Le visage de la guerre

Author: Marijke Peyser

In his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid recounted the myth of Perseus, the son of Danaë and Zeus, the ruler of the gods. He was ordered to kill Medusa, one of the three terrifying Gorgons. Medusa’s wild eyes, tusks, protruding tongue and snakes instead of hair made her face so hideous that anyone who looked at her was turned to stone. By using his shield as a mirror Perseus managed to behead her, but her head maintained its petrifying power even after her death.^[1] In 1940 Salvador Dalí depicted the horrors of the Second World War in the painting Le visage de la guerre with this image in mind.

During a lengthy stay in Rome with Lord Gerald Berners, a good friend of his patron Edward James, Dalí wrote a letter dated 21 March 1938 to his confidential advisor Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge. Shortly before that, on the twelfth of March, German troops had marched into Austria. The Anschluss of Austria with the Third Reich was the first move towards the Second World War. In his writings Dalí expressed his feelings as follows: ‘One evening at sunset (very fiery and red) … in the Forum I met a ‘Margulies’, which is as we know an Austrian bird with feathers that lives in the mountains; his arms and legs were cut off, he was wearing a very flashy tie; his eyes were filled with tears when he looked at me; but I also saw a display of a will to triumph at all costs (of course I pretended that I didn’t know him).’^[2]

When the war broke out on 1 September 1939, Dalí and his lover Gala wanted to leave their home in Paris as quickly as possible. They went to live not far from Bordeaux, in the seaside town of Arcachon.^[3] German troops marched into Paris on 14 June 1940, and it was not long before the war reached Bordeaux: Arcachon was no longer safe. The interior designer Jean-Michel Frank managed to persuade Dalí and Gala to flee to the United States. In the summer of 1940 Gala went to Lisbon to arrange their passage. Dalí travelled through Northern Spain to say goodbye to his family.^[4] The devastation that he saw there made a deep impression on him.^[5] When Dalí arrived in Port Lligat, he found his house completely ransacked and daubed with fascist slogans.^[6] Not much later, in mid-July, he reached Lisbon. In his autobiography he described the atmosphere in the Portuguese capital, where thousands of refugees were trying to obtain documents that would enable them to escape the war: ‘The last act of the European drama was being performed in Lisbon. A forlorn drama, without fuss, which was played out in packed hotels, shared dormitories and ended in toilets where people had to go and stand in the queue before they could open a vein.’^[7] Dalí and Gala crossed the Atlantic on board the SS Excambion. They arrived in New York on 16 August 1940.^[8] It was not until eight years later that their exile came to an end and they returned to Europe.