Millet’s L’Angélus, beautiful like
the fortuitous encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an
umbrella.
‘It is quite evident that the
“illustrative fact” could not in any way restrain the course of my delirious
ideas, but that, on the contrary, it makes them flourish. Therefore, it could
not concern me, of course, other than as paranoiac illustrations, and I must
excuse myself here for the crude neoplasm that this implies. Indeed, as I have
often had the pleasure and patience to explain to my readers, the paranoiac
phenomenon is not only one on which are preeminently summed up all the
“systematic-associative” factors, but also the one embodying a “psychic-interpretative”
illustration that is more “identical.” Paranoia doesn’t limit itself to being
always “illustration”; it also constitutes the true and “literal illustration”
that we know, that is to say, the “interpretative-delirious illustration” – the
identity manifesting itself always a posteriori as a factor following the “interpretative
association.”’
Salvador Dali (1938), Millet’s
L’Angélus
