Dalí’s forms are mirrored and doubled in this disconcerting painting, made in a state of “paranoiac critical activity.”
Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937, oil on canvas, 51.1 x 78.1 cm (Tate Modern, London)
The ancient source of this subject is Ovid’s Metamorphosis (Book 3, lines 339–507). It tells of Narcissus, who upon seeing his own image reflected in a pool, so falls in love that he cannot look away. Eventually he vanishes and in his place is a “sweet flower, gold and white, the white around the gold.”
Dalí’s poem, below, accompanied the painting when it was initially exhibited:
Narcissus,
in his immobility,
absorbed by his reflection with the digestive slowness of carnivorous plants,
becomes invisible.
There remains of him only the hallucinatingly white oval of his head,
his head again more tender,
his head, chrysalis of hidden biological designs,
his head held up by the tips of the water’s fingers,
at the tips of the fingers
of the insensate hand,
of the terrible hand,
of the mortal hand
of his own reflection.
When that head slits
when that head splits
when that head bursts,
it will be the flower,
the new Narcissus,
Gala – my Narcissus.
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:03] We’re looking at a painting by Salvador Dalí in the Tate Modern. It’s “Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” and it dates to 1937. It’s a pretty wild painting.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:14] So what I see that relates to that is this hand that seems to be emerging from the earth that holds an egg, from which seems to be hatching a narcissus.
Dr. Zucker: [0:24] Except that so many of Dalí’s paintings and rendering in Dalí’s paintings, which are painted in a kind of classical manner in terms of its sort of…
Dr. Harris: [0:33] It’s very realistic.
Dr. Zucker: [0:34] …its precision — its careful rendering of space, even if that space is distorted — of shadow, of line.
[0:39] If you look at the egg from which the flower is emerging, it seems to be emerging from a crack that is also the shadow of the flower at the same moment, and so it’s both those things, sort of simultaneously. In fact, the whole painting seems to be about forms being one thing and at the same moment another.
Dr. Harris: [0:57] There is, behind that hand, another hand that seems to be emerging from a pool of water. This time not rock, but something, because it’s brown, but something that seems more earth-like, and holding also an egg-like shape, but actually it looks a little bit more like a walnut.
[1:14] It also has a crack, and from that seems to emerge hair that looks like a flame.
Dr. Zucker: [1:19] The hand is, in that second iteration, not so much a hand as actually a crouching body, the body of Narcissus.
Dr. Harris: [1:27] You can see knees and arms.
Dr. Zucker: [1:30] What’s wonderful is that whereas the figure that’s yellow on the left, slightly further back, is a body, where the head is a walnut, on the right it’s more clearly a close-up of a hand holding an egg, and yet they’re precisely the same forms. It’s that doubling. It’s that mirror that’s so incredibly disconcerting.
[1:48] All of this needs to be contextualized. What in the world is Dalí doing? Well, what he said he was doing and what André Breton lauded him for, he was a writer and often seen as one of the leaders of the Surrealist movement…
Dr. Harris: [2:00] He wrote the “Surrealist Manifesto.”
Dr. Zucker: [2:02] Right, all of the Surrealist Manifestos, or at least a number of them. They called the ability of Dalí to do this, to see things simultaneously as more than one thing, as a result of a psychological state, which they called “paranoiac-critical activity.”
Dr. Harris: [2:17] Sounds scary and dangerous.
Dr. Zucker: [2:19] I think they loved the fact that it was scary and dangerous. It was based on a kind of willful misreading of Freud.
[2:26] Freud talked about the filters that kept the unconscious and the conscious mind apart. but Dalí claimed that in the state of paranoiac-critical activity, he could actually embrace both the conscious and the unconscious simultaneously so that his conscious mind could actually do the painting.
[2:43] The brilliance of understanding that form as both a hand and a body, as flesh and stone simultaneously, that, Dalí would have claimed, was absolutely the result not of the rational mind, impossible in the rational, but it was the result of the irrational, of a conversation between those two states in this state of paranoid-critical activity.
Dr. Harris: [3:05] It was incredibly important to the Surrealists to access that unconscious, to access something that was more authentic, that lacked the control of the conscious mind.
Dr. Zucker: [3:16] For them, that was the engine of creativity. Absolutely, it was this mother lode of the creative. I mean, when we think back to the 19th century and we think back to artists like Gauguin wanting to get back to nature, of Courbet wanting to get back to nature. The unconscious for the Surrealists, that was the great goal. That was it.
[3:34] What’s so interesting is the Surrealists go at this from a number of different points of view. People like Miró will try to, in a sense, allow for the unconscious to emerge and to paint using an automatic method that is not allowing the conscious mind to interpret, whereas Dalí is sort of wanting both. He wants the perfection of the academic style to render the inspiration of the unconscious.
[3:58] [music]
