"Dining with Dalí: Gastronomy, Cannibalism,

& Edible Architecture"

Peter Tush Curator of Education

"At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since."

Dalí: Secret Life

 "I...can only paint after certain delirious occurrences [happen] in my digestive system."

Dalí in Passeron: Salvador Dalí, p.73

The Lips & Jaws

"…the most philosophical organs man possesses are his jaws. What indeed is more philosophic than the moment when you slowly suck in the marrow of a bone that is being powerfully crushed in the final destructive embrace of your molars…for it is at the supreme moment of reaching the marrow of anything that you discover the very taste of truth…"

Dalí, Secret Life, p. 10

Chompers – Ruby Lips with Teeth of Pearls brooch

A luscious Lip Sofa, 1937

Toe-sucking

Buñuel and Dalí’s L’Age d’Or

1930

Not all eating is appropriate in polite society…

Freud’s Perverse Polymorph

(Bulgarian Child Eating a Rat)

1939

"Sunset, the time for running out to the kitchen-garden! The time notorious for pressing out the guilty juices of terrestrial gardens invaded by the evening breezes of original sins. …"

"I would bite into everything- sugar beets, peaches, onions tender as a new moon. I was so fearful of becoming satiated, of letting my temptations lose their edge too quickly by the debauched prodigality of my gluttony, that I would only bite the desired fruit with a single impatient crunch of my teeth, and after having extracted from it the strict taste of desire, I would throw away the object of my seduction, the more quickly to grasp the rest of these fruits of the moment, whose taste was for my palate as ephemeral as the fugitive flicker of the fireflies that already began to shine in the deepest shadows of the growing vegetational darkness. …"

"At times I would take a fruit and be content to touch it with my lips or press it softly against my burning cheek."

Secret Life, p.89

TheSymbolization

of Food

"I like to eat only things with well-defined shapes that the intelligence can grasp. I detest spinach because of its utterly amorphous character…"

Secret Life, p. 9

"The very opposite of spinach is armor. That is why I like to eat armor so much, and especially the small varieties, namely all shell-fish."

Dalí, Secret Life, p. 9

The Basket of Bread, 1926

Catalan Bread, 1932

Nature Morte Evangelique, 1952

Eggs on the Plate Without

the Plate

1932

Gala’s gaze, eggs sunny-side up, and St. Lucy

Born again hard boiled

"…the most striking vision was that of a pair of eggs fried in a pan, without the pan; …The eggs fried in the pan without the pan, which I saw before my birth were grandiose, phosphorescent and very detailed in all the folds of their faintly bluish whites. These two eggs would approach (toward me), recede, move toward the left, toward the right, …; they would attain the iridescence and intensity of mother-of-pearl fires, only to diminish progressively and at last vanish. The fact that I am still able today to reproduce at will a similar image…makes me interpret this fulgurating image of the eggs as being a phosphene…"

Secret Life

Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937

Enigma of Desire

1929

Persistence of Memory, 1931

"Dalí’s soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant and solitary paranoiac-critical Camembert of time and space."

Salvador Dalí: Conquest of the Irrational

Cannibalism

"I like Gala and I like steak. Why would I not paint them together?"

Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb

Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder

1933

Self-serving meat from

Les Chantes de Maldoror print suite

1934

Francesco de Goya

Saturn Devouring One of his Children

1821-1823

Eating as metaphor for Civil War:

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans

(Premonition of Civil War)

1936

Boiled beans: "One could not imagine swallowing all that unconscious meat without the presence of some mealy and melancholy vegetable."

"Narcissus, in his immobility, absorbed by his reflection with the digestive slowness of carnivorous plants, becomes invisible."

Poem: The Metamorphosis of

Narcisus, 1936

Autumnal Cannibalism

1936

Jean-François Millet: The Angelus, 1857-59

Male / female relations?Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, 1933-35

Female mantis devours male after mating

William Tell

1930

Dalí’s father consumes sea urchins in Buñuel’s 1930 Menjant garotes (Eating Sea Urchins)

Print from Les Chantes de Maldoror, 1934

Photo by Buñuel of Dalí with hair shaved and urchin on head

1929

Soft Self-Portrait with Grilled Bacon

1941

Edible Architecture

Spoofing André Breton’s pronouncement, "Surrealism will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all," Dalí suggested a new metaphor:

"The new Surrealist image of the ‘cannibalism of objects’ equally justifies the following conclusion: Beauty will be EDIBLE, or it will not be at all."

Dalí: "The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture," 1933 article in Minotaure magazine

Brassai:

Métro Modern

Style

(Héctor Guimard)

1933

The "edible" architecture of Antonio Gaudí: La Perdrera (Casa Mila) apartments, Barcelona

Bread loaves and eggs decorate Dalí’s Torre Galatea at the Teatro Museo

Digestion& Excretion

"My enlightenment is born and propagated through my guts."

Les Diner de Gala

Indigestion?

"I personally indulge in

atomic explosions"

The Caganer

Joan Miró: Man and Woman in Front of Pile of Excrement, 1935

The Accommodations of Desire, 1929, Metropolitan Museum, NY

"Temporal immortality must be looked for in refuse, in excrement and nowhere else… And since man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject."

Diary of a Genius

The Social Dimensionof Eating:

Cooking & Dining

Salvador Dalí

Dalí: Les Diners de Gala

Dalí with the Chef and Owner of Maxim’s

It includes recipes for thousand year old eggs, conger eel, crayfish consommé, peacock, and aphrodisiacs.

The Royal Book of Cookery (Livre de cuisine), English edition 1868

Jules Gouffé was born in Paris in 1807 and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1877. He was a renowned French chef and pâtissier.In 1867 he accepted an offer from Alexandre Dumas to become chef de bouche of the Jockey-Club de Paris.

Dalí’s entourage always assembled at the best restaurants

Agnostic Symbol

1932

Dalí’s "mollusc-shell" silver-gilt dessert service cutlery designs, 1957

Elephant tusk fork and the "serpent with the forked tongue"

Salvador Dalí

Dinner in the Desert Lit by

Giraffes on Fire

1937

The ultimate social gathering: Last Supper, 1955

Photo by Werner Bokelberg

1965

Dalí stages a crustacean feast on the body of actress

and model Lotte Tarp