Keeping it Surreal

DD sends me this strange portrait of a male face in profile composed of writhing nude bodies, and I KNEW I had seen this technique before: a mélange of nude women arranged to form a head, a skull, a profile: WHERE had I seen this? I had seen it in the work of Salvador Dalí of course, specifically his In Voluptas Mors (Voluptuous Death), a photo collaboration between Dalí and Philippe Halsman. In that work, naked female figures in a group were stacked and arranged to form a skull with orbital openings, nose, and teeth. Dalí and Halsman met in 1941 and collaborated for 30 years: Voluptuous Death shows Dalí at the front of the composed photo, in top hat and tails, a circus ringmaster gesturing towards the death-head of full-sized female bodies. Dalí painted this style of bodies IN bodies, such as The Face of War, the eyes and mouth of skulls full of skulls like so many marbles. Marvelous, in a style called both surrealist and anamorphic. 

DD’s work is signed by an artist who I cannot find, so the artist may have been an amateur that happened to discover this anamorphic style. I wonder if he had experienced the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593), who not only composed portrait faces from naked bodies, but portraits from fruits and flowers, plants, vegetables, books, animals, and sea creatures.

Considered the first surrealist before the term was even known, Arcimboldo was born into the 16^th century when the oddities of nature were celebrated and collected in macabre ways by the very wealthy. Bones, shells, fossils, heads, teeth, and skulls entered into personal Cabinets of Wonder. Likewise, the painter Arcimboldo painted his fanciful and frightening images as “scherzi” – diversions, or “capriccio” – for caprices, for jokes and laughs, for amusement at the strangeness of the world. Five hundred years later, DD’s painting might have been created because the artist had a strange way of seeing a man’s face: through female nudes. 

Feminist critics have pointed out that even though men do not inhabit the female body, men have nonetheless exerted control over the female body’s representation throughout cultural history: think of works by Michelangelo, da Vinci, Rubens, Goya, Picasso, Dalí, and Arcimboldo, and now DD’s artist!

Similarly, a painter in the 19^th century, Filippo Balbi (1806-1890) created heads of males composed of nude figures: Head of a Man Composed of Nude Figures Wrestling.

Arcimboldo was an inspiration to Dalí and other surrealists and, like Dalí, Arcimboldo worked in cycles: he did portrait representation of the four seasons, the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and what looks to me like insulting caricatures of royal and court patrons – such as Rudolf the 2^nd and his officers – comprised in images of fruit, in naked bodies, in fish. He created visual feasts, reimagining heads as edible arrangements of food for royal patrons. This is the tradition whence DD’s portrait originates. 

X rays of the canvases of Arcimboldo from the 16^th century show that he painted his subjects upside down, using the objectifying still life technique before its time. He was drawn to the curiosities and grotesqueries of nature and had a customer base that laughed along with him. 

If you like Surrealism I suggest you fly to Paris, where on Avenue Hoche on March 26, Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr are holding an all-surrealism auction, and in fact the most expensive photo ever sold ($12m, having been shown at the Met in a show called When Objects Dream, 2022) is a surreal 1924 photo Le Violon d’Ingres by Man Ray. Ray transformed a woman into a thing, namely into a violin. This was his photo of the jazz singer Alice Prin, or “Kiki of Montparnasse” (the bohemian neighborhood of Paris in the 1920s). He photographed her from behind, wearing nothing but a turban, and upon her back he painted two black f-holes of the kind you see on a violin. She was “hollowed out” to be played, as it were!

At the website Postcard Guy, DD might (for $40) purchase a 1910 postcard called L’Eunuque where, for a private gentleman’s delectation, he might in 1910 have owned a postcard of a man’s face composed of naked women. Another face composed of naked people was created recently to promote an Australian TV show called “Who Do You Think You Are?” 

The relationship of bodies to faces is integral to how we think about being human, as we see by DD’s unique and macabre portrait. The value is unknown.