Le grand paranoïaque

Author: Marijke Peyser

Salvador Dalí said that he painted Le grand paranoïaque after a conversation about the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo with the artist Joseph Maria Sert.^[1] Dalí’s painting can be interpreted in a variety of ways. The face of the main figure may have been borrowed from ‘the inhabitants of the Emporda region, the greatest sufferers from paranoia in existence’.^[2] Almost all the figures in the desolate landscape have their hands over their eyes or their gazes averted. The seated woman’s buttocks form the nose of the protagonist. On the immediate left of this ‘nose’ the painter placed a female figure reminiscent of Gala, Dalí’s partner and muse.^[3] In the background on the left the artist repeated the main motif on a smaller scale. The back of the head is formed by a group of fleeing people who hide their faces or run away. They appear to be ashamed of something.

The obsessions and hallucinations that preoccupied Dalí throughout his life were mainly sexual.^[4] Masturbation was one of the major themes in his oeuvre.^[5] This theme is expanded on in works like Le grand masturbateur (1929), Le jeu lugubre (1929) and La vieillesse de Guillaume Tell (1931). Dalí’s use of double or multiple images stemmed from the ‘paranoiac-critical method’ he had devised, where an object can at the same time depict another object without any adaptation or change. The aim of this method was to make use of the confusion created by the ambiguity of these images; then there is room for a new order of elements of everyday life, which normally speaking have no connection with one another. In the winter of 1929 Dalí began to work on L’homme invisible (1929-32). It was his first attempt to create different images on one canvas at the same time.^[6] It was followed by works like Dormeuse, cheval, lion invisibles (1930). In the same period he published a number of articles in which he set out his views on Surrealism and which were at odds with those of the leader of the Surrealist movement, André Breton. In the articles entitled ‘L’âne pourri’ (1930), ‘Nouvelles considérations générales sur le mécanisme du phénomène paranoïaque du point de vue surréaliste’ (1933) and ‘La conquête de l’irrationnel’ (1935) Dalí rejected Breton’s form of Surrealism, based as it was on automatic writing and dreams where the dream images continued to exist after the sleeper awoke. He believed that this led to stereotypes. Dalí maintained that it was only his paranoiac-critical method that could divulge new and objective meanings of the irrational. In this way the world of madness became the world of reality.