The great surrealist painter Dali was obsessed with dreams and their significance: Freud was the great explorer of the unconscious, the man who had claimed to reveal the hidden, unconscious drives behind our actions and beliefs, and had also unlocked the keys to the inner landscape of the sleeping mind in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), a book Dali studied with close attention in 1925. So although Dali and Freud should possibly have been in touch more often, in fact they only met once, in the unlikely setting of North London, where the Freuds stayed briefly on arriving in London in 1938, after fleeing Vienna in June.
Freud received many visitors in London, though he was probably proudest to receive officials from the Royal Society, who brought – in an unprecedented gesture for someone who was not the monarch – the Society’s charter for him to sign as he was too ill to travel. A stream of writers and celebrities came to visit Freud, including HG Wells (Freud wrote to Wells saying he was now fulfilling his childhood fantasy of becoming an Englishman) and old friends such as Princess Marie Bonaparte and the writer Stefan Zweig; the latter arranged for Salvador Dali to visit Freud, and Dali came along with his wife Gaia and the art collector Edward James, who brought along Dali’s work, The Metamorphoses of Narcissus, a work inspired by Freud’s study of Leonardo da Vinci.
The meeting was slightly strained: Dali, who saw Freud (consciously) as a father figure, thought Freud a bit ‘cold’ and may even have been a bit in awe of Freud, who observed quietly that if Spaniards commonly looked like Dali, it was no wonder they had a civil war. He also told Dali that he felt the work of the surrealists compared unfavourably with that of the old masters: when looking at great works of the past, he said, one looks for the unconscious, but with surrealist art, one looks for the conscious. He does seem to have been pretty impressed with the Dali painting, however, and later said that although he had previously dismissed surrealists as ‘nuts’, Dali’s visit had made him reconsider.
The meeting also produced a masterpiece. While conversing, Dali was also quickly and quietly sketching Freud, and he subsequently worked up the sketch into a pen-and-ink drawing, which is proof in itself of Dali’s real talent. Freud was dying of cancer, and he was not shown either the sketch or the finished drawing – Zweig felt it showed the great man’s imminent death too clearly.
What Happened Next
Freud died in September 1939, after the family had become established at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Primrose Hill, which became the Freud family home until Anna Freud’s death in 1982. It is now the Freud Museum, and contains Dali’s drawing of Freud, and many fascinating artefacts – including the famous ‘consulting couch’. See 1927: The Einsteins visit the Freuds