At-large French serial killer who targets young gals & viciously mutilates them,may be drawing inspiration from,or trying to bring to life,the paintings of Salvadore Dali,has killed at least 2,probably 3,since Dec.1997
Joe1orbit
I hope all of you got a chance to watch the ABC-TV "20/20" segment that aired
a few days ago, in which the POSSIBLE link between old Salvador Dali paintings,
and a series of BRUTAL SERIAL gal murders in France, was explored. It was
definately a FASCINATING segment, and it does look VERY likely that a brutal
serial killer is on the loose in France, although whether or not he WAS/is
inspired to kill by Salvadore Dali paintings, or trying to "re-enact" the
images depicted in the paintings, is quite open to debate and interpretation.
Anyway, You can view two of the Dali painting that MAY be serving the
wonderful role of inspiring a serial killer, over at:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/onair/2020/2020_000420_dali_feature.html
I wonder how Salvadore would FEEL, if he were still alive and told that his
paintings may be directly inspiring an enraged murderer?? You never know,
artists are very INTENSE people, and Salvadore himself may have harbored both
VIOLENT tendencies AND a respect/admiration for actual killers.
We get some details of the THREE murders that are being currently credited to
this unknown societal victim. Only TWO bodies have actually been found, but a
third gal, aged 17, has vanished without a trace and may well be a harvestee
too. It looks like this fellow likes to CARVE. Hey, many artists like to paint,
but CARVING can be another form of artistic expression, even when practiced on
fellow humans. Victim number one was 19 years old, and had BOTH her breasts cut
out, with SURGICAL skill. #2, harvested about six months later, a 22 year old
gal, was even MORE carved up, her HEAD and HANDS both totally severed, and her
sexual organs CUT OFF and placed in a BOX! You gotta admit, a serial killing
like this, truly can be viewed as a "work of art".
It is certainly possible that our serial killer has drawn inspiration from
Salvadore. Serial killers are GENERALLY very sensitive and artistically-minded,
so that theory would fit perfectly. It's even possible that he is "trying to
bring Salvadore's paintings to life", as the bolder European media speculators
suggest. BUT, it could also all just be a coincidence, the fact that the gals
were all last seen ALIVE while travelled through the SAME train station, a
station that Salvadore painted, and the fact that the mutilation-murders
RESEMBLE some of Salvadore's paintings, to some degree.
For me, the most important detail is that NOBODY has been arrested or
charged, and that means our apparently VERY controlled and PATIENT serial
killer is on the loose, and more than likely WILL strike again.
Many artists are TRUTH-SEEKERS. They try to EXPRESS purity of thought, and
Truth, in their work. The EXACT same thing is true for many murderers. They try
to EXPRESS the TRUTH of their lives, the truth of the torment and suffering
that society CARVED into their SOULS, via acts of reflective, cathartic,
truth-based violent VENGEANCE. So, it is no surprise at all that a GREAT many
killers, especially serial killers, have MAJOR artistic talent and abilities.
Take care, JOE
The following appears courtesy of the 4/20/00 ABC-TV News Service, located at
http://www.abcnews.com:
The Art of Murder
Are Salvador Dalí’s
Images Blueprints
for a Serial Killer?
April 20 — When Moktaria Chaib’s body was found in December 1997, the
19-year-old’s head was face down in the ground and both her breasts were
removed with surgical precision.
The murder of Marie-Helene Gonzalez six months later was no less macabre.
The 22-year-old’s torso was brutalized, her sexual organs placed in a box and
her head and hands were missing.
Both were last seen alive near the Perpignan railway station in the south
of France. Now the brutal murders of these two women and the disappearance of a
third, Tatiana Andujar, a 17-year-old student who was also last seen near the
Perpignan station, have led to a startling theory: that a serial killer is
using Salvador Dalí’s art as disturbed inspiration.
Surrealist Master
Salvador Dalí, of course, was the Spanish 20th-century painter best known for
his Surrealist works and his “paranoiac-critical method,” which he saw as a
means for experimenting with illusion, ambiguity, disorientation and hidden
meanings.
His work from the 1960s until his death in 1989, in particular The Railway
Station at Perpignan, shows a fascination with the red-brick station. And in
his autobiography Diary of a Genius, Dalí writes that he “sprang to attention
with joy and ecstasy” when he rode in and around the station — the same place
where all three women were last seen alive.
But his attachment to it — and the fact that all three women were last
seen near it — are not the only links between the artist and the brutal murders
and disappearance.
Another is that Dalí’s sexually explicit depictions of nude, disfigured
and dismembered women resemble the mutilated bodies of Chaib and Gonzalez.
Life Imitating Art
The French press was the first to report the possible association between
Dalí’s paintings and the corpses, suggesting the possibility of a serial killer
trying to bring the artist’s work to life.
The Spectre of Sex Appeal, for example, features a nude woman, her head
and a hand missing and cloth bags placed where her breasts should be. The
disfigured woman reclines as a boy looks on.
Similarly, Gonzalez’s head and hands were missing and her breasts removed.
Though Stephen Bourgoin, France’s leading expert on multiple murder,
discounts any link between a serial murderer and Dalí’s art, he says, “Dalí has
done his work of art.” Now, “the serial killer of Perpignan is doing his
gruesome work of art.”
-------------------------------------
The following appears courtesy of the 4/20/00 online edition of The
Washington Post newspaper:
Dali's Flip Side
By Paul Richard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 20, 2000
SALVADOR DALI (1904-1989) was the painter as magician. This is only partial
praise.
He strode the art world's stage like the most flamboyant of vaudevillians. He
wore leopard skins and funny hats, and twiddled his mustache. The man was
unembarrassable. He'd screech about his genius and his masturbations, and wait
for the applause. His shabby bag of tricks held an inexhaustible supply of
Vegas-kitschy props: elephants on stilts, Siegfried-and-Roy tigers, obelisks
and boiled beans, melting watches, ants.
Modernist sophisticates soon tired of his shtick, but Dali scarcely noticed.
He'd lecture on the rhino. He'd hurl himself through windows. And then, all of
a sudden, he'd do something so amazing one could not believe one's eyes.
In "Dali's Optical Illusions," at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
you can see his act again.
His secret was the flip.
You'd be looking at a napkin, and then you'd see a sea gull. Or he'd present
you with a donkey that--flip--became a monk.
He painted the old-fashioned way. He'd stand there at his easel with a palette
in his left hand and a paintbrush in his right, calculating shadows and
pondering perspective just as he'd been taught to do as a careful, timid
student at his art school in Madrid. Dali's methods were traditional, yet he
fashioned in his pictures some of the key newnesses of 20th-century art.
His show is pretty fabulous. It's also, in a charming way, eerily familiar. We
all have been to Daliland. The beachlike zone he showed us so often in his
paintings has become a place we share. We visit it in ads, in movies and in
nightmares. Its lone and level sands still stretch to the horizon. Its
enigmatic objects--that half-buried amphora, the white horse in the distance,
the blasted leafless trees--still cast their stretching shadows beneath the
silent sun. Something in his art is endlessly available. Dali at his easel set
the landscape of our dreams.
Freud spoke of the unconscious. Dali, more than any other painter of his era,
made that world beyond the rational appear before our eyes. His exhibit at the
Hirshhorn shows us how he did it.
There are more than 60 oils and drawings, ephemera, and even one green hologram
in "Dali's Optical Illusions," but the Hirshhorn's exhibition is not a
retrospective. It excludes his melting watches and much of his best painting.
Dali's "Rainy Taxi" (its living snails trailing slime) is not on display. Nor
is the razor that slices through an eye in the 1929 Dali-Bunuel film "An
Andalusian Dog." The ocelot the painter liked to hurl into his swimming pool is
missing from the show. So is his stuffed giraffe.
The focus here is tighter. The subject of this show is the half-old-fashioned
science of his partly modern art.
Much modern art is abstract. Dali's is insistently, painstakingly depictive.
Much abstract art is big. Dali preferred miniatures. When you step into the
gallery, nothing grabs your eye. The smallest of his pictures--you have to step
right up to them--are just dots on the wall.
The Old Masters he admired (Raphael, Velasquez, Vermeer, Leonardo) sought to
make their pictures work like windows in a wall. Dali--as Dawn Ades, the
historian of surrealism, tells us in the exhibition's catalogue--turned that
goal around. Dali wasn't interested in the illusion of reality. It was the
reality of illusion that he had in mind.
Reveries, delusions, repulsions and desires--these formless phantoms of the
mind were the subjects of his art. Dali sought to make them entirely concrete.
His intention, he insisted in 1935, was to make the stuff of dreams as
"evident" and "durable" and "communicably thick as the exterior world of
phenomenal reality."
"I am like the alchemist," he wrote, "trying to apprehend the non-measurable
through the measurable."
How do you paint fear or disquieting emotions or the tumblings and shape-shifts
of free association? In 1929, Dali found a way. He called it, rather nicely,
his "paranoiac-critical method." It involved a sort of trick.
Instead of painting just one thing, say a napkin or a donkey, he'd make a
double image, one that could be read as something wholly other, say a sea gull
or a monk.
"Voluntary hallucinations" fueled by "optical insecurities" were crucial to his
method, for buried in his motive was a sense of persecution, as if the bland
forms of the real world--a napkin or a fruit dish or a fountain or a
piano--were somehow out to get him.
"It is by a frankly paranoiac process," he explained in 1933, "that it has been
possible to obtain a double image: that is to say the representation of one
object which, without the least figurational or anatomical distortion, is at
the same time the representation of a totally different object."
His "Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach" (1938) is an eye-feast of
such shifts.
We see the still life first, a fruit dish, white and pear-filled, standing on a
table cloth, and then comes the first flip. It's not a fruit dish after all;
it's a calmly staring face. Flip. It is not exactly a face. The right eye is a
jug; the left one is a woman. Whoops. Flip. There it goes again. It's not a
white face anymore, and it's not a fruit dish, either. Now, instead, we're
looking at a posing springer spaniel, whose studded leather
collar--flip--becomes a Roman aqueduct whose blue, white-dotted eye turns into
a see-through cave in a far-off sun-washed hill.
To cook up such an image, one had to somehow blend meticulous depictions with
unmoored mental driftings. The core idea, of course, was not wholly new.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo--the 16th-century Italian who composed his compound
portraits with flowers, fruits and chunks of meat--understood it well. So did
William Shakespeare: "Do you see yonder cloud," Hamlet asks Polonius, "that's
almost in the shape of a camel?" Polonius says he does. "Methinks," continues
Hamlet, "it is like a weasel." Polonius sees a weasel. "Or like a whale," says
the prince.
Leonardo, too, urged that kind of staring. "Stop sometimes," he wrote, "and
look into the stains of walls, or ashes, or a fire, or clouds . . . in which,
if you consider them well, you may find really marvelous ideas . . . battles of
animals and men . . . landscapes . . . monstrous things."
But Dali had a sharper aim. He meant not just to liberate his already free
fancy, but "to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discredit of
the real world."
"The only difference between me and a madman," he explained, "is that I am not
a madman."
I think I should acknowledge that I never cared much for the preposterous old
charlatan. (Actually, I liked his art when I was 11, but not a lot thereafter.)
Dali seemed a sellout. He gladly lent his name, as well as his mustache, to
brandy bottles, perfume, furniture and fabrics, and did so just for cash. "Dali
sleep best," he happily explained, "after receiving tremendous quantity of
checks."
His showing off seemed gross. (With Whistler and Warhol, Dali surely ranked
among the least modest self-promoters in the history of art.) And his
brushwork--set beside that of Jackson Pollock, say--seemed tight and
icky-picky, boringly antique.
For a while, he competed with Picasso for the title of the planet's Most
Important Artist. When his "Enigma of Desire" (1929) sold for $807,408 in 1982,
it set a record for a picture by a living painter. His "Gala Looking at the
Mediterranean Sea, Which From a Distance of Twenty Meters Is Transformed Into a
Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (for Mark Rothko)" fetched more than twice as much
in 1987, but by then Dali, decaying in his home in Spain, was no longer in the
race.
The least likable, and most overdone, of all his works of art was the shameless
man himself. But now that he is gone, folded into history, we are left here
with his paintings, which are grander than we thought.
Dali knew their flaws. "They're badly painted," he acknowledged in 1969. "If
you compare me with any classical painter whatsoever, then I'm an absolute
nonentity."
We're more forgiving now. After all those years of splash-and-drip abstraction
and minimalist geometries and scavenged installations, Dali's virtuosities,
which once suggested salon art, again seem sort of magical. It may be just
coincidence, but skillful Norman Rockwell, Holland's Gerrit Dou and Salvador
Dali, all of whom depict in the most convincing manner, are getting strong
museum shows in Washington this spring.
It isn't his celebrity or his entertaining generosity, or even his fine
brushwork, that makes the man significant. It's his restless, reaching mind,
his vast imagination. Nothing, after all, matters more in art.
'OPTICAL ILLUSIONS'
"Dali's Optical Illusions," at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Independence Avenue and Seventh Street SW, explores the long career and skilled
investigations of the Catalonian surrealist. The show was arranged by guest
curator Dawn Ades for the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn.
No tickets are required, and admission is free. But because large crowds are
expected, visitors are asked to enter the galleries--on a first-come,
first-served basis--through a special Dali entrance on the plaza side of the
museum's lobby.
The Hirshhorn is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily and, for the Dali
exhibition, until 8 p.m. on June 1, 8 and 15. For information, call
202-786-2122.
United Technologies helped pay for the show. It also is supported by a grant
from the Holenia Exhibition Fund in memory of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. The exhibit
closes June 18.
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