DALI and MAN RAY

Salvador Dalí and Man Ray in Paris, on June 16, 1934 making “wild eyes” for photographer Carl Van Vechten(…) When Moreau’s liberal teaching methods were later praised by his more radical students, such as Matisse, Breton chastised their inability to see him also as “a great visionary and magician.” The issue of “vision” was taken in a primal sense in Surrealism, since only the “wild eye” of the visionary could see into the abyss. Indeed, one of Breton’s central criteria for painting was that it be a “way of thought directed entirely toward the inner life.” This was a thin paraphrase of Moreau’s own statement about art. Yet interiority had to reveal itself in nonliteral ways. Many artists who apparently painted internal fantasies, such as Swiss painter Arnold Bocklin(1827-1901), were provocative but finally too direct, too literary in their symbols. (…)