This article was originally printed in RVA Mag #25. The accompanying web article can be found here.
A young Christine Argillet with Dali in Spain. Image acquired from Mme. Argillet and Chasen Galleries, RIchmond
The infamous Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) has graced Richmond with yet another short visit. Recalling his extended stay in Bowling Green, Virginia from 1940-41 at Caresse Crosby’s Hampton Manor estate, along with his (then) preposterous proposal for a sculpture on Monument Avenue in 1966, Dalí has appeared in the city on several occasions. From the 23rd-30th of this past April, Chasen Galleries on West Cary St. exhibited the private collection of Dalí’s publisher and confidant of more than 50 years, Pierre Argillet. Dalí met M. Argillet before the Second World War through the Surrealist circle of artists and writers in Amsterdam. After the war, they reunited to embark on over a decade of fruitful projects and exhibitions. I had the distinct opportunity to speak with Pierre’s daughter, Mme. Christine Argillet—curator of the collection, as well as a premiere scholar of Surrealism—on topics surrounding her father’s working relationship with Dalí, and her own childhood experiences with the artist. She explains, “This presentation of Dalí: The Argillet Collection is a tribute to the work of my father, Pierre Argillet, as an extraordinary publisher of the Dada and Surrealist group. This collection reflects a constant endeavor, a very personal archive of not only Dalí’s finest etchings and tapestries, but an intimate glimpse into my family’s personal and cherished photos, films, anecdotes and memories of life with Dalí and [his wife] Gala.”
While most of us are familiar with Dalí’s early painting career, recognizing notable pieces like The Persistence of Memory (1931) and The Great Masturbator (1929), the Argillet Collection provides great insight into his post-war productivity. Mme. Argillet explains, “There was this long maturation for the body of work we have here. [With] the exception of three drawings which are older, these are all mostly works of the 60s.” Influenced by the work of notable writers, artists, and popular figures outside of the Surrealist tradition, its evident where Dalí uses his own iconographies to comment on many cultural and political themes. Each of the eight series in the exhibition were curated by suite—Mythologies, Faust, Bullfights, Venus in Furs, Apollinaire, Mao Zedong, Don Juan, and Hippies—as well as a suite of ceramic vessels and two large tapestries. The Argillet Collection captures a number of stylistic developments in Dalí’s works on paper. As Mme. Argillet points out, “There is really a shift in his work… [from the early] 60s where it’s very meticulously drawn like the Mythologies, to the end of the 60s where its very spontaneous.” She explains, “In the beginning of the 60s, he would throw acid on covered plates, and then draw around the abstract shape created by this motion, being inspired by the given smudge. Then we have the mid-60s where he reworks Picasso’s Bullfight series… [he] brings this sort of burlesque, humorous touch because he didn’t like the bullfights so he made fun of them.” Then in the late 60s, his Hippies series was the “most immediate and spontaneous of them all”—at times he would mark the plate without even a sketch.
Mme. Argillet explains, “Fifteen years ago, I had a gallery in Los Angeles when I first came to the US for two years, and then my father passed away, and I closed the gallery. After, I had the luck to meet someone who organized exhibitions for me, and it was exactly what I wanted, to have this collection travelling to museums… we have had beautiful exhibitions in different countries. In the US, I made donations to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, too. This agent brought me to good galleries, and that was the idea, to have this collection in museums and with galleries… and to keep these works together as much as possible.”
Pierre Argillet with Dali. Image acquired from Mme. Argillet and Chasen Galleries, RIchmond
AH: What brought Dalí and your father together after the war? What halted their working relationship after 15 years of publications?
MA: Dalí was so happy to escape the disaster in Europe, that’s the reason my father reconnected with him not before the end of the 50s. When my father restarted to work with him, he decided to put aside the other artists to work with Dalí. It brought him much pleasure to work with Dalí… they were great friends! So, that’s why a large part of the work shown here is from the 60s. Then in 1973, Dalí said to my father, “I cannot etch anymore, it’s too much work, my eyes water after 5-10 minutes… I cannot work on a copper plate because it’s so shiny; the work is too small and tedious… I have to finish projects and paintings… I would like you to go for lithographs and printing afters.” My father said, “No, never, I have beautiful, genuine original etchings that you did working directly on the copper plate. I don’t want anything that would be “afters” with a photographic medium in-between. For me, it has no more interest than a poster, and if you don’t mind, we stop our publications here. But let’s remain friends.” And they remained very good friends, my father organized a huge Dalí exhibition in Moscow at the Pushkin Museum in 1980, one year before Dalí passed away… he did not come because he was ill at the time—but it was prepared by Dalí, I saw those meetings. They went on some projects, but our collection stopped in 1973, and we are very happy for that, because later on there were a lot of problems with the lithographs that were over produced and over numbered—so that is why we are safe and happy with that.
AH: How did your father become involved with this line of work?
MA: He started as a journalist very early on, he was very lucky that the first years where he was involved in journalism, a very well read guy involved with the surrealist movement took him to his various events and happenings… they were great friends until the end of his life. My father had no family to take him to those exhibitions and new movements… he completely opened [my father’s] eyes. [His working relationships with artists] started with Jean Arp, who was a great friend of Andre Breton (leader of the Surrealist movement)… and that took him to Marcel Duchamp, and then from Duchamp to Dalí, then to other associated writers and philosophers.
AH: Did your father identify as a surrealist?
MA: I would say that he was a very free thinker, but at the end of his life he was always telling me, he was 92 when he passed away, “Oh, it's not like Surrealism”—nostalgic of that time. You know, when you are so part of a movement and have seen all that, and then people pass away one after another… its quite difficult I would say, quite sad for him… but yes, he was very linked to Surrealism. We had long talks about this, but I had difficulty taking him out of [the melancholy]. I’d tell him ,“Why don’t you come out and see, there is a beautiful exhibition here,” he’d reply, “I don’t want to see anything anymore I saw so many things!” That’s the age I think, but he was very linked to Surrealism, that was his passion… and I think it became difficult for him to escape from that dream world, to deprogram himself. I think he appreciated very much the freedom of the time, the challenges… it would push him to work more, and do things that weren’t always easy with Dalí and with others, to push certain limits. He had a very rich and full life in that time of Surrealism, and I think probably he stayed with that, I’m quite sure.
AH: Did you hear any details about Dalí’s excommunication from the Surrealist circle by the movement’s leader, Andre Breton?
MA: Yes! What I heard from my father was, Breton wanted to frame anyone in that movement in a very strict way. Dalí was a Surrealist, probably more-so than many of the other artists of the movement, but he wanted to be free. And for that reason, I think Dalí came to a big meeting in Paris wearing about 20 pullover sweaters, one over the other. Each time Breton said something against him he would take off one of the pullovers… and they went like that with all 20. Then he left the scene, and was no more a part of the movement... that was around the end of the 30s. My father tried to reconnect them during the 60s, but that never happened, and I think that Breton had become very bitter because a lot of artists had run away from him because of his [unwavering] idea of Surrealism… whoever didn’t fit in his own vision wouldn’t be part of it… and that was a little bit sad, especially for Breton. Dalí was certainly not the type of guy to be limited in something.
AH: What can you tell me about Dalí’s creative process? Were there any ritualistic elements?
MA: Ritualistic, I wouldn’t say so… other than he was always whistling. His idea was always to change with the topic he was working on. For instance, even in the late 60s, he would read for a long time on the Faust series, on Apollinaire’s poems, he would read about Mao Zedong very much. He knew poems by heart in many languages… pages, entire pages. Then in a movement, like the flow of a calligrapher, he would work very spontaneously and let his imagination go… and in a way his imagination and ideas connected without him being totally controlling. He would love to be controlling and not controlling, work in-between those, let it naturally fill itself in. [Some of] his most happy moments that I noticed [were] when he saw connections that appeared in his works that he would notice afterwards. Yes, in the beginning of the 60s he would throw acid, but other times he would use nails, scissors, roulettes, it had no end. For the Medusa, he even used a real octopus that was there on the shore in front of his house in Spain. I saw him take the animal, put it in the acid and onto the copper plate so it printed its own shape.
Medusa, etching by Dali. Image acquired from Mme. Argillet and Chasen Galleries, RIchmond
AH: Do you recall any specific topics of conversation between your father and Dalí about the relation of art and literature?
MA: You know, they were very close, and so they would exchange books quite often. In 1968, my father found the beautiful poems of Mao Zedong [in a Parisian bookstore], which he did not know existed until that time. He brought them to Dalí who said, “That’s extraordinary, I didn’t know this guy had done poetry!”. It’s from there that [these projects] started. So often, they were exchanging books and ideas—when my father proposed Venus in Furs, Dalí was excited. But sometimes my father proposed things that didn’t resonate with Dalí at that moment, or through his views; and Dalí proposed things to my father who was not enthusiastic about this or that, so it depended. But they had this free, back and forth, watching happenings, going to them together, or organizing them… my father did this many times, so they had those exchanges of, “You should see this or that,” and then they would discuss.
Behind his public persona, which was a bit crazy, he was shy… he would overcompensated [in public]… my father was always afraid of where it was going to lead! But Dalí was very bright, very well read, and with a sort of pirouette he would come back. I think the public persona does not reflect at all who he was, he was a very easy-going simple person, but outside you saw a different man. At home he was totally different… extremely human, simple, and charming. That’s something which has always touched me retrospectively, thinking of that proximity he had with everyone, and the way he would talk to the taxi driver asking if he had seen his last show, here and there, telling that he should come… you know everyone was important for him, and I haven’t seen that in [many people] or in most artists. He had this vision that he had to talk to everyone to be universal, so I think that’s the best souvenir that I have of him is this openness to everyone, taking everyone on the same level. I think he had this intelligence to know that what is finally very important is the human nature over whatever you create artificially around yourself; so he had this vision, but in public he would not show that unfortunately.
AH: What are your thoughts on developing journalists and writers alongside artists?
MA: I think that sometimes the combination is marvelous because one corresponds with and complements the other, which is extremely beneficial. In the time of Surrealism, I think that many writers were there—like Paul Eluard and Andre Breton—and they would bring another complement of what a painter or etcher would do, and in that sense I think it was allowing everyone to go further on their own path… but in many cases, it distracts. I remember Giorgio DeCirco, I think it was in 1971 in Venice, Italy, and he had been shown a film on Kandinsky and he said, “If I had known so well Kandinsky’s works before, I might have not been able to do what I did because it would have lead me somewhere else and distracted me from my own path. So, I think Dalí was, for most of his life, very strong in his own research. [When you have a movement like Surrealism, there’s] an eclecticism so spread that it’s difficult to see [now]. But in those times, they would go to a café in Paris, they would agree or disagree, very strongly… next day in the newspapers you would see something against this one, and they would answer with another newspaper. In those times, everything was possible to be said… yet there existed this underlying respect for everyone’s freedom of thought. There were also very strong quarrels, but that brought fuel to the debate, so it was beautiful. It’s ok to be upset with one another and have different views, it’s a learning experience. Now it’s different unfortunately, a different way of life where everybody is connected but people are not together. When you are in front of a computer, you don’t have to listen to someone and envision another point of view, or cope with another point of view... you say yes or no I don’t want this or I want that, so you don’t have this possibility of deconstructing and constructing yourself in the same way. It’s what is missing nowadays… it might be uncomfortable, but you have to face this discomfort and reflect on it. We need a contradictory eye sometimes to challenge and defend our thoughts. Truth lives in different ways, it is so important for people to envision something else, otherwise the learning process through life is held back.
I was fortunate to have my former professor and mentor, Richard Stamelman (and his Leica), along for my second visit with Mme. Argillet. Richard is a Professor Emeritus of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Williams College, and the former Executive Director of the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Endowment at Dartmouth College. He now teaches a variety of modernist art, literary and cultural topics at William and Mary, and takes photos over his travels and spare time.