués landscapes, my father, my sister, everything that could be a subject for my frenzied brush.
    I was paying close attention to Chirico’s paintings, through the magazines. I was contributing to Barcelona’s Gaceta de las artes and L’Amic de les arts; and one book was always at my bedside, Ingres’ Thoughts. I decided I would take some essential notes out of it as preface to my first one-man show, at the Dalmau Gallery, Barcelona, in November 1925. I put into the catalogue: “Drawing is the touchstone of Art” and “He who calls upon no mind except his own will soon find himself reduced to the most wretched of all imitations, namely, that of his own works.”
    This tribute to the beauties of craft and tradition corresponded exactly to my own ideas. This is the basis on which one can afford to be a genius. I exhibited five drawings and seven paintings. The critics, who are always laggards and unaware of truth, were nevertheless enthusiastic.[1]
    There was another show at Dalmau’s, from December 31, 1925, to January 14, 1926, this time including twenty paintings and seven drawings, and equally successful. I was not unhappy to display the admirable classical tradition that inspired me – and paradoxically had inspired the anarchist suspended from the Fine Arts School.
    I exhibited among others a girl of the Ampurdan, with an admirable pair of buttocks, and a basket of bread that a representative of the Carnegie Institute, visiting from the U.S., was to borrow for an exhibition at Pittsburgh, where it was bought and remained in the States.
    I returned to Madrid, the year of my suspension having come to an end. And I saw my old friends and fell into the same kind of nightlife. My father, cautiously – so he thought – had granted me only a tiny allowance, but I signed chits everywhere to be forwarded to him, and he had no choice but to pay them. My friends, who were always ready to go along with any idea of mine and had greeted my return with delirious delight, proved that I had lost none of my pres tige, far from it. I came out magnified by this adventure, during which I had even found time further to polish my craft, while having the wildest of times. They pooled their resources to be able to pay for my whims. The Municipal Pawnshop (sometimes known as the Mount of Piety) became a familiar haunt of young Madrileños, and we had developed the fine art of “mooching” on our friends to the level of an institution of cynical technical perfection. Any expedient, any pocketbook, flush or meager, any lie was acceptable – if it did the trick.
     
    Did The Low Life Not Bother Dalí?
    We were really greedy, cunning, and diabolical little lowlifes. I was in the grasp of a self-destructive mania against all values, as if to test their resistance and establish a new hierarchy, selected by my own genius.
    Even my friendship with Lorca now was subject to question. I had veritable fits of jealousy that made me shun him several days running. I systematically tried to become more debauched and more detached from all past ties. In painting class, being assigned one day to paint a Gothic Virgin atop a ball, I drew a balance-scale and assured the bemused professor that “That is what I see in the model.” I might also have pointed out to him that in the Zodiac the respective Virgo and Libra are right next to each other, and connected, but that would not have helped any.
    The final flourish was sounded by the publication in the official gazette on October 20, 1926, of my order of final expulsion from the

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