A method for going a little mad on purpose

Surrealism, when Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) walked into it, was already a going concern. It had been founded in Paris in 1924 by the poet André Breton (1896–1966), who defined it, roughly, as the attempt to put the logic of dreams onto the canvas and the page: to let the unconscious mind, the part that runs your dreams without asking permission, do the talking, and to short-circuit the tidy rational mind that normally keeps it quiet. By the late 1920s the movement’s painters had split into two broad camps. One, around Joan Miró and André Masson, worked loose and abstract, letting the hand wander and seeing what shapes turned up. The other, around Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte, painted eerie, dreamlike scenes but in a fairly conventional, recognizable way.

Dalí, a young Catalan from the seaside town of Figueres, arrived in Paris around 1929 and was formally welcomed into the group, and he brought something neither camp had: a technique for manufacturing the dream-state on demand. He called it the paranoiac-critical method, and the name is more frightening than the idea. In plain terms, it meant this: Dalí would deliberately work himself into a delirious, near-hallucinatory frame of mind, the kind in which an anxious person “sees” faces in wallpaper or animals in clouds, and let those unstable, irrational associations come flooding up. (“Paranoiac” here is borrowed from the psychology of the day, meaning a mind that compulsively reads hidden connections into ordinary things; “critical” is the cold, controlling half that stands back and judges what surfaced.) Then, crucially, he would paint what he had “seen” not in a wild, loose hand but with the opposite: the licked, exact, photographic finish of a nineteenth-century academic master, the kind of painter who could render a buckle or a strand of hair so precisely it fooled the eye.

That combination is the whole of Dalí. He courted madness to find the image, then used iron craft to make it look like a fact. He had a phrase for the result: he called such pictures “hand-painted dream photographs.”A photograph does not argue with you. It simply records what was in front of the lens. Dalí wanted his impossible scenes to land with exactly that flat, undeniable authority, so that the eye would accept the impossible the way it accepts a snapshot. The painting made in 1931 is the most famous thing that method ever produced.