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The passage de l'Opéra 1924 Man no longer worships the gods on their heights. Solomon's temple has slid into a world of metaphor where it harbours swallows' nests and corpse-white lizards. The spirit of religions, coming down to dwell in the dust, has abandoned the sacred places. But there are other places which flourish among mankind, places where men go calmly about their mysterious lives and in which a profound religion is very gradually taking shape. These sites are not yet inhabited by a divinity. It is forming there, a new godhead precipitating in these re-creations of Ephesus like acid-gnawed metal at the bottom of a glass. Life itself has summoned into being this poetic deity which thousands will pass blindly by, but which suddenly becomes palpable and terribly haunting for those who have at last caught a confused glimpse of it. It is you, metaphysical entity of places, who lull children to sleep, it is you who people their dreams. These shores of the unknown, sands shivering with anguish or anticipation, are fringed by the very substance of our minds. A single step into the past is enough for me to rediscover this sensation of strangeness which filled me when I was still a creature of pure wonder, in a setting where I first became aware of the presence of a coherence for which I could not account but which sent its roots into my heart. The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the great lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateways to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts. The disquieting atmosphere of places contains similar locks which cannot be bolted fast against infinity. Wherever the living pursue particularly ambiguous activities, the inanimate may sometimes assume the reflection of their most secret motives: and thus our cities are peopled with unrecognized sphinxes which will never stop the passing dreamer and ask him mortal questions unless he first projects his meditation, his absence of mind, towards them. But if this wise man has the power to guess their secret, an interrogates them in turn, all that these faceless monsters will grant is that he shall once again plumb his own depths. Henceforth, it is the modern light radiating from the unusual that will rivet his attention. How oddly this light suffuses the covered arcades which abound in Paris in the vicinity of the main boulevards and which are rather disturbingly named passages, as though no one had the right to linger for more than an instant in those sunless corridors. A glaucous gleam, seemingly filtered through deep water, with the special quality of pale brilliance of a leg suddenly revealed under a lifted skirt. The great American passion for city planning, imported into Paris by a prefect of police during the Second Empire and now being applied to the task of redrawing the map of our capital in straight lines, will soon spell the doom of these human aquariums. Although the life that originally quickened them has drained away, they deserve, nevertheless, to be regarded as the secret repositories of several modern myths: it is only today, when the pickaxes menaces them, that they have at last become the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions. Places that were incomprehensible yesterday, and that tomorrow will never know. 'Today, the Boulevard Haussmann has reached the Rue Lafitte,' remarked L'Intransigeant the other day. A few more paces forward by this giant rodent and, after it has devoured the block of houses separating it from the Rue Le Peletier, it will inexorably gash open the thicket whose twin arcades run through the Passage de l'Opéra, before finally emerging diagonally on to the Boulevard des Italiens. It will unite itself to that broad avenue somewhere near where the Café Louis XVI now stands, with a singular kind of kiss whose cumulative effect on the vast body of Paris is quite unpredictable. It seems possible, though, that a good part of the human river which carries incredible floods of dreamers and dawdlers from the Bastille to the Madeleine may divert itself through this new channel, and thus modify the ways of thought of the whole district, perhaps of a whole world. We are doubtless about to witness a complete upheaval of the established fashions in casual strolling and prostitution, and it may well be that this thoroughfare, which is bound to make the boulevards and the Quartier Saint-Lazare far more easily accessible to each other, will see entirely new types of person saunter along its pavements, hitherto unknown specimens whose whole lives will hesitate between the two zones of attraction in which they are equally involved, and who will be the chief protagonists of tomorrow's mysteries. Furture mysteries will arise from the ruins of today's. Let us take a stroll along this Passage de l'Opéra, and have a closer look at it. It is a double tunnel, with a single gateway opening to the north on to the Rue Chauchat, and two gateways opening to the south on to the boulevard. Its two arcades, the western one, called the Galerie du Baromètre, and the eastern one, called the Galerie du Thermomètre, are joined by two short cuts, the first of which runs across the passage at its northern end, while the second is at the boulevard end, just behind the bookshop and café which occupy the space between the two southern gateways. [...] A shop selling canes and walking-sticks separates the Café du Petit Grillon from the lodging-house entrance. A perfectly honourable salesman offers to a questionable clientèle a wide choice of luxurious examples of these canes, displayed so as to show both stems and handles to their best advantage. A whole art of spatial panoply is at play here: the canes lower down form fans, while those higher are crossed like Xs and, as the result of a strange tropism, incline towards the beholder their bouquets of pommels: ivory roses, dogs' heads with jewelled eyes, damascened semidarkness from Toledo, niello inlays of delicate sentimental foliage, cats, women, hooked beaks, countless materials ranging from twisted rattan to rhinoceros horn and the blond charm of cornelians. A few days after the conversation I have just pretended to report, I found myself spending the entire evening at the Petit Grillon waiting fro a person who, it became increasingly ckear, had decided not to turn up. Having justified my suspiciously solitary existence, every fifteen minutes or so, by ordering a drink, each of which drained me a little more of my powers of invention, until I had prolonged my state of expectation and nervous irritability well beyond tolerable limits, I finally walked out into the passage. By that time the lights had already been switched off. My attention was suddenly attracted by a sort of humming noise which seemed to be coming from the direction of the cane shop, and I was astonished to see that its window was bathed in a greenish, almost submarine light, the source of which remained invisible. It was the same kind of phosphorescence that, I remember, emanated from the fish I watched, as a child, from the jetty of Port Bail on the Cotentin peninsula; but still, I had to admit to myself that even though the canes might conceivably possess the illuminating properties of creatures of the deep, a physical explication would still scarcely explain this supernatural gleam and, above all, the noise whose low throbbing echoed back from the arched roof. I recognised the sound: it was the same voice of the seashells that has never ceased to amaze poets and films-stars. The whole ocean in the Passage de l'Opéra. The canes floated gently like seaweed. I had still not recovered from my enchantment when I noticed that a human form was swimming among the various levels of the window display. Although not quite as tall as an average woman, she did not in the least give the impression of being a dwarf. Her smallness seemed, rather, to derive from distance, and yet the apparition was moving about just behind the windowpane. Her hair floated behind her, her fingers occasionally clutched at one of the canes. At first I thought I must be face to face with a siren in the most conventional sense of the term, for I certainly had the impression that the lower half of this charming spectre, who was naked down to a very low waistline, consisted of a sheath of steel or scales or possibly rose petals. But by dint of concentrating my attention on her gliding act among the weals of the atmoshphere, I suddenly recognised this person, despite her emaciated features and distraught appearance. It was under the dubious circumstances of the insolent occupation of the Rhineland, and of an intoxicated delight in prostitution, that I had first met Lisel, by the banks of the river Saar. She had refused to join the rest of her people in their flight from the defeat, and all night long, as she paraded the Sofienstrasse, she sang songs she had learned from her father, a Rhine hunting captain. What on earth could she be doing here, among the canes? And she was still singing, judging by the movements of her lips, though the sound of the surf in the window display covered her voice and the surf rose above her, up as far as the mirrored ceiling beyond which there was no sign of either the moon or the menacing shadow of the cliffs: 'The Ideal', I cried, finding nothing better to say in my confusion. The siren turned a scared face towards me and stretched out her arms in my direction. Immediately the window display was seized by a general convulsion. The canes turned ninety degrees, so that the upper halves of their X-shapes were now opening their Vs against the glass, in front of the apparition and forming a top fringe for the curtain made by the lower fans. It was as though a row of pikestaffs had suddenly blocked the view of a battle. The brightness died away with the sound of the sea. [...] When I passed by the following morning everything had resumed its normal appearance, except that in the second window an accident had taken place, unnoticed: one of the pipes in a rack, a meerschaum whose bowl depicted a siren, had broken, as though it had been condemned to be a target in some seedy shooting gallery at a fair. From the end of this pipe's illusionistic stem there still protruded the twin curve of a charming breast: a little white dust that had fallen on the silesia fabric of an umbrella testified to the erstwhile existence of a head crowned with flowing hair. (Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, London, 1971, translated by Simon Watson Taylor, p. 27-30, 35-38.) THE PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN COLLECTOR

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

How super-realist Dalí saw Broadway

Details

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
How super-realist Dalí saw Broadway
signed and dated 'Salvador Dalí 1935' (upper right)
charcoal and pencil on paper
20 x 15 5/8 in. (50.8 x 40.2 cm.)
Drawn on 17 March 1935

Provenance

Perls Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above in the late 1980s by the present owner.

Literature

D. Abadie (ed.), La vie publique de Salvador Dalí, Paris, 1980, no. 447 (illustrated p. 50).

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

Robert Descharnes has confirmed the authenticity of this work.

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