![]() ![]() Seized with dread, this original drop, who was afflicted with this first great shiver of creation, saw how its surface was first angered and produced goose flesh' (R. The artist explained the genesis of the sea urchin as 'the fear felt by a droplet of water to lose its beauty and purity at the instant of its first fall to earth. The final element is the sea urchin, a fundamental trope in the Dalínian vocabulary, which first appears twinned with the rhinoceros on the plinth of the Madonna of Port Lligat of 1950 (Tokyo, Private collection). Present, however, is the puckered hide so similar to human 'goose flesh' which fascinated Dalí and which is repeated in Rhinocéros cosmique. Dürer never saw the rhinoceros, and his heavily armoured almost mechanical representation was made from written descriptions. That animal was a specimen sent from Portugal's Indian territories to Lisbon and was intended by King Manuel I as a present for the Pope (although it died in a shipwreck on the onward journey to Rome). The representation of the rhinoceros in the present sculpture derives from Dürer's celebrated woodcut of 1515, a reproduction of which also hung in Dalí's childhood home. In the same year, as part of the ongoing investigations documented in The Prodigious Adventure of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros, Dalí took a large reproduction of The Lacemaker to the enclosure of François the Rhinoceros at Vincennes Zoo, and painted the results with the intention of seeing 'a rhincerontic Lacemaker spring up from the canvas' (Robert Descharnes, quoted in R. Guggenheim Museum), in which the young lacemaker is herself besieged by a maelstrom of rhino horns. The combination of Vermeer and rhinoceros appears again in Paranoiac-Critical Study of Vermeer's Lacemaker of 1955 (New York, Solomon R. ![]() ![]() He underlined the importance of this discovery in his lecture at the Sorbonne in December 1955 entitled Phenomenological Aspects of the Paranoiacal Critical Method, to which he was driven in a Rolls Royce filled with cauliflowers. The logarithmic spiral also guides the process by which a rhinoceros horn grows, much as it does the development of a snail's shell, the seeds in a sunflower head and the arrangements of the florets in a cauliflower. ![]() This coincided with his investigations into the logarithmic spiral, a mathematical progression which he saw as an element in an underlying natural system linking God and nature. The obsession reappears in 1954 when Dalí was granted permission to make copies of the original in the Louvre. The picture appears first in a scene in Un Chien Andalou, the pivotal surrealist film Dalí made with Luis Buñuel in 1929. Vermeer stood at the head of the trinity of Dalí's favourite artists, ahead of Raphael and Velásquez, with The Lacemaker as the ideal image. The Lacemaker is Vermeer's painting of that title in the Louvre, which Dalí had first encountered as a reproduction on the wall of his father's study. The roots of each element can to a certain extent be divined. The film, described as a 'cinematic symphony', was driven by Dalí's adherence to his paranoiac-critical method of surrealist invention and as a result almost defies description. cit., p.66).Įach element of this formula can be related to The Prodigious Adventure of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros, the extraordinary film project that Dalí worked on from 1951 to 1962, with Robert Descharnes as director and amanuensis. Rhinocéros cosmique represents the summation of a number of Dalí's obsessions from the 1950s, as arranged in a bewildering formula expounded by the artist to Robert Descharnes at Cadaqués in the summer of 1954: 'nebulous = Lacemaker = rhinoceros horn = corpuscular and logarithmic granulation of the cauliflower = granulation of the sea urchin, this shudder of creation' (R. Descharnes, Dalí, The Hard and the Soft, Spells of the Magic of Form, Paris, 2004, pp.70-71, fig.152 (another cast illustrated p.71). Presented by the Valsuani foundry to the present owner. ![]()
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