Tea at Trianon: Salvador Dalí, the Nuclear Mystic

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 17, 2026

Salvador Dalí, the Nuclear Mystic

From Word on Fire:

Salvador Dalí was born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, and baptized in the Church of Sant Pere (St. Peter). His older brother, also named Salvador, died nine months prior and haunted Dalí throughout his life. He created many paintings and drawings inspired by his brother, writing, “[My brother] was probably the first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute.” Dalí’s father was a staunch atheist and his mother an ardent Catholic. His father’s nonbelief and his mother’s sincere faith formed the foundation for Dalí’s lifelong, complex connection to God and Catholicism. When Dalí was sixteen years old, his mother died of uterine cancer, which he described as “the greatest blow he had experienced in his life.”

A year later, he moved to Madrid and began studying at San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he met future surrealist director Luis Buñuel and modernist poet Federico García Lorca. Dalí began studying the old masters, particularly Velazquez, and experimenting with cubism. He also became acquainted with contemporary avant-garde movements like Dada and futurism, which, along with the cutting-edge psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, were to have a profound influence on the young Dalí. In 1926, he met Pablo Picasso and later quipped about their similarities and differences, “Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.”

From 1927, Dalí became increasingly “surrealist” in his work. The poet Apollinaire coined the term in 1917. The word was adopted by André Breton, who penned The Surrealist Manifesto (1924), defining surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (Read more.)