MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award:
As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART
SALVADOR DALI & PSYCHOANALYSIS
by Peter Fuller, 1980
First, I suppose, credit where credit is due: Salvador Dali was among those who opened up a new area of experience to painting—that of the ‘internal world’, inner space and dreams. Despite the reservations I have about the way in which he did this it must be admitted that there are aspects of his project as a painter which are convincing for many of his viewers. We still hear a lot from those who think that the diminution of the audience for modern art can be correlated with its lack of social content. How, I wonder, do they explain the fact that, apart from Picasso, Dali, egotist and dreamer, is the only modern artist who has succeeded in exciting the popular imagination?
Moreover, Dali is a painter of considerable fanciful inventiveness and technical virtuosity. At a time when much that passes for painting is merely bland and slovenly abstraction, such qualities are too easily sniffed at. Dali himself once wrote, ‘To understand an aesthetic picture, training in appreciation is necessary, cultural and intellectual preparation. For Surrealism, the only requisite is a receptive and intuitive human being. Nonetheless, several of his paintings do show concern for compositional effectivity (though others admittedly do not). The Persistence of Memory and the Tate’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus are not bad pictures. For once, the Tate deserves praise for having acquired a work which, on the evidence of this exhibition at least, is among this artist’s best. These two paintings manifest an exemplary economy of scale and a capacity to weld heterogeneous imagery into a convincing unity.
The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali
But that is about the extent of the commendable residue I could salvage from my experience of the Tate’s Dali exhibition in 1980. The overwhelming impression which Dali’s work, as a whole, made upon me was of emotional shallowness and, above all, of inauthenticity. There are many advertisements which touch upon significant fears and wishes—concerning sexual enjoyment, good health, child-care, longevity, happiness, peace, etc., etc.—and which yet banalize them by associating them with the most petty decisions we make in our lives, such as whether to buy Omo rather than Daz, to drink Pepsi instead of Coke, or to commit attenuated suicide with or without a menthol taste in our mouths. These advertisements insult because of the enormity of the gap between the experiences and sentiments they allude to and that which they are in fact selling to us. Similarly, Dali evokes such things as our fears about bodily aging, fantasies infantile and adult about ourown bodies and those of others, and our capacities for imaginative and iconic symbolization in dreams: but he, too, insults because all these intimate impingements are deployed for but one purpose, that of impressing upon us what a smart-ass painter he is. A typical quotation from Dali: ‘In the city of Figueras, at 8.45 am, the eleventh of the month of May, in the year 1904, Salvador Dali, Domenech, Felipe, Jacinto, was born. Let all the church bells ring! Let the stooped peasant in his field straighten up his arched back . . .’, etc., and so forth, until, ‘Look, Salvador Dali is born!’ The trouble is, he means every word of it. Indeed, that is the repeated message of his paintings, ‘Look, Salvador Dali is born!’
To put the same criticism another way: the experiences and emotions which Dali alludes to are vicariously evoked; they are not earned through authentic expressive work upon materials and conventions. This can be demonstrated by considering two aspects of his work: his drawing and his touch.
Dali’s drawing is full of the stereo-typed spiralling of dead lines which describe conventionally elongated figures: these are executed with the numbing cleverness of the artiste, acrobat or clown, someone who has learned how to run through a set repertoire. In a painter, that leads to a jaded, prostituted look: Dali’s pencil exudes feigned sentiment. As for his touch, he often goes for a finished meticulousness which occludes all those nuances of gesture through which the affective value of a painting is realized. Although he blathers about his debt to Vermeer, you only have to compare the way in which the latter modulates light across the back wall of an interior with Dali’s ‘picturesque’ skies in his dreamscapes, to realize why the master of Delft still looks fresh after three centuries, whereas even Dali’s best work has a decidedly stuffy feel after less than twice as many decades. But you really get to see the extent to which Dali is faking it when he presents himself without make up on: i.e. in those paintings where he roughs up the surface a bit, for example, Palladian corridor with dramatic surprise, or The tunny fisher—a perfectly hideous 1966/7 work. Here, you can follow the stiff, insensitive, and repetitive movements of the artist’s hand which demonstrate that, far from being ‘the greatest living artist’ as advertisers of his wares claim, he is often as banal as a Bayswater Road sunset painter.
Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Salvador Dali
Julian Green, one of Dali’s earliest collectors, once said that Dali spoke of Freud as a Christian would speak of the apostles. Indeed, Dali’s reputation as a painter is rooted not so much in his material abilities—which are slight—as in his parasitic relationship to Freudian psychoanalysis. That relationship has queered the pitch f°r the potential contribution psychoanalysis has to make to the aesthetics of painting: here, I wish to raise certain questions about it.
How accurately did Dali depict or reflect Freud’s insights in his paintings? First, I should stress that there can be no question of seeming to equate the achievements of Dali with those of Freud. Whatever criticisms one may have of him, Freud was one of the few true giants of twentieth century
Salvador Dali, Portrait of Freud, 1938, Boymans-van Beuningen Museum Rotterdam culture, a man who has irrevocably transformed our perceptions of ourselves and each other. Dali, however, is dispensable. And yet there is a real sense in which Freud got what he deserved in Dali. I can clarify this by considering their brief encounter.
Freud had always sought to establish psychoanalysis as a science; he refused to have anything to do with the Surrealist movement. In 1938, however, Freud, frail and dying of cancer, left Austria in the wake of the Nazi invasion: he came to live in England. That July, his friend, Stefan Zweig, brought Dali to visit Freud. Dali, who thought that Freud’s cranium was reminiscent of a snail, made a drawing of him on the spot. Zweig says in his autobiography that he dared not show this to Freud ‘because clairvoyantly Dali had already incorporated death in the picture’. Dali’s perspicacity was, however, hardly remarkable since, as Zweig himself admits, at this time ‘the shadow of death’ showed ever more plainly on Freud’s face. In any event, Freud must have seen the sketch because the following day he wrote to Zweig concerning it. (The inconsistencies in Zweig’s account may relate to his own attempt to deny identification with the dying Freud; Zweig, also a refugee from the Nazis, delivered the oration at Freud’s funeral. Two and a half years later, he and his wife killed themselves. Zweig wrote in a suicide note that he lacked the powers to make a wholly new beginning.) Freud’s letter said, ‘I really owe you thanks for bringing yesterday’s visitor. For until now I have been inclined to regard the surrealists, who apparently have adopted me as their patron saint, as complete fools (let us say 95 per cent, as with alcohol). That young Spaniard, with his candid fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate. It would be very interesting to investigate analytically how he came to create that picture’. To put this judgement in its context, it is now necessary to say something about Freud.
Freud had been educated as a neurologist under the great mechanist, Ernst Briicke, who was an associate of Helmholtz himself. The generation of Freud’s teachers believed in the measurability of all phenomena: ideologically, they were materialists and determinists, bitter opponents of vitalism and its derivatives. They would not, of course, have approved of psychoanalysis, but their influence upon Freud’s development cannot be overestimated. Only with the most extreme reluctance did he give up the hope of correlating psychological phenomena with the activity of neurones. Indeed, he never ceased to think of the mind as a ‘psychic apparatus’ within which different sorts of ‘energy’ circulated.
Freud retained a key distinction from Helmholtz: that between ‘freely mobile’ and ‘bound’ energy. He brought this into contact with what he regarded as the most significant of his own discoveries, the distinction between two types of mental functioning, the primary processes and the secondary processes.
For Freud, primary process thinking displayed condensation and displacement, e.g., as in dreams, where images tend to become fused and can readily replace and symbolize one another. Furthermore, it denied the categories of time and space, and was governed by the pleasure principle, Lustprinzip, —or the tendency to reduce the unpleasure of instinctual tension by hallucinatory wish-fulfilment. Freud thought that primary process thinking was characteristic of the Unconscious, or, as he termed it in later formulations, the Id: it made use of mobile energy. Secondary process thinking, however, he saw as obeying the laws of grammar and logic, observing the realities of time and space, and governed by a reality principle which sought to reduce the unpleasure of instinctual tension through adaptive behaviour. Secondary process thinking thus made use of bound energy.
Now Freud always tried to associate the primary processes with sickness and neurosis. This is one reason why he regarded natural mental functions—such as dreaming while asleep—as analogous to psychopathological symptoMs. Conversely, he associated the secondary processes not just with the ego, but also with health. Indeed, he sometimes likened a psychoanalytic cure to land reclamation, whereby the ego took over that which once had belonged to the Id. Inevitably, this led Freud into some peculiarly unsatisfactory formulations about those activities—especially artistic activities—in which the imaginative modes of mental functioning, characteristic of the primary processes, played a vital part. At first, he tended to link art with neurosis, but later on he simply despaired of making any contribution to aesthetics, saying that when confronted with the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms.
Freud’s conception of the psyche was inflected not just by his cultural origins but also, inevitably, by his own psychological make-up. He was the founder of psychoanalysis, and as such was analysed by no one except himself. He was also an obsessional, and, like many obsessionals, tended towards a dissociation between the affective and the intellectual combined with a fear of the former insofar as it refused to submit itself to rational control and explanation. Indeed, it is a singular fact that although, as Marjorie Brierley has put it, ‘the process of analysis is not an intellectual process but an affective one’, Freud’s psychoanalytic metapsychology lacks any adequate theory of affects—with the exception of anxiety.
We have to conclude that Freud’s historic self-analysis (on which, of course, the first discoveries of psychoanalysis were based) was incomplete. As is well-known, Freud took precious little account of the infant-mother relationship. Although he, I think rightly, correlated oceanic feelings of mergence— characteristic of many mystical, religious, and aesthetic experiences—with the infant’s lack of differentiation between ego and the external world, he himself reported that he had never experienced such ‘oceanic feelings’. Clearly, he regarded them as regressive, tout court. And yet we know that Freud disliked music, and was singularly lacking in true aesthetic sensibility.
This is manifest in his attitude to painting. As he himself once wrote, ‘I have often observed that the subject-matter of works of art has a stronger attraction for me than their formal and technical qualities, though to the artist their value lies first and foremost in these latter.’ After spending an evening in an artist’s company, he wrote complaining to Jones, ‘Meaning is but little to these men; all they care for is line, shape, agreement of contours. They are given up to Lustprinzip’. And similarly, when one of his followers, Oscar Pfister, wrote a book on Expressionist art and sent it to Freud, Freud wrote back, ‘I must tell you that in private life I have no patience at all with lunatics. I only see the harm they can do and as far as these “artists” are concerned, I am in fact one of those philistines and stick-in-the-muds whom you pillory in your introduction, but after all, you yourself then say clearly and exhaustively why these people have no claim to the title of artist’.
Freud owned few pictures: what attracted him was invariably subject matter. (He had, for example, a particular interest in the theme of death). He did own engravings by Wilhelm von Kaulbach—an arid salon painter, comparable with Bouguereau or Meissonier. Indeed, it might be said that, insofar as he liked painting at all, Freud liked only those aspects of it which could be associated with the secondary rather than the primary processes. He was interested in that about painting which could be put into words without loss (i.e. ‘meaning’): he was indifferent to line, and colour as such—regarding them as symptomatic of disruptive ‘Lustprinzip'. He wanted paintings which conformed with nineteenth century spatial and temporal conventions, which were regulated by ‘reason’, and the ‘reality principle’. None of that ‘lunatic’ ‘oceanic feeling’ (or aesthetic experience) evoked by the ambiguities and fusions of modernism!
And yet, when all this has been said, it must be emphasized that Freud was in a highly paradoxical position. He was scientistic by inclination; and yet his chosen terrain was that of subjectivity itself. As Charles Rycroft has put it, ‘Since psychoanalysis aims at being a scientific psychology, psychoanalytical observation and theorizing is involved in the paradoxical activity of using secondary process thinking to observe, analyze, and conceptualize precisely that form of mental activity, the primary processes, which scientific thinking has always been at pains to exclude’. We can now see, I think, why Dali proved so acceptable to Freud.
Freud endeavoured to cope with this contradiction at the heart of psychoanalysis by talking about the human psyche as if it could be adequately explained using models derived from the nineteenth century natural sciences—hence his continued reliance on the Helmholtzian theory of two kinds of energy, and his belief in psychic determinism, etc. Dali is a painter who, though he draws on the contents of ‘the unconscious’, succeeds in subjecting them entirely to a nineteenth century world-view, to a sensibility compatible with the nineteenth century ‘reality principle’. (His work involves innovations in subject matter, but significantly not in form.) Dali has said that his favourite artist is Meissonier, and indeed, he regularly ‘Meissonises’ imaginative activity, by which I mean he brings it to heel through the conventions and devices of nineteenth century salon art. Furthermore, as I hope I demonstrated earlier, the way in which Dali paints is such that, although he deals with ‘the inner world’, he effectively suppresses all the dangerous affective connotations which might have been aroused by such a terrain—beyond those which are readily put into words. Dali’s conception of ‘inner space’ is really of a modified, mathematically coherent, perspectival vista. If post- Renaissance art purported to offer a ‘window on the world’, Dali purported to offer a window on the psyche, and that, of course, is exactly what Freud, the ‘scientific’ observer, wanted to look through.
It remains, however at best doubtful whether psychic processes are really analogous to those models through which Freud endeavoured to describe them. Charles Rycroft (whose writings have had a considerable influence upon much that I have argued here) has suggested that Freud’s theory of ‘energy’, upon which his psychological model depends, is in fact a theory of meaning in disguise. Indeed, in his view, psychoanalysis is not really like the natural sciences at all: he implies it might be something sui generis, that is ‘a theory of biological meaning’. Such a position implies a radical revision of psychoanalytical terminology. (This has already been attempted in Roy Schafer’s A New Language for Psychoanalysis, which endeavours to dispense with all concepts about human behaviour and feeling derived from the deterministic models appropriate to physics and chemistry.) Such a revision involves the relinquishment of some of Freud’s most cherished notions. Rycroft, for example, argues ‘concepts like the unconscious are unnecessary, redundant, scientistic, and hypos- tasizing—the last since the concept of the unconscious insinuates the idea that there really is some entity somewhere that instigates whatever we do unconsciously, some entity which is not the same entity as instigates whatever we do consciously’.
If Rycroft is right—as I am convinced that he is—then of course Dali’s ‘vistas’ on ‘the unconscious’ will soon seem even more dated than they do now. But Rycroft’s position also involves great gains: throughout his work, he emphasizes that the primary processes are not, as Freud perceived them, on the side of neurosis, sickness, and aspects of the self which require ‘reclamation’ or repression. He argues that they form an integral component in healthy and creative living and mental functioning, co-existing alongside the secondary processes from the earliest days of life. Characteristically, Rycroft’s most recent book, The Innocence of Dreams, describes dreams not as ‘abnormal psychical phenomena’, but rather as the form taken by the imagination during sleep. Similarly, instead of associating symbolism exclusively with the primary processes as ‘the language of the unconscious’, Rycroft has characterized it as ‘a general tendency or capacity of the mind, one which may be used by the primary or secondary process, neurotically or realistically, for defence or self-expression, to maintain fixation or to promote growth’.
The great advantage of such a position is that it dispenses with that form of psychoanalytic reductionism which regards non-verbal creativity as a reprehensible, ‘immature’, sick, or regressive phenomenon—or, at best, a kind of semi-civilized crust formed over undesirable impulses. It removes the notion that a concern with form is dismissable as Lustprinzip, and takes us ‘beyond the reality principle’ to re-instate the imagination in its rightful place. Furthermore, it opens the door to a psychoanalytic contribution to the understanding of all those areas—e.g. music, abstract and expressionist painting, ‘oceanic feeling’, etc.—where Freud’s own sensibility (and his theoretical constructs, too) are literally anaesthetized, i.e. lacking in an aesthetic dimension. (From this point of view, I think that it is also possible to explain why, despite what Dali claims, truly ‘aesthetic’ paintings, which reach down into relatively constant areas of human experience, are likely to outlive his anaesthetic, culture-trapped vision.) In my book, Art and Psychoanalysis, I have sketched the preliminaries for such a contribution, drawing heavily upon the work of the British object relations school of psychoanalysis, especially that of D. W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and of course Charles Rycroft himself.
1980
