Dalí's immortality of the soul

Salvador Dalí often incorporated science into his paintings, such as The Face of War (right), and can be seen below with a scientific magazine under his arm. Credit: FUNDACIÓ GALA-SALVADOR DALÍ, SPAIN

“Thinkers and literati can't give me anything. Scientists give me everything, even the immortality of the soul.” Perhaps surprisingly, these are the words of surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, who died in 1989, with the books of physicists Stephen Hawking and Erwin Schrödinger, and mathematician Matila Ghyka, on his bedside table.

Dalí's paintings are almost too familiar. They include The Great Masturbator, a classically freudian work, The Persistence of Memory, with its iconic image of clocks dripping from dead branches and flowing across surfaces, and The Face of War (shown here).

But few know of Dalí's lifelong passion for science, and the eagerness with which he sought the company of scientists. The documentary film The Dalí Dimension, which had its first international showing at the EuroScience Open Forum 2004 meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, last month, puts the record straight. Making extensive use of little-known film footage, much of which has never been aired before, Catalan film-maker Joan Úbeda documents the side of Dalí that engaged with the fundamental theories and discoveries of his time — such as relativity, quantum physics and genetics — and reflected them in his work.

In a powerful narrative, the film introduces us to Dalí's unusual relationships with some top scientists, including Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, who entered a debate with him about time and relativity. Another was James Watson, who in 1965 boldly asked him to illustrate his book The Double Helix, though Dalí didn't do it in the end.

Dalí held court in the New York hotel he made his second home and summoned those scientists he thought might interest him. But he was far from being a scientific dilettante. “We always spoke pretty much as equals,” reports mathematician Thomas Banchoff, who was a frequent visitor.

Three years before his death, Dalí summoned a large group of top scientists to a conference on ‘Chance in Nature’ in the Dalí Museum in Figueres, Spain. The artist watched the proceedings on a TV monitor from his sick-bed. At the end he called Prigogine and his good friend the mathematician René Thom to his bedroom. He asked them to reconcile — “in Schrödinger's name” — their scientific differences, which they had exposed in a quarrel during the meeting. “I did not understand why he invoked Schrödinger,” comments Prigogine. But he probably understood that Dalí had enjoyed being a spectator to the dramatic battle of words.

In recognition of the centenary of Dalí's birth, a major retrospective of his work has recently opened at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and will run until January 2005. The film, meanwhile, has its formal première in Barcelona on 16 September and will be shown by television companies in several European countries in the coming weeks.

→ http://www.dalidimension.com