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Lot Essay
For the "divine" Dalí there were only three painters in the whole history of art whose divine inspiration surpassed that of his own: Raphael, Velasquez and Jan Vermeer whom Dalí regarded as "the most perfect of all the painters". Indeed, of these three artists it was probably the subtle art of Vermeer and in particular, the Dutchman's almost magical ability to seemingly freeze a moment of time into a single but transcendent image of high precision and photographic clarity that most deeply informed his own obsessive photographic style. "In the history of looking [Vermeer's] eyes are the case of the highest probity," Dalí wrote in his essay From Photography: Pure Creation of the Spirit. "With all the temptations of light however, Van der Meer, a new Saint Anthony, preserved intact the object with an inspiration altogether photographic, an outcome of his humble and impassioned tactile sense" (cited in The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, ed. Haim Finkelstein, Cambridge, 1998, p. 46).
Apparition de la ville de Delft (Apparition of the town of Delft) is one of a number of paintings that Dalí made in the mid-1930s which refer directly to the debt he felt he owed to Vermeer. A fusion of Vermeer's famous portrait of his home town of Delft with the imagery and iconography of Dalí's own local landscape around his home village of Port Lligat on the Catalan coast, the painting is clearly intended to be seen as a visual metaphor of Dalí's self-identification with Vermeer. It is a timeless portrait of a bizarre mental landscape that fuses both painters' personal and local imagery into a single hallucinatory or dream-like image of photographic precision and clarity.
The predominant feature of the painting is the rock-encrusted outline of a car silhouetted against the vast empty sky. Featuring in several of Dalí's paintings from this era, this car is one of the apparitions he had perceived amongst the strange-shaped anamorphic rocks of Cape Creus near Port Lligat which had first prompted the artist's development of his paranoiac-critical technique. The fossilised automobile had first appeared in Dalí's art in the 1929 painting Monument impérial à la femme-enfant (Imperial monument to the Child Woman). It is a familiar icon used by Dali to suggest the ultimate triumph of Nature over technology which was given its most grandiose expression in Dalí's art in his 1938 installation Rainy Taxi where the interior of the car was transformed into a forest-like environment complete with falling rain and live edible snails crawling over a dilapidated female mannequin.
In Apparition de la ville Delft the seemingly flat two-dimensional car, with its old, perhaps 17th Century, brickwork structure is isolated against the sky in such a way as to emphasise its almost artificial and stage-set-like character. In this respect it relates closely to the seemingly mirage-like apparition of Vermeer's View of Delft as a kind of continuation of the rocky Catalan landscape in the lower left-hand corner of the painting. The bizarre appearance of this 17th Century masterpiece depicting Vermeer's hometown is not completely arbitrary however, for, like so much of Dalí's work, it conforms to the artist's unique but often convoluted logic of his inner fantasies.
In addition to his profound admiration of Vermeer, Dalí had undergone a revelation when discovering in the View of Delft the close resemblance of the town's belfry tower to that of the tower of Sant Pere in Figueras where he himself had been baptized. For Dalí, belfries held an erotic charge that was visually explored in many of his paintings - often with the paranoiac-critical transformation of the suspended bell being simultaneously perceivable as the figure of a young girl. Dalí himself has recalled that many of his sexual onanistic fantasies were habitually enacted in superimposed belfries, the reason being that as an adolescent he used to masturbate on the rooftop terrace in Figueras while watching the setting sun lighting the tower of Sant Pere. On discovering that this tower resembled that of San Narcìs in Girona and the one in Delft figured in Vermeer's painting, Dalí reportedly developed a masturbatory fixation about towers to the point where, according to his close friend Nanita Kalashnikoff, "He would juxtapose the three belfries in his imagination and when everything was exactly right, all the details correct, he'd ejaculate" (cited in I. Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, London, 1997, p. 72).
Fuelled by the artist's own much-vaunted impotence, both the tortured and tortuous nature of Dalí's inner erotic fantasies plays a central role in the creation of the majority of his pictorial imagery. In this respect, the appearance in this painting of part of Vermeer's View of Delft - the part centred on the view of the town's belfry - is therefore not without an erotic significance. This is also the case with the figures of the three ghost-like figures and the cupboard with its open drawer that appear in the foreground of the picture. Closely resembling the mysterious figures that appear in the 1934 painting Cardinal Cardinal - a work which also portrays a smiling Gala holding the white rag that is here suspended on the cupboard's open drawer - these painterly figures seem to be becoming fossilised themselves. Slumbering, their spectral forms appear to be dissolving into the shadows created by the rocks.
The spectres around the table can also be seen to relate to Vermeer in that not only did Dalí paint Vermeer's ghost transforming itself into a table in numerous paintings of 1934, but he also declared that "Vermeer is the authentic painter of spectres", and maintained that the Dutch painter's "woman trying on her pearl necklace in front of the mirror is the most authentically spectral picture that was ever painted" (cited in Cahiers d"art, no. 1-2, 1940). In Cardinal Cardinal these ragged figures are gathered around a cupboard attempting to gain sustenance from the cupboard with a jug. Both the jug and the cupboard are vessels which according to Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams are clear symbols for woman or for female sexuality. Dalí's cupboard was originally born from the back of the figure of his nursemaid in the painting Le sevrage du-meuble-aliment (The Weaning of Nutrtitive Furniture) and is repeatedly used in his work - as is the open drawer - as a somewhat anthropomorphic and erotically-charged object. The positioning in this painting of the mysterious white rag suspended on the drawer directly under the belfry tower of the town of Delft is also surely not without significance. Like so much of Dalí's work, however, a precise interpretation of its importance and meaning for the artist remains an intriguing mystery.
The present work once formed part of the collection of the noted English eccentric Robert Heber-Percy. Known for his high spirits, pranks and uninhibited behaviour, which earned him the nick-name "The Mad Boy", Heber-Percy was the friend and lover of the equally eccentric composer, author and painter, Gerald, 14th Lord Berners of Faringdon Park, Oxfordshire. Berners became a great friend of Salvador Dalí, having met him first in 1932 and having been re-introduced in 1935 by Edward James, also a close friend. Dalí was frequently a guest at Faringdon Park, most notably during the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, when he agreed to give a lecture to Berners' assembled guests on Paranoia, The Pre-Raphaelites, Harpo Marx and Phantoms, or Authentic Paranoiac Fantasies. In order to highlight his metaphorical plunge into the subconscious, Dalí wore a diving suit supplied by Berners. Noone could hear the artist speaking in his heavy helmet, however, and when Dalí went to take it off, he discovered that it was bolted on. Dalí very nearly suffocated, but for a timely intervention by a workman with a spanner. Berners owned several works of art by Dalí and it is likely that it was he who acquired Apparition de la ville de Delft. On Berners' death in 1950, Heber-Percy inherited the vast majority of the estate, including the house, the possessions and most of his Lordship's money.
Apparition de la ville de Delft (Apparition of the town of Delft) is one of a number of paintings that Dalí made in the mid-1930s which refer directly to the debt he felt he owed to Vermeer. A fusion of Vermeer's famous portrait of his home town of Delft with the imagery and iconography of Dalí's own local landscape around his home village of Port Lligat on the Catalan coast, the painting is clearly intended to be seen as a visual metaphor of Dalí's self-identification with Vermeer. It is a timeless portrait of a bizarre mental landscape that fuses both painters' personal and local imagery into a single hallucinatory or dream-like image of photographic precision and clarity.
The predominant feature of the painting is the rock-encrusted outline of a car silhouetted against the vast empty sky. Featuring in several of Dalí's paintings from this era, this car is one of the apparitions he had perceived amongst the strange-shaped anamorphic rocks of Cape Creus near Port Lligat which had first prompted the artist's development of his paranoiac-critical technique. The fossilised automobile had first appeared in Dalí's art in the 1929 painting Monument impérial à la femme-enfant (Imperial monument to the Child Woman). It is a familiar icon used by Dali to suggest the ultimate triumph of Nature over technology which was given its most grandiose expression in Dalí's art in his 1938 installation Rainy Taxi where the interior of the car was transformed into a forest-like environment complete with falling rain and live edible snails crawling over a dilapidated female mannequin.
In Apparition de la ville Delft the seemingly flat two-dimensional car, with its old, perhaps 17th Century, brickwork structure is isolated against the sky in such a way as to emphasise its almost artificial and stage-set-like character. In this respect it relates closely to the seemingly mirage-like apparition of Vermeer's View of Delft as a kind of continuation of the rocky Catalan landscape in the lower left-hand corner of the painting. The bizarre appearance of this 17th Century masterpiece depicting Vermeer's hometown is not completely arbitrary however, for, like so much of Dalí's work, it conforms to the artist's unique but often convoluted logic of his inner fantasies.
In addition to his profound admiration of Vermeer, Dalí had undergone a revelation when discovering in the View of Delft the close resemblance of the town's belfry tower to that of the tower of Sant Pere in Figueras where he himself had been baptized. For Dalí, belfries held an erotic charge that was visually explored in many of his paintings - often with the paranoiac-critical transformation of the suspended bell being simultaneously perceivable as the figure of a young girl. Dalí himself has recalled that many of his sexual onanistic fantasies were habitually enacted in superimposed belfries, the reason being that as an adolescent he used to masturbate on the rooftop terrace in Figueras while watching the setting sun lighting the tower of Sant Pere. On discovering that this tower resembled that of San Narcìs in Girona and the one in Delft figured in Vermeer's painting, Dalí reportedly developed a masturbatory fixation about towers to the point where, according to his close friend Nanita Kalashnikoff, "He would juxtapose the three belfries in his imagination and when everything was exactly right, all the details correct, he'd ejaculate" (cited in I. Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, London, 1997, p. 72).
Fuelled by the artist's own much-vaunted impotence, both the tortured and tortuous nature of Dalí's inner erotic fantasies plays a central role in the creation of the majority of his pictorial imagery. In this respect, the appearance in this painting of part of Vermeer's View of Delft - the part centred on the view of the town's belfry - is therefore not without an erotic significance. This is also the case with the figures of the three ghost-like figures and the cupboard with its open drawer that appear in the foreground of the picture. Closely resembling the mysterious figures that appear in the 1934 painting Cardinal Cardinal - a work which also portrays a smiling Gala holding the white rag that is here suspended on the cupboard's open drawer - these painterly figures seem to be becoming fossilised themselves. Slumbering, their spectral forms appear to be dissolving into the shadows created by the rocks.
The spectres around the table can also be seen to relate to Vermeer in that not only did Dalí paint Vermeer's ghost transforming itself into a table in numerous paintings of 1934, but he also declared that "Vermeer is the authentic painter of spectres", and maintained that the Dutch painter's "woman trying on her pearl necklace in front of the mirror is the most authentically spectral picture that was ever painted" (cited in Cahiers d"art, no. 1-2, 1940). In Cardinal Cardinal these ragged figures are gathered around a cupboard attempting to gain sustenance from the cupboard with a jug. Both the jug and the cupboard are vessels which according to Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams are clear symbols for woman or for female sexuality. Dalí's cupboard was originally born from the back of the figure of his nursemaid in the painting Le sevrage du-meuble-aliment (The Weaning of Nutrtitive Furniture) and is repeatedly used in his work - as is the open drawer - as a somewhat anthropomorphic and erotically-charged object. The positioning in this painting of the mysterious white rag suspended on the drawer directly under the belfry tower of the town of Delft is also surely not without significance. Like so much of Dalí's work, however, a precise interpretation of its importance and meaning for the artist remains an intriguing mystery.
The present work once formed part of the collection of the noted English eccentric Robert Heber-Percy. Known for his high spirits, pranks and uninhibited behaviour, which earned him the nick-name "The Mad Boy", Heber-Percy was the friend and lover of the equally eccentric composer, author and painter, Gerald, 14th Lord Berners of Faringdon Park, Oxfordshire. Berners became a great friend of Salvador Dalí, having met him first in 1932 and having been re-introduced in 1935 by Edward James, also a close friend. Dalí was frequently a guest at Faringdon Park, most notably during the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, when he agreed to give a lecture to Berners' assembled guests on Paranoia, The Pre-Raphaelites, Harpo Marx and Phantoms, or Authentic Paranoiac Fantasies. In order to highlight his metaphorical plunge into the subconscious, Dalí wore a diving suit supplied by Berners. Noone could hear the artist speaking in his heavy helmet, however, and when Dalí went to take it off, he discovered that it was bolted on. Dalí very nearly suffocated, but for a timely intervention by a workman with a spanner. Berners owned several works of art by Dalí and it is likely that it was he who acquired Apparition de la ville de Delft. On Berners' death in 1950, Heber-Percy inherited the vast majority of the estate, including the house, the possessions and most of his Lordship's money.