Salvador Dalí asked that Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner sound to go from life to death in January 1989. It was a music he knew well because he had accompanied him while painting many of the works he created in Portlligat, from dawn to sunset. He liked to put it on his old record player and if someone complained about how bad it sounded, he said: "It's like we fry sardines." But the surrealist painter was also attracted to other composers. Like Beethoven who he admired since he was a child, as he wrote in his famous Secret Life of Salvador Dalí , whose first edition of 1942 illustrated with drawings made with black ink. One of them is that of a huge and stormy cloud that represents “an immeasurable and apotheosic plummic skull” from which rays appear that illuminate the landscape, the result of a vision he had as a child and titled Beethoven Skull , a drawing of just 20 centimeters that the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation bought in 2004.
Three decades later, in 1973, one of the paintings he made to decorate his last great work, the Teatre-Museu de Figueres, was a Beethoven head painted frontally; a gouache made with a very special technique: throwing live octopus on a huge paper placed on the ground and taking advantage of its footprint and ink. "I paint with octopus and dragging them with that kind of ink they cast, I made the head precisely of Beethoven," he explained in a radio interview, in which he added, with the sarcasm and irony that characterized him: "I painted with arcabuces throwing the white, I painted with little frogs, with toads that also fell from a storm, I painted with snails, I painted with everything, even with oil paint. ”
Since then, Beethoven Head , has not moved from the place where Dalí placed it: under the huge dome of the theater-museum, to the right of the grave where he is buried, next to other outstanding works such as Hallucinogenic Bullfighter (1970) and Portrait of Lincoln (1974). So far, for the first time, he has traveled (together with the first drawing for The Secret Life ) to the German city of Remagen, just 22 kilometers from Bonn, the city where Beethoven was born 250 years ago, to participate in an exhibition in which he pays tribute to the composer.
“It is important for us to link to the German and international celebration of Beethoven's anniversary. From the Arp Museum in Remagen they have insisted a lot; letters of recommendation have even arrived for us to agree to lend. The board of trustees, after studying it carefully, has agreed that it will only be provided for a little more than a month, given the exceptionality of the anniversary. But possibly it will never lend itself again ”, explains Montse Aguer, director of the Dalí Museums, before the work of almost two meters high, about to be packed to go on a trip to Germany for the exhibition that opens its doors this Sunday .
Before, in the center's conservation workshop, Irene Civil and Josep Maria Guillamet analyze the health of this piece. The work is preserved inside a special frame that protects it from dust and ultraviolet rays. "But Dalí hung it directly hooked with four nails to a wood", explains the Conservative Civil, provided with special glasses and flush light lantern after concluding a map with all the folds of the paper, essential to be able to track the work on his round trip. "The paper has many folds, none important," he says.
Dalí creates this work by displaying his maxim of “always accumulate, never select,” recalls Aguer. He placed the paper on the floor, and because of its large dimensions, he couldn't help stepping on it. And there are his prints, but he also took one of his espadrilles with his hand and used it as a brush. To the footprints of the shoes and the octopus, Dalí added another, more reddish ink, in which he ended up configuring the face and a kind of landscape at the bottom. "It could even be Portlligat Bay," notes Aguer, who points out how Dalí follows "the surreal idea of going from the abstract to the concrete." In addition to their fingerprints there are also traces of organic matter: "they can be traces of resin or of the same octopus and oxide of some metallic container that he placed on paper," explains Civil.
To all that, small tree or plant branches and a bird feather are added, which possibly fell from the air, since it was created on the terrace of Portlligat, next to where Dalí and Gala had a loft, but also of the half a dozen swans swimming in the calm waters of the bay. Even the party, held a while earlier, in which the guitarist Manitas de Plata had participated and that Dalí ended up throwing with the help of fans chicken feathers on the surprised attendees. “It would be necessary to analyze it to know what bird it is,” says Civil.
In spite of everything, the work is very clean. Dalí put the octopus on the paper, placed their huge heads and tentacles and then lifted them, did not drag them. I had practice. “He did it thinking about his museum, but the technique had been using it since the late fifties, making it clear that there is always a sequential line in it. Since the end of the fifties he had done works using these animals, as in the illustrations for a Quixote commissioned by the Foret editor ”, explains Aguer who points out that he signed the work“ forcefully as if he were a notary ”, with a large rubric and date.
“Both Dalí and Beethoven agree on their radicalism and their genius. We like the Arp Museum to talk about being two eccentric, ingenious, innovative and visionary artists, with an artistic legacy that transgresses genres. The two rely on the tradition of their ancestors to create new compositions that have fascinated until today; who found their way in popular culture and have become universal symbols, ”says Aguer. Some arguments that have been decisive to provide, exceptionally, the work. The piece, which traveled at the end of last week to Germany, will also be the image of the poster to announce the summer concerts in this city dedicated to Beethoven.
Dialogue with the Dadaist Arp
“Let's put Picasso aside. We will have to learn to get along better with Arp, ”Dalí wrote in 1928, after agreeing in Paris with Jean Arp, poet, painter and sculptor, pioneer of modern abstraction and Dadaism. For a decade the two artists participated in exhibitions and actions of the French capital and now the two creators meet again in the Salvador Dalí exhibition . The birth of memory that brings together (until August 20) about twenty works of the Empordà in the museum that the city of Remagen has dedicated to Arp since 2007. Dalí's paintings and sculptures, from museums around the world, they will dialogue with the fantastic and enigmatic works of the dadaist. In a section of this exhibition is where you can see the two works that Dalí dedicated to Beethoven, with which the museum celebrates the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth.