The Art Bulletin

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Masson's Gradiva: The Metamorphosis of a

Surrealist Myth

Whitney Chadwick

To cite this article: Whitney Chadwick (1970) Masson's Gradiva: The Metamorphosis of a
Surrealist Myth, The Art Bulletin, 52:4, 415-422

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043079.1970.10790400

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 Masson's Gradiva: The Metamorphosis of a Surrealist Myth*
ITNEY CHADWICK
" ... moi-merne je ne suis pas en etat de me rendre clair ce qu'est et ce
que veut Ie surrealisme."
Sigmund Freud to Andre Breton
December 20, 1932
The cult of the erotic female lies at the heart of Surrealist theory
and practice of the 1930's.1 The most concentrated expression of
this idea is the image of Gradiva, drawn from Freud and fre-
quently recurring in the paintings and writings of Breton, Masson,
Dali, Eluard and others." To these artists she became the incarna-
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tion of that collective myth the creation of which Breton later de-
scribed as fundamental to Surrealism's aspirations.P To identify the
motif and its sources without an attempt to elucidate the figure's
connotations for the Surrealists is to misunderstand the central
role of myth in the creative processes of the movement in its ma-
ture phase. It may be that the study of a single theme, used exten-
sively by this diverse group in a large body of artistic, literary and
theoretical works, will clarify the connections between Surrealism's
intellectual incentives and its artistic productions. Such a study is
necessarily limited in scope and does not attempt to contain the
broad spectrum of ideas found in more general scholarly and criti-
cal treatments of the subject." But the Gradiva theme is worth
examining in detail since it reveals the particular quality of the Sur-
realist imagination during this period, the literary sources and
iconographic referents of certain works and the origins and inter-
connections of three major Surrealist themes after 1929: dream,
desire and love.
It was in 1929 that Andre Masson parted from the Surrealists and
turned to the most somber myths of ancient Greece" as primary
expressions of these themes. His paintings of the thirties reflect a
personal mythology of chaos, erotic violence and metamorphosis.
*Part of this material was presented in a paper read at the College Art
Association annual meeting, Boston, in January, 1969. I wish to express
my gratitude to Professor Anthony Cutler for his constructive advice
and criticism and to Mr. Albert Field, archivist, The Dali Archives, who
located and supplied photographs for the Dali works cited.
1 R. Shattuck, "Love and Laughter; Surrealism Reappraised," intro-
duction to Maurice Nadeau, History of Surrealism, trans. R. How-
ard, New York, 1965 (originally published as Histoire du surrealisme
et documents surrealistes, 2 vols., Paris, 1964). Shattuck retrospec-
tively discusses the Surrealists' devotion to love as a fundamental
means of liberating the imagination through passion, and concludes
that "the cult of the mythical woman ... lies at the heart of the
Surrealist credo."
2 The theme was not confined to the immediate members of the Sur-
realist group and the image of Gradiva also appears, for example, in
J. Cocteau, "D'un Mimodrame," 1946, in his La Difficulte d'Etre,
Paris, 1957. Referred to as "la jaune Gradiva" in this mime-play,
she is the ethereal female figure who resurrects the artist after his
ritual suicide.
3 A. Breton, interview with J.. Duche published in Le Litieraire, Octo-
ber 5, 1946; reprinted in Breton, Eniretiens, Paris, 1952, 250; also
cited in Nadeau, History of Surrealism, 104. J. H. Matthews, An
Introduction to Surrealism, University Park, Pa., 1965, 48f., C. Brow-
415
Freud had defined dreams as "days' residues" but art for Masson
was the residue of centuries and it was myth which allowed the
perception of the universal in the particular. "Toutes les mytho-
logies sont vraies, il n'y a rien plus vrai que les mythologies," he
later wrote, recalling his artistic career." Like the dream, myth con-
tained imagery that is invulnerable to chaos and destruction; like
the dream it was not limited by the logic of space-time. It is not
surprising, then, that by the time he rejoined the Surrealist circle
at the end of 1937 Masson's interests coincided with the group's
concern with myth. To this new orthodoxy the erstwhile heretic
added his personal belief in a world constantly in a state of flux.
The result was his Gradioa (Fig. 1) painted in 1939, the composi-
tion deriving from an unsuccessful painting of the previous year
entitled Pygmalion. 7 Masson's Gradiua is perhaps the Surrealists'
most successful attempt to transform a literary source into a myth-
ological statement about the human condition.
The painting depicts a huge woman, half-flesh, half-marble,
sprawled on a marble plinth in an attitude that hovers between
sleep and death. The base on which she sits crumbles beneath her
sandaled, marble foot and her splayed legs reveal a raw beefsteak
and a gaping shell-like vagina. A volcano is in eruption in the dis-
tance to the right of the figure; to her left a rift in the wall reveals
a dark abyss. A vertical strip of panelling suggests the figure's
division but the two halves are visually united by the repetition of
marble and fleshy leg and the bees which swarm over the right
knee, their curved pattern of flight reflecting the arc of the marble
arm which, on the left, encircles the head. The entire painting is
bathed in a flickering reddish light intensified in a bed of red pop-
pies growing at the base of the wall.
The image of Gradiva derived originally from a short novel by
der, Andre Breton: Arbiter of Surrealism, Geneva, 1967, 65, and M.
Brion, Art [aniastlque, Paris, 1961, 224-61, also discuss Surrealism's
tendencies toward myth construction, particularly after 1930.
4 See now H. Gershman, A Bibliography of the Surrealist Revolution
in France, Ann Arbor, 1969.
5 In 1934 Masson became the illustrator for Acephale, a new review
founded by his friend Georges Bataille. Bataille's interest in Greek
mythology was communicated to Masson who, before developing
his personal mythologies of Nature and Being (Mythologie de la
nature and Mythologie de l'etre, Paris, 1946, and Anatomy of My
Universe, New York, 1943), executed a number of pictures after
Greek mythological themes, among them Mithra, 1936, Narcisse,
1934, and Daphne, 1933; reproduced in M. Leiris and G. Limbour,
Andre Masson and His Universe, Geneva and Paris, 1947, pis. 133,
135 and 142. See also A. Masson, Sacrifices (Les dieux qui meurent:
Mithra, Orphee, Le Crucifie, Le Minotaure, Osiris), Paris, 1936.
6 A. Masson, Entretiens avec Georges Charbonnier, Paris, 1958, 194.
7 Reproduced in O. Hahn, Andre Masson, London, 1965, 46. The
painting contains the major images found in Gradiva: the monu-
mental woman resting on a plinth, the beefsteak, an architecturally
framed exterior space, etc., arranged in a similar composition. But it
lacks the compositional clarity of Gradiva and the power of the
images is diffused and weakened by the overall lack of organization.
 416 The Art Bulletin
Wilhelm Jensen entitled Gradiva: ein pompejanisches Phantasie-
stiick (1903)8 and from Freud's subsequent analysis of the work.
Jensen's novel drew on a Classical Greek relief of a young woman,
a cast of which he had seen in a Munich Museum." The original
relief is preserved in the Museo Chiaramonti in Rome (Fig. 2)10 and
was the object of a trip to the Vatican by Freud in 1907. The novel
concerns a young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, who falls in love
with a plaster cast of this same relief. He calls her Gradiva, "the
girl splendid in walking," a feminine equivalent of the epithet ac-
corded by the "ancient poets"ll to Mars Cradivus, the magnificent
god of war. Her unusual gait captivates Hanold, and he notes par-
ticularly the perpendicular position of one foot; his fantasies about
her become delusions and he dreams that he witnesses her death in
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the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Accepting the dream as fact,
Hanold is drawn to Pompeii by the power of the delusion, meet-
ing there a girl who closely resembles his beloved relief. He en-
counters her three times and each meeting reinforces his belief that
she is the spirit of his lost love, freed from the grave and allowed
to wander through the streets of Pompeii each day at noon. Recog-
nizing his mental state the girl manages to effect his cure. She then
reveals herself as a childhood playmate, Zoe Bertgang, whom the
young man had completely forgotten but who still lived near him in
Hamburg. Hanold's amorous feelings, previously repressed and able
to find expression only through his devotion to archaeology, are
restored to their rightful place and the inevitable happy ending
ensues.
Jensen's third-rate fiction might quickly and deservedly have
faded into obscurity had not the Swiss analyst Carl [ung read it
shortly after publication. Although [ung and Freud had not met at
the time, [ung had read The Interpretation of Dreams and in 1906
began a correspondence with Freud which lasted for nearly a dec-
8 Dresden and 'Leipzig, 1903; translated as Gradiva: A Pompeiian
Fancy, New York, 1918.
9 E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols., New York,
1955, II, 342; Jones does not identify the museum beyond specifying
that it was in Munich. Freud's interest in Gradiva and his subse-
quent correspondence with Jensen concerning the work are described
by Jones, II, 341-43.
10 The relief, inv. no. 1284, was restored and interpreted by F. Hauser,
"Disiecta membra neuattischer Reliefs," Jahreshefte des Osterreiches
archiiologisches lnstitut in Wien, Vienna, 6, 1903, 79-107. Several
years later Freud, in a letter to his daughter Martha, described his
initial reaction to the work during a visit to Rome: "Just imagine my
joy when, after being alone so long, I saw today in the Vatican a dear
familiar face! The recognition was one-sided, however, for it was the
'Cradiva,' high up on a wall"; The Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed.
E. L. Freud, trans. T. and J. Stern, London, 1960, 267. Jones also
relates that after Freud published his study it became fashionable
among analysts to hang a copy of the relief in their offices and Freud
kept one in his consulting room (Sigmund Freud, II, 342~.
11 Jensen, Gradiua, 4.
12 Cited in Jones, Sigmund Freud, II, 30.
13 Published in his Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Vienna,
1907; translated as "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva" in
the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig-
mund Freud, trans. J. Strachey, London, 1959, IX, 7-93.
14 Jones, Sigmund Freud, II, 23.
15 Editor's note, Standard Edition, IX, 51; the analogy between the bur-
ial of Pompeii and individual repression was used by Freud in The
ade. In a letter of 1906 12 he recommended Jensen's Gradiva to
Freud who became interested in the idea of analyzing dreams that
have never been dreamed-dreams invented by an imaginative
author and ascribed to fictitious characters in the course of a story.
The result was Freud's Der Wahn und die Traume in W. Jensen's
Gradiva (1907),13 his first work devoted to literary analysis. Freud,
who had visited Pompeii and climbed Vesuvius in September,
1902,14 was fascinated by the analogy between the historical fate of
the city (its burial and subsequent excavation) and the psychic
mechanism which he himself had uncovered-burial by repression
and excavation by analysis.l" Subjecting the novel to the psycho-
analytical method, Freud discovered that the laws of the uncon-
scious applicable to a patient's behavior were manifested in the
conscious actions of Jensen's characters.
Hanold's anxiety dream, the dream in which he saw Gradiva
perish, expanded his fantasy about the existence and death of this
girl into a delusion in which their life in ancient Pompeii is equated
with Hanold's repressed memories of his childhood friendship.
Meeting Zoe/Cradiva in Pompeii, he incorporates her into the delu-
sion and, intuitively accepting her role in the fantasy, she manages
to lead him back from a distorted reality. She thereby cured him.!"
The delusion, characterized by Freud as a condition which produces
no direct effect on the body and is manifested only in delusions that
influence action, represents the struggle between Hanold's repressed
erotic feelings for his childhood friend and the strength of the
forces repressing them. In this way the potential strength of re-
pressed passion is demonstrated. Despite its dynamic intensity it is
unable to enter consciousness.'? Hanold, therefore, unconsciously
transfers his amorous feelings for Zoe to the marble relief and,
through the intervention of the living woman, is brought back to
reality by a circuitous but unconsciously logical path.
Rat Man, a case history published shortly after his analysis of
Jensen's Gradiva.
16 Freud notes that Zoe's intuitive acceptance of Hanold's fantasy is
an integral part of the actual method proposed by Josef Breuer and
himself in 1895 for the cure of patients suffering from delusions.
Thus the author intuited what the scientist has learned through ex-
perimentation; ibid., 88-89.
17 lbid., 48; Freud differentiates between "unconscious:' a static state,
and "repressed:' a dynamic interplay of mental forces.
18 Breton's view of artistic production as a means to self-knowledge
(cf., his "Second manifeste" in Manifestes du surrealisme, Paris,
1962, passim) probably derived from Freud's concluding remarks in
the Gradiua essay concerning the extent to which artistic expression
may validly reflect scientific "truths." The work provides perhaps
the most succinct scientific justification for artistic exploitation of
the unconscious available to the Surrealists at this time. Compare
Freud, Standard Edition, IX, 92.
19 The epigraph to Breton's Les Vases communicants, 1932, Paris, 1955,
is a quotation from Jensen's Gradiva, by that time an integral part
of Surrealist iconography. P. Eluard, Le Poete et son ombre, ed.
R. Valette, Paris, 1963, 37, cites the novel as among the body of
"poesie indispensable."
20 Breton, Vases, 127; in a footnote Breton quotes the conclusions
reached by Freud in his study of Gradiva but does not identify their
specific source. The text of the passage borrowed by Breton reads:
"Les poetes ... sont dans la connaissance de I'ame, nos maitres a
nous, hommes vulgaires, car iIs s'abreuvent a des sources que nous
n'avons pas encore rendue accessibles a la science." Compare Freud,

Freud beautifully reveals the different economy of the uncon-
scious, its relationship to conscious action, and the role played by
dream in this nexus. He concludes that both scientist and artist
arrive ultimately at the same understanding of the unconscious; one
proceeds through the conscious observation of abnormal mental
processes in others, the other direct his attention to his own un-
conscious and gives it artistic expression.l" The Surrealists were
quick to seize on Freud's conclusion that science and art confirm
rather than contradict one another in their explication of the uncon-
scious. They found in Freud's essay an explicit justification for their
own attempt to determine the tortuous relationship between artistic
expression and the unconscious. Freud's Gradiva was to be a sig-
nificant guide during the 1930' S.19 Breton recognized that the imagi-
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nation provided the key through which the artist could unlock and
give artistic expression to the mind's recesses. He employed Freud's
conclusion in his own study of the dream, Les Vases communi-
cantsr" which, however, attempted a consideration of the prophetic
dream ignored in Freud's Interpretation.
Freud's essay furnished many of the themes indispensable to
Surrealism's second decade; the myth of love, the primacy of de-
sire, the mechanism of repression and the dynamism of the re-
pressed. But their explication of the unconscious could not be un-
mediated. Only the artistic symbol could provide the necessary link
between the real and the surreal. The image of Gradiva became such
a symbolic mediator and it is in this guise that the figure appears
in the productions of other Surrealist painters.
The first representations of the image, in two drawings of 1930
entitled Gradiva and Andromeda'- (Figs. 3 and 4), in a painting of
the same subject the following year 22 and in The Invisible Man,
1929-33, (Fig. 5), coincide significantly with Dali's initiation into
the Surrealist movement. This period-1929-30-marks the climax
Standard Edition, IX, 8.
21 This second drawing (Fig. 4) is exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, Buffalo, under the title of Andromeda. According to Albert
Field in a personal communication to me, Dali insists that this work
properly represents Gradiva. When the two drawings of 1930 are
compared, their formal similarity and iconographical identity are
fully evident.
22 The painting is reproduced in the Dictionnaire abnige du surrealisme,
ed. A. Breton and P. Eluard, Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1938, 60.
23 Breton, in the "Second manifeste," 83, and passim, originally pub-
lished in La Revolution surrealiste, 12, December 15, 1929, and re-
printed in Manifestes, 76-150, delivered a polemic against those
original members whose goals he now felt had departed from Sur-
realism's primary aims. The manifestoes have been translated by
H. Gershman (Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor, 1969).
24 Browder, Andre Breton, 65, emphasizes that references to Freud in the
early manifestoes are minor compared with the "massive Freudian
erudition" of Les Vases communicants, 1932, and L'anthologie de
l'humeur noire, 1940. Although Surrealist techniques of the 1920's,
most notably automatism and the narration of dreams, derive from
an interest in Freud's method, it was not until the following decade
that the Surrealists began fully to explore the implications of Freud's
theories. Breton himself distinguishes between Surrealism's intuitive
and reasoning epochs, the latter occurring after 1925; cf., his
Qu'est-ce que Ie surrealismel, Brussels, 1934.
25 Nadeau, History of Surrealism, 154-65, discusses the events leading
to this crisis and its subsequent effect upon the group's organization
MASSON' GRADIVA 417
of the ideological conflict within the Parisian group that resulted in
Breton's' expulsion of Artaud, Masson and others.F' At the same
time, new members were admitted, among them Dali whose para-
noiac-critical method became one of the psychoanalytic banners to
which Breton rallied the newly purged ranks of the faithful.
That the figure of Gradiva, first used by Dali, was immediately
taken up by other Surrealists is no accident. Rather it reflects a de-
veloping predisposition toward the Freudian explanation of the
sources of artistic creativity.P" The so-called "crisis of 1929,"25 pre-
cipitated over the question of Surrealism's relationship to the Com-
munist party marked the decisive end of the movement's first dec-
ade: a decade of psychological and political experimentation in
which revolution was an essential step toward a world in which
man would be liberated from the constraints of logic and posi-
tivism. In 1929, disgusted with Surrealism's failure to accommodate
itself successfully within the Communist party, Breton subsumed
the Marxist concern with social action under the general problem
that the movement sought to raise: "celui de l' expression humaine
sous toutes ses formes."26 The history of Surrealism from 1930 rep-
resents an attempt to retain the techniques of the earlier years,
among them automatism and the narration of dreams, but now
these techniques were to be used deliberately as means of probing
man's unconscious.j" In Breton's eyes Surrealism's goals should
include a broadening of the traditional definition of reality28 to evoke
a greater consciousness of the sensuously perceived world and,
finally, to present interior and exterior reality as two elements in
process of unification.F''
The difficulty lay in finding a means to express this abstraction.
By the early 1930's the Surrealists believed that such expression
must employ symbols organized within a body of myth. A new
mythology released them from the constrictions of an order based
and direction. A more extended discussion of the complex relation-
ship between Surrealism and contemporary politics can be found in
H. Gershman, The Surrealist Revolution in France, Ann Arbor, 1969,
80-116. See also A. Breton, Position politique du surrealisme, Paris,
1935.
26 Breton, "Second manifeste" in Manifestes, 108 (Breton's italics).
27 Cf., Breton, Qu'est-ce que Ie surrealieme], Brussels, 1934. This ap-
parent shift in attitude toward earlier Surrealist techniques is of
fundamental importance in understanding Breton's view of Surrealist
art during the 1930's. The work of art was no longer valid as an
aesthetic end in itself but acceptable only in so far as it became a
means to the expression of the Surrealist world-view. Thus the auto-
matic paintings of the 1920's give way to thematic works, like
Gradioa, which must be considered in terms of their literary and
theoretical content.
28 As early as 1924 Breton had rejected positivistic realism as hostile
to intellectual and moral development; see "Manifeste du sur-
realisme" in Manifestes, 14.
29 Breton, Qu'est-ce que Ie surrealisme], 11. "Tout porte a croire," he
wrote in December, 1929, in an often quoted passage which is an es-
sential signpost to Surrealism's new direction, "qu'il existe un cer-
tain point de l'esprit d'ou la vie et la mort, Ie reel et l'imaginaire, Ie
passe et le futur, Ie communicable et l'incommunicable, Ie haut et Ie
bas cessent d'etre percus contradictoirement. Or, c'est en vain qu'on
chercherait a I'activite surrealiste un autre mobile que l'espoir de
determination de ce point;" "Second manifeste" in Manifestes, 77.
 418 The Art Bulletin
on space-time; a new mythology employing such specific forms as
Gradiva could flesh out the abstractions of Breton's theorizing. The
techniques used by the group during these years-the paranoiac-
critical method.I" the manufacture of objects functioning symboli-
cally,31 the simulation of mental diseases.I'' the automatic message'"
and the analysis of the interpenetrating states of dream and wak-
ing 34-were means of objectifying desire, psychological devices
which would enable the mind to effect the necessary synthesis be-
tween contradictory states of being. It was Freud who had first
demonstrated the dynamism of unfulfilled desire, projected indi-
vidually as dream, collectively as myth. This is precisely the point
of Breton's exegesis of the myth of Venus which he saw as an
allegory of surreal love revealed to the everyday world.s" For the
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goddess Venus the Surrealists substituted the muse Gradiva, she
who could help the artist penetrate the barrier between the real and
the surreal, she whose face was the "perceur de murailles.t'P"
Her dual nature is most fully explored in Dali's works where she
is both corporeal reality (Zoe/life) and mythical woman (Gradiva).
For more than thirty years Dali equated his wife Gala with the
Gradiva figure, substituting the living woman for Zoe Bertgang,
"the double of the mythological image of Gradiva,"37 and transfer-
ring to her the qualities ascribed by Jensen and Freud to this bi-
morpho Of his Three Apparitions of the Visage of Gala, 1947,
(Fig. 6) he suggested: "Gala is trinity. She is Gradiva the woman
who advances. She is, according to Paul Eluard, 'the woman whose
glance pierces walls.' "38 The painting derives its composition from
Dali's 1929 work, Accommodations of Desirei" and, like its pred-
ecessor, depicts rocks bearing hallucinatory figures on the barren
beach at Cadaques. Gala's classicizing face appears three times, the
petrified representations becoming more life-like as they emerge
30 The techniques of the 1930's must be seen only as specific devices
through which the general theorizing of the manifestoes and related
attempts to define Surrealism's intellectual position after 1929 might
be expressed; cf., notes 23 and 26. Discussions of Dali's paranoiac-
critical method are too numerous to cite exhaustively here; see, for
example, S. Dali, Conquest of the Irrational, New York, 1935, and
A. Breton, "Le 'Cas' Dali," 1936, reprinted in Le Surrealisme ei la
p einiure, Paris, 1965, Doff.
31 See A. Breton, "Crise del'objet," 1936, reprinted in Le Surrealisme
et la p einture, 125-32. The essay appeared originally in Les Cahiers
d'art, 1936, 21-26, as part of a special number devoted to the Sur-
realist object. In May of that year an exhibition of objects had been
held at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris. For a discussion of the
philosophical implications of the Surrealist object, see A. Balakian,
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, New York, 1959, 105ff. For
a more general discussion of such objects, M. Jean, The History of
Surrealist Painting, New York, 1960, 227-56.
32 A fascination with aberrant mental states had been evidenced by
Breton since the movement's inception and derived from his work
with mental patients in Nantes during the First World War; see
"Manifeste du surrealisrne" in Manifestes, 13. Like the dream, mental
illness represented a means of escaping logic. See A. Breton and P.
Eluard, L'Immaculee Conception, Paris, 1931, in which the writers
deliberately simulate mental illnesses as means of poefic expression.
33 The automatic message is explained by Breton in "Le Message auto-
matique," Minotaure, 3-4, 1933, 55-65.
34 Unlike Freud who admitted only the influence of waking events on
dreams, Breton conceived the two states as being of equal value. He
then attempted to demonstrate that the waking state could be
shaped by dream phenomena. See Breton, Vases, passim.
35 Concerning the impact of this myth Breton wrote, ". . . nous ne
pouvons douter quil exprime une verite commune eternelle, qu'Il
from the background. Cradiva's dual nature is rendered by the depic-
tion of Gala first as a living being and then as a shade. But if Gala
is Gradiva, Gradiva is also Gala and Dali's representations of the
mythical woman, for example his Gradiva of 1930 (Fig. 3), are rec-
ognizable as portraits of Gala. 40
Dali, the Catalan Catholic, incorporated the Christian mythical
tradition rejected by Breton and the more "orthodox" Surrealists
into his attempt to universalize the image of Gala. The trinitarian
reference accompanying the Three Apparitions of the Visage of
Gala presaged a series of religious paintings in which Gala appeared
first as the Virgin: The Madonna of Port Lligai, 1948-49,41 and The
Virgin of Guadalupe, 1959,42 and finally as Christ in Dali's version
of the Last Supper. 4 3
But the Surrealists also drew heavily on the devices of classical
mythology to suggest that their image belonged to another realm
of being. According to Breton's theory of immanence, surreality
.resides in reality itself and is perceived through the objects of the
real world.v' Myth construction became one means of suggesting
the integral relationship between the particular and the universal.
Sometimes called "the Surrealist muse,"45 Gala had originally been
married to Eluard and is the object of his love poetry; ".3. Gala ce
livre sans fin," he wrote in 1926, dedicating to her his newly pub-
lished volume L' Amour la poesie. 46 Eluard had re-named her Gala
and Dali referred to her as Galatea,47 the ivory maiden brought to
life by Aphrodite in response to the prayers of the sculptor Pygma-
lion. This mythical sculptor is a figure widely used by the Surrealists
during these years 48 and resembles the Gradiva theme in its blur-
ring of the distinction between life and death, the animate and the
inanimate. The intensity of Pygmalion's love for his creation moved
Aphrodite to intercede and transform the image into flesh and
traduise dans la langue allegorique line serie d'observations Iondees
que ne sauraient admettre d'autre champ que I'existence humaine";
L'Amour [ou, Paris, 1937, 144.
36 The expression was first used by Eluard in "Au Defaut du silence,"
1925, reprinted in his Oeuvres completes, Paris, I, 1968, 166, as a
reference to his wife Gala whom the Surrealists at that time re-
garded as their muse. It was later used symbolically by Breton, Dali
and Rene Creve I to describe the unique ability of the muse Gradiva
to perceive the surreal.
37 Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, trans. H. Chevalier, New
York, 1961, 240.
38 Dali in an explanatory note to the painting in R. Descharnes, The
World of Salvador Dali, trans. A. Field and H. Chevalier, Lausanne,
1962, 28. Eluard's remark, which first appeared in Au Deiaut du
silence (see note 37, above) has been erroneously interpreted by
F. Cowles, The Case of Salvador Dali, London and Boston, 1959, 75,
as a "stinging epitaph." It is rather a recognition of Gala's inspira-
tional abilities.
39 Reproduced in Salvador Dali 1910-1965, exhibition catalog, Gallery
of Modern Art, New York, 1965, No. 245.
40 The drawing isolates the figure of Gradiva as it appears in Tile
Invisible Man (Fig. 5).
41 Reproduced in Descharnes, World of Salvador Dali, 176-77.
42 Reproduced in Salvador Doli 1910-1965, 126.
43 Reproduced in Descharnes, World of Salvador Doli, 188.
44 Breton, Qu'est-ce que Ie surrealisme], 18f. The attempt to perceive the
surreal in and through the objects of the real world is an essential
part of the philosophical justification of the Surrealist object. Cf.,
Breton, "Crise de I'objet," note 32, above.
45 M. Harriman, "Profiles: A Dream Walking," Tile New Yorker, 15,
July 1, 1939, 26.
46 Paris, 1929. Eluard's familiarity with the Gradiva theme has already

blood. The Surrealists, fascinated by the relationship between
image and reality, immediately recognized the analogy between the
legend and Hanold's desire to discover the corporeal double of his
marble relief. Like Gradiva, Pygmalion represented the unique po-
tency of amorous love.
For the Surrealists, the presence of woman is proof of man's re-
demption and it is she who gives life meaning by her power to
"mediate between man and the marvelous.rt'' In Dali's eyes the
initial meeting with Gala in Cadaques in 1929 was the culmination
of a life-long pursuit of an ephemeral fantasy the images of which
now "mingled in the indestructible amalgam of a single and unique
love-being.... no She (Gala) was destined to be my Gradiva, 'she
who advances,' my victory, my wife. But for this she had to cure
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me, and she did cure me !"51 Jensen's Zoe-Cradiva had effected
Hanold's psychological cure: Dali credited Gala with saving him
from the paralyzing attacks of hysterical laughter from which he
was suffering when they met, enabling him to resume painting and
achieve his "surrealist glory."52 Moreover, the fact that the "cure"
was brought about solely through the power of a woman's love
identified this particular aspect of the feminine psyche as the most
powerful. Jensen's Gradiva, "the girl splendid in walking," became
Breton's and Dali's "celle qui avarice," a timeless being who leads
the artist in his unceasing attempt to glimpse what lies ahead, be-
yond the real.r.3
Freud had indirectly suggested a second attribute of Gradiva. She
differed from the other inhabitants of Pompeii in that she was not
buried. She not only rose from the dead (marble made flesh), but
rose therapeutically into Hanold's consciousness. His childhood love
was no longer repressed; the muse was freed and again effective.
Although Gala was the best known of these muses, there were
been mentioned, note 20, above.
47 Diary of a Genius, New York, 1965, dedication: "I dedicate this
book to my genius Gala Gradiva, Helen of Troy, Saint Helen, Gala,
Galatea Placida [sic]."
48 See, for example, Masson, Pygmalion, 1938, reproduced in Hahn,
Andre Masson, 46; and P. Delvaux, Pygmalion, 1939, reproduced
in W. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, exhibition cata-
log, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968, No. 68 and fig.
201.
49 Matthews, Introduction to Surrealism, 163.
50 Dali, Secret Life, 91. Dali discusses at length the development of this
love fantasy, the image of which lives in his mind, as did Hanold's
Gradiva, until it is finally revealed in the flesh. The formal source
for Dali's fantasy is Jensen's Gradiva and references to this text are
specific and unmistakable.
51 Ibid., 233.
52 Ibid., 349.
53 See A. Breton, "Cradiva," 1937, in his La Cle des champs, Paris,
1953, 25-28. Breton begins the essay by identifying his title, "em-
prunte au m'erveilleux ouvrage de Jensen, signifie avant tout: celie
qui avance. . . ."
54 By "immortalizing" these women Breton anticipated the essence of
a "Letter to the Nymph Echo" by the poet Joe Bousquet. Bousquet,
a friend of Max Ernst's, wrote: "One day the fad I am about to
tell you will be venerated as a wonderful myth. The genius of the
great Surrealists will owe its renaissance to the young women who
dared to and were capable of loving them;" cited in Max Ernst,
exhibition catalog, The Copley Galleries, Beverly Hills, California,
1949,12.
55 Breton, Eniretiens, 182. Breton relates that after a proferred uni-
versity lectureship was withdrawn the opportunity to open the
MASSON I GRADIVA 419
others ..Breton, when he opened his Surrealist gallery on the Rue de
Seine in 1937 (Fig. 7), inscribed their names on the Facade.P" He
later acknowledged that the gallery, which specialized in Surrealist
and primitive art, had rescued him in a moment of extreme financial
privation. In memory of Jensen's salvatory heroine he gave the
name Gradiva to the gallery.55 Above its glass doors, designed by
Marcel Duchamp as the silhouette of a conjoined man and woman/"
her name was spelled out above those of other Surrealist "women"
of the decade. The word com me, as in "G comme Cisele,' is used as
a copulative subsuming, among others, Cisele Prassinos, the four-
teen-year-old poetess adopted by the group in 1934; Dora Maar,
Man Ray's photographer companion; Alice Paalen, the Surrealist
poet and member of the group from 1935; and Violette Nozieres, a
young French girl condemned to death for poisoning her parents
under bizarre circumstances and extolled by the Surrealists as a
modern Electra.57
The image of Gradiva is not confined to the traditional concept
of the muse. Although she appears as an isolated figure in several
of Dali's drawings (Figs. 3 and 4), she also functions as a uniquely
powerful erotic symbol in several of his most important works of
these years, among them The Invisible Man, 1929-33 (Fig. 5), and
the finely executed drawing Gradioa, William Tell and the Bureau-
crat, 1932 (Fig. 8). Each of these works pursues Dali's paranoiac-
critical method, eagerly adopted by the movement in the early
1930's as a means of exploiting the rich imagery of the uncon-
scious. Drawn from Freud, the self-induced delirium was to be a
"methode spontanee de connaissance irrationelle basee sur l'asso-
ciation interpretative-critique des phenomenes delirants."58 Its pur-
pose was to release the images of a paranoiac world in which the
ego molds reality according to its dictates, and to organize these
gallery saved him from a financial crisis.
56 Reproduced in R. Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, London, 1959, figs. 33-36.
57 N. Calas, "L' Amour de la revolution a nos [ours," Minotaure, 11,
1938, 52, discusses the Violette-Electra equation. In 1933 the Sur-
realists had decided to pay homage to this girl and published a
pamphlet, Violette Nozieres (Brussels, 1933) which contained poems
by Breton, Char, Eluard, Peret and others, and drawings by Dali,
Tanguy, Ernst, Brauner, Magritte, Marcel Jean, Arp and Giacometti.
The stimulus for the undertaking had come originally from Picasso;
see Jean, Surrealist Painting, 220.
58 Breton, "Le 'Cas' Dali," reprinted in Le Surrealisme et la peiniure,
134. Breton summarizes Dali's undertaking in Qu'est-ce que Ie sur-
realisme], 25: "II s'agit (pour donner une idee somma ire de l'en-
terprise de Dali), de speculer ardemment sur cette propriete du
devenir ininterrompu de tout objet sur lequel s'exerce l'activite para-
noiaque, autrement dit I'activite ultraconfusionnelle qui prend sa
source dans l'Idee obsedante. Ce devenir ininterrompu permet au
paranoi'aque qui en est temoin de tenir les images memes du monde
exterieur pour instables et pour transitoires ... Nous nous trouvons
ici en presence d'une nouvelle affirmation, avec preuves formelles
a l'appui, de la toute-puissance du desir qui reste, depuis l'origine, Ie
seul acte de foi du surrealisrne." (Italics in text.) It was to Freud
that Dali turned to discover the source of the delirious images which
would deliver the unconscious from reality. He later acknowledged
that, "... les obsessions sexuelles sont Ie fondement de la creation
artistique"; see A. Bousquet, Entreiiens avec Salvador Dali, Paris,
1966, 153. An examination of the mechanics of the Freudian reality
principle, to which Breton refers above, as it relates to Surrealism,
appears in H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, New York, 1955, 127-
43.
 420 The Art Bulletin
images critically. Unlike automatism and the dream, it was not a
passive state but constituted a form of interpretation in which the
world of the imagination and the irrational are as objectively evident
as the exterior world of phenomenal reality.59 The paranoiac-critical
method considered delirious images not as isolated phenomena but
as a systematic vision of another, interior, world.t"
The attempt at a visual crystallization of unconscious images re-
quired by the method was, for Breton and Dali, largely dependent
on the stimulus of desire.P! The initial impulse was released by an
external object, most frequently Woman, the feminine repository
of the love impulse closely associated if not identical with desire.
The results of that stimulus are then projected onto her. As Freud
had demonstrated, it was repressed memories and current fantasies
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of Zoe/Cradiva which stimulated Hanold into the expression of his
delusion by awakening in him a desire to locate his repressed love-
object. And it was this image which symbolized for the Surrealists
the same essential stimulus.
She appears in The Invisible Man (Fig. 5), no longer the Surrealist
symbol in isolation, but rather as part of that landscape each figure
of which specifically serves, as Freud had generally elucidated, to
release repressed eroticism. The man's torso, created from natural
forms by erotically stimulated delirium as part of the paranoiac's
imposition of the ego's desires on the natural world, is cradled by
three erotic symbols: the vaginal heart 62 with its stylized crown of
thorns, the onanistic motif connecting the paranoiac figure with the
artist's personal symbol of the lion, and the dual image of Gradiva
in the right middle-ground, the personification of desire. The deep
perspective and sharply delineated shadows derive from de Chirico
whose influence on Dali at this time has been noted by both Soby
and Rubin. 63 Although the various images which surround the cen-
tral figure appear consistently in a number of other works,64 the
composition itself suggests this work's intrinsic meaning. The
painting is divided into three distinct vertical registers by the alter-
nation of light and dark forms; the central third is then bisected by
the meeting of the pearl-encrusted hands and the stylized testes. An
onanistic cycle connects the artist, depicted as a lion in the fore-
59 Dali, Conquest of the Irrational, 12, and passim; Dali summarizes
his artistic ambition as an attempt to give form to the images of
irrationality so that the world of the imagination and the irrational
will be as objectively evident as that of exterior reality. The passage
contains the rationale behind his choice of technique, applying the
realism of Chardin to the images of the unconscious.
60 Balakian, Surrealism, 99, in a reference to the technique of autom-
atism equally applicable to the paranoiac-critical method, notes
that the condensation of images and the displacement of the sense of
time and space derive from Freud's observations on the role of lan-
guage in dream and dream interpretation.
61 See note 59, above. Further discussion of this aspect of Surrealist
theory is beyond the scope of the present work. For our purposes it
is significant that Freud's Gradiva explicated the psychic mechanism
of desire and the psychological relationship between desire, love and
unconscious motivation. Matthews, Introduction to Surrealism, 152-
64, and R. Jean, "La Grand force est Ie desir," Europe, 475-76, 25-
34, discuss desire as a motivating force for the Surrealist imagina-
tion.
62 Cf., Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, 113, who sees this motif as an "Art-
Nouveau-inspired 'vaginal head.' " The influence of Art Nouveau on
Dali at this time is well established; cf., Rubin, 113 and J. Soby, Sal-
vador Dali: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, exhibition catalog, Museum
ground, with the paranoiac figure above. The "invisible man" be-
comes visible through an imposition of erotic fantasy on the land-
scape of the mind. But the open and receptive heart attests to the
fact that the onanistic stimulus is not exclusively genital. Likewise,
the two Gradivas,6~ recognizable as depictions of Gala, define the
delusion's origin as clearly as does the vaginal heart.
The juxtaposition of the "invisible man" and the Gala/Gradiva
figures may also have an external reference. Dali worked simul-
taneously on this painting and La Femme visible, a written account
of his current method of painting dedicated .to Gala who was, for
him, the visible woman.P" The relationship between eroticism and
the paranoiac-critical method is depicted in both with unmistakable
reference to their Freudian origin and to the implications of the
Gradiva motif.
Dali's symbolic iconography is, however, limited by the fact that
it never transcends its personal origins. It is ultimately restricted to
a limited and repetitive set of symbols the meaning of which is
nonetheless consistent within the body of his work. When Gradiva
next appears in Gradiua, William Tell and the Bureaucrat (Fig. 8),
she is again the mythical female caressed and held against the
breast of William Tell, Dali's persistent symbol of repressive
authority."? Like the paranoiac-critical paintings, the drawing is
also composed of a juxtaposed group of personally significant im-
ages. William Tell's apple, Dali's symbol of "cannibalistic ambiva-
lence" resolved by the father's willingness to sacrifice his son, is
replaced by a loaf of bread to which are affixed bottles of ink. The
image of bread and ink bottles originated in a "hypnagogic clock"68
realized as a Surrealist object by Gala and Dali. The meaning as-
cribed to the loaf of bread was expanded during the ensuing years,
to emerge finally in Dali's projected "Secret Society of Bread" as a
symbol of the destruction of "the logical meaning of all the mecha-
nisms of the rational practical world."69 Attached to this image of
destruction are the symbols of its antagonist, the bottles of ink
used by the petty bureaucrats associated in Dali's mind with the
Communist party whose world was the antithesis of everything in
which Dali, the confirmed monarchist, believed. It was the Com-
of Modern Art, New York, 1941, 18, and relevant to a discussion of
this particular image. However, a careful examination of the form,
noting particularly the tendril-like veins which encircle it and its
apparent elasticity, suggests that this is a heart rather than a head.
63 Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, 113; Soby, Salvador Dali, 13f.
64 Perhaps the most persistent of these images is the sculpted female
head, which resembles a toby-jug in the application of a handle to
the back of the head; see for example, among Dali's contemporaneous
paintings, Illumined Pleasures, 1929, Portrait of Paul Eluard, 1929,
and The Font, 1930; reproduced in Salvador Dali 1910-1965, Nos. 27,
29 and 32. Its symbolic significance, if any, remains obscure.
65 The figures are specifically identified as Gradiva in Dali's drawing of
1930 with that title (see note 41, above).
66 Dali, La Femme visible, Editions surrealistes, Paris, 1930.
67 Dali, Secret Life, 319; the source of the sacrificial father image was
Dali's expulsion from his own family in the late 1920's. See also R.
Crevel, Dali ou l'antiobscurantisme, 1931, reprinted in his L'Esprit
contre la raison, Paris, 1969, 51-77. The symbolism of Dali's images
is almost exclusively personal and as such has few points of refer-
ence outside the cult of his own personality.
68 Hypnagogic images were, for the Surrealists, those which appear
during a state of drowsiness bordering on sleep.
69 Dali, Secret Life, 307-08.
Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 00:01 22 March 2016

Andre Masson, Gradiva. Knokke-Ie-Zoute, Collection Gustave Nellens 2. Marble relief, Vatican, Museo Chiaramonti (photo: Archivio Fotografico,
(photo : Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris) Vatican)
Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 00:01 22 March 2016

3. Salvador Dali, Gradioa, drawing. Pr ivate Collection (photo: Dali Arch ives)

4. Salvador Dali, drawing, here identified as Gradiva. Buffalo, Albright-Knox s. Salvador Dali, The Invisible Man. Private Collection (photo: Museun
Art Gallery, Gift of A. Conger Goodyear (photo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery) Modern Art)
Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 00:01 22 March 2016

alvador Dali, Three Apparitions of the Visage of Gala. Collection Salvador 7. The Galerie Gradiva, Paris, in 1937 (from A. Breton, La Cle des champs)
'ali (photo : Dali Archives)
Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 00:01 22 March 2016

9 10

8. Salvador Dali, Gradiua, William Tell and the Bureaucrat, drawing. Private
Collection (photo: Dali Archives)

9. Andrea Mantegna, The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Paris, Louvre (photo:

Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Service photographique) 10. Detail of Fig. 9.

munists, and among the Surrealists, Louis Aragon.I" who would
sustain the people with the very bread which Dali saw as leading
to the "systematic cretinization of the masses.r"! This ironic juxta-
position of repressive images, the father and the bureaucrat, the
bread which will destroy "logical" (rational) society, and Gradiva-
she who can release the repressed, simultaneously suggested man's
psychological imprisonment and salvation.
In 1934 Breton reiterated Surrealism's desire to deepen the
foundations of the real, to bring about a greater consciousness of
the world perceived by the senses and to present interior and ex-
terior reality as two fluid states in the process of unification.P The
image of Gradiva became the symbolic expression of this unifica-
tion, the being who existed in Jensen's novel and Freud's study
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both as dream image and corporeal being, belonging to the worlds
of death and life, madness and sanity, fantasy and reality. Limited
neither by space nor time she participated in some form in each
of these states but was bound by none of them. It is hardly sur-
prising, therefore, that the projection of desire onto actual objects,
the concrete realization of the images of dreams, the Surrealist
objet so favored during this decade.P would also find expression
in the figure of Gradiva. The Surrealist object, existing as an image
in the mind and as a phenomenal body, recognized the final
recognition of the duality of life, a duality resolved by this mythical
image. In 1937 Breton's essay "Gradiva" and Dali's Freudian anal-
ysis of the Catalan fairy tale "The Wax Mannikin with the Sugar
Nose,"74 explained the theoretical basis of Surrealist objects as the
ultimate objectification of desire. The heroine of Dali's tale is saved
from death at the king's hand by substituting a wax image of her-
self. Dali explains:
The wax mannikin with the sugar-nose, then, is only an 'object-being' of
delirium, invented by the passion of one of those women who, like the
heroine of the tale, like Gradiva, or like Gala, is able, by virtue of the
skillful simulacrum of their love, to illuminate moral darkness with the
sharp lucidity of 'living madmen: For me the great problem of madness
and of lucidity was that of the limits between the Galuchka of my
false memories, who had become chimerical and dead a hundred times
through my subconscious pulsions and my desire for utter solitude, and
the real Gala whose corporeality it was impossible for me to resolve in
the pathological aberration of my spirit. And it is these very limits, which
were peculiar to me, which are defined with a materialized symbolism
in the form of a veritable 'surrealist object' in the tale I have just told-
where the wax mannikin ends, where the sugar-nose begins, where
70 It was Aragon who consistently argued for Surrealism's acceptance
of the Communist party's goals, a political position which Breton, at
least partially under Dali's influence, tempered after 1929 (see note
26, above). Dali, in Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali, New York,
1965, 14, relates a little contemptuously that Aragon was the only
Surrealist who objected to his "thinking machine" adorned with
goblets of hot milk. Milk, according to Aragon, should rather be
distributed to the children of the unemployed.
71 Dali, Secret Life, 308. Breton later claimed that by 1935 Dali had
ceased to be a Surrealist as his political views had become offensive
to the movement; see Breton, Entretiens, 281f.
72 Note 28, above.
73 Note 32, above.
74 Note 54, above. The fairy tale is reprinted in Dali, Secret Life, 235-
40.
75 Ibid., 240.
76 Breton, "Second manifeste" in Manifestes, 92, and passim. The vast
philosophical problems inherent in the Surrealists' attempt to define
a new reality contributed to numerous fluctuations in theory. Sur-
MASSON I GRAD IVA 421
Gradiva ends, and where Zoe Bertrand [sic] begins in Jensen's Delirium
and Dreams [sic].75
This final projection of desire onto things and objects became
a means of effecting the link between subjective and objective: the
revolutionary mental leap which Breton hoped would sever the
Surrealist world from traditional concepts of reality.?" It is the
idea of love, and its erotic corollary, desire, which enables the mind
to give form to formless psychic phenomena.?" Just as the dream
is always the expression of unfulfilled desire, so the Surrealist ob-
ject is the projection of these same desires onto actual objects. It
is in this final guise as Surrealist objects that the Gradiva-like
mannikins created by Ernst, Arp, Tanguy, Man Ray, Masson,
Duchamp, Dali and Miro stood on "la rue surrealiste" at the en-
trance to the Paris International Surrealist Exposition in 1938, de-
sirable simulacra of women waiting to usher the visitor into the
surreal universe.I"
Dali was willing to accept Freud's mechanistic schema of cause
and effect (repression : release : : sterility : creativity) thereby
reducing Hanold's delusion to repressed personal sexuality, but
Masson was the first to explore the social implications of the Gra-
diva theme.
His representation depicts the climax of Hanold's dream, August
24, 79 A.D. The heavens are black with smoke and the city bathed
in a blood-red light. As Hanold stands at the edge of the Forum he
sees Gradiva a short distance ahead of him. Appearing not to no-
tice the impending destruction she walks across the flagstones of
the Forum to the Temple of Apollo where, ignoring his cry of
warning, she mounts the steps and sits down. She assumes the
appearance of a marble statue and, calmly submitting to her fate, is
soon obscured by the falling ashes. On one level Masson's iconog-
raphy is drawn directly from Jensen: he reproduces the vertical po-
sition of Gradiva's foot described in the novel, the rift in the
wall through which Hanold believed she returned each day to
the grave, the poppies growing in the courtyards of excavated
Pompeiian houses, the tomb and the volcano.
But the painting is more than a visual translation of its literary
source. Subtle adaptations of the text in the form and placement
of images suggest that the painting exists also at a second level
of meaning. The rift in the wall becomes a rifle with fixed bayonet,
realism as pure psychic automatism (cf., Breton "Manifeste" in Mani-
festes, 37) yielded in the second manifesto to Breton's view that
"I'idee de surrealisme tend simplement a la recuperation totale de
notre force psychique par un moyen qui n'est autre que la descente
vertigineuse en nous, l'iIIumination systematique des Iieux caches et
l'obscurcissement progressif des autres lieux.... "
77 The almost mystical significance ascribed by the Surrealists to love
pervades their writings throughout the movement's history. The role
played by woman in the Surrealist world was firmly established by
Breton in Nadia, 1928, reprinted Paris, 1964, and increases in signifi-
cance after that date when love gradually replaced political revolu-
tion as the means to transform the world. Breton later wrote:
"... independamment du profond desir d'action revolutlonnafre qui
nous possede, tous les sujets d'exaltation prop res au surrealisme
convergent ... vers I'amour," Breton, Entreiiens, 138. The mass of
material relating to this subject is too vast to cite exhaustively; see,
for example, "Enquete sur l'amour," La Revolution surrealiste, 12,
December IS, 1929.
78 The mannekins are reproduced in Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, 153.
 422 The Art Bulletin
an emblem of modern warfare intensified by the poppies growing
underneath. Thus Jensen's "path to the tomb" became, for Masson,
war itself. Implicit in the painting is the concept of holocaustal de-
struction, the sources of which may be natural, the volcano, or
human: war. Gradiva, the most prominent element, suffers both of
these destructive forces.
This compression of images, the type of condensation found in
dream imagery, contributes to the painting's spatial dislocation. The
background of painted panelling suggests the interior of a Pom-
peiian house.?" but the tomb on which Gradiva rests, the growing
poppies and the volcano confuse the distinction between interior
and exterior. Gradiva, although depicted at the moment of Han-
old's dream, is now placed at some distance from the volcanic erup-
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tion. Half of her body, classically draped and sandaled, is already
marble. The remainder is still flesh, but the pallor of the face and
right arm suggests that the process of metamorphosis has not
been arrested, and that the line between the living flesh and the
dead marble is fluid.
The central place, given to the huge shell-like vagina, is sur-
rounded by images of death-the volcano, the rifle-rift in the wall
and the bees attracted to the honey that streams from her hive-like
breast. Arising near the volcano they swarm toward the breast and
disappear finally through the rift in the wall emphasizing the cyclical
connection between fertility and death. For Masson, fertile eroti-
cism and death are always coexistent: "C'est-a-dire que la mort est
dans la face de nons-memes que nous neclairons pas, et l'erotisme
c'est la meme chose. L'erotisme et la mort sont toujours coexistants.
C'est ce qui fait d'ailleurs la grandeur de l'erotisme."8o The paint-
ing epitomizes Masson's view of a universe in which death is no
longer an absolute: that which is buried-physically, psychologi-
cally or metaphorically-may be regenerated.
Gradiva, then, functions as an image of this regeneration and in
the Louvre version of Mantegna's Martyrdom of St. Sebastian
(Fig. 9) Masson found a sympathetic representation of death and
implicit resurrection and therefore a useable source, probably re-
membered from his days as a student copyist. Later he acknowl-
edged that he was attracted by Mantegna's remarkable conden-
sation of images and the petrified appearance of figures caught in
a grief that is tranquil and profound but charged with suppressed
79 The panelling derives, in fact, from that of the Villa of the Mysteries.
Masson reproduced the original in both color and design.
80 Masson, Eniretiens, 138. Masson's interest in the Freudian relation-
ship between Eros and Thanatos was shared by Dali who later re-
marked, "1'y tiens, a la mort. Apres l'erotisme, c'est Ie sujet qui
m'interesse Ie plus:' Dali, Enireiiens, 42.
81 Masson's sources, and particularly his use of Mantegna, are dis-
cussed by Michel Leiris in an essay in a volume in the painter's
honor, Andre Masson, Rauen, 1940.
82 Note 80, above.
83 See, for example, the Bacchus and Ariadne from Pompeii, reproduced
in M. L. Barre, Herculanum et Pompeii, Paris, 1875, II, pl. 33. There
is no evidence to suggest that Masson knew this work, but the
Pompeiian pose persisted in later representations of the sleeping
Ariadne.
84 For the original in the Vatican, see W. Helbig, Fuhrer durch die
offentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertumer in Rom, Tubingen,
1963, I, 109. The work is reproduced in K. Ipser, Vatican Art, New
York, 1953, 68. For Poussins copy, A. Blunt, Exposition Nicholas
Poussin, Musce du Louvre, Paris, 1960, No. 241. The figure of the
sleeping Ariadne, depicted always with head flung back and en-
circled by the arms, was widely used by 3e Chirico about 1913 and
vitality.f" He incorporated the marble foot on its crumbling block
(Fig. 10) in his Gradioa, using this element, not in formal isolation,
but to suggest the metaphysical truth which he recognized in
Mantegna's composition. The Italian had placed a stone foot be-
side the living member of St. Sebastian; the Surrealist gave to his
figure in a state of metamorphosis one foot of flesh, the other of
marble. On a large scale the pose of Masson's Gradioa seems to de-
rive from traditional representations of the sleeping Ariadne. His
use of Pompeiian motifs has already been pointed out,82 and the
pose of Ariadne sleeping with head flung back and encircled by
bent arms goes back at least to Pompeiian wall painting.P A more
recent and formally more convincing source, however, might be
Poussin's wax copy of the famous Vatican Sleeping Ariadne which
had been in the Louvre since 1855. 84 Given Masson's preference
for sources the meaning as well as the form of which related
to his subject, it is not unlikely that he drew here on the Ariadne
figure, recognizing her significance as a goddess of the earth and
fertili ty. 85
Masson's and Dali's paintings, Breton's essay and Freud's paper
all used the Gradiva theme as a myth of metamorphosis-from
death to life, from dream to wakefulness, from the unconscious to
the conscious, from the mundane to the transcendental. The icono-
graphic elements of the theme persisted throughout the 1930's.
Pompeii, Freud's image of repression, appeared in Dali's Dream of
Venus, an underwater exhibit prepared for the 1939 New York
World's Fair. Looking through glass walls into large tanks, the
visitor watched a series of marine tableaux and Surrealist objects.
Living mermaids floated through the water against a background of
ruined Pompeii while, in another section, Venus lay dreaming on a
bed of glowing ccals.t" The volcano, Masson's symbol in 1936 and
1939 of a world's end,"? reappears in his later writings from Mar-
tinique as a powerful male sexual symbol.t" perpetuating the sexual
overtones ascribed to the volcano by Breton in Minotaure,89 the
periodical appropriated for their own purposes by the Surrealists.
Ultimately, however, it was the historical eruption of September,
1939, rather than the activity of the Surrealists' mythic volcano
which would disrupt the entire tenor of European avant-garde
painting.
[The Pennsylvania State University]
was well-known to the Surrealists. De Chirico's The Afternoon of
Ariadne, 1913, was reproduced in La Revolution eurrealiste, 6, Paris,
1926,1. For other examples see J. Soby, The Early Chirico, New York,
1941, pls, 7,14, and 16.
85 It is noteworthy, although coincidental, that Hauser, "Disiecta mem-
bra neuattischer Reliefs," 106, interpreted the group of which the
Gradiva figure is one part as the Horae, goddesses of fertility.
86 The exhibit was described in a press release dated June 15, 1939 for
Dali's Dream of Venus, exhibited at the New York World's Fair.
The release is available at the Museum of Modern Art Library.
87 In 1936 Masson wrote a description of volcanic destruction to accom-
pany his drawing Dream of a Future Desert; both are reproduced in
Masson, Anatomy of My Universe, pl. XVIII.
88 A. Masson, "Antille," in A. Breton and A. Masson, Martinique,
charmeuse de serpents, Paris, 1948. Masson, while in Martinique in
1941, was moved by stories of an earlier volcanic eruption on the
island and wrote a poetic description of a mythical eruption in which
he referred to the "lave spermatique" which inundated the earth.
89 Discussing sexual desire Breton invokes de Sade's image of the vol-
cano: "Un jour, examinant l'Etna, dont Ie sein vomissait des flammes,
je desirais etre ce celebre volcan ... ," "Le Chateau etoile," Mino-
taure, 8, 1936, 37.