"The Belly of an Architect" and other matters of the heart

It’s not hard to figure out the 1987 film “The Belly of an Architect,” coming soon to the Dali Museum. It’s all in the title. The master-builder in question has a bad stomach ache, his wife is pregnant, and his task of the day is to design a show for architect Etienne-Louis Boullee, who based his rotundas and domes on human anatomy. Obviously, the film is about bellies – one cramping, the other expanding. (It’s also a nifty metaphor for an artist’s creative struggles).

Less obvious is why the Dali Museum is featuring this film. What does Dali have to do with bellies, with anatomy? Answer: A lot.

Even though he was said to be frightened by female anatomy and only had sex with his wife of 48 years once, he focused on human form in his paintings - though not in an admiring way. You'll see no no Venus, no Adonis. Given his repulsion to the body, it’s not unexpected that he would picture it pulled apart every which way. He was the first to admit this.

Referring to his “Soft Construction with Boiled Bean, he said, "I showed a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of auto-strangulation."

But it was the womb in particular that prompted many of his pictures and pronouncements. Commenting on his painting “Marsupial Centaurs, which is pocked-marked with holes, he said, “The holes are like parachutes, only safer.” Safe holes? What can they be? What else? Wombs, which reflected his contention that his time in the womb remained in his memory, and that everyone wanted back in, as he did. The shock of ejection from the safety of the womb, and the torturous descent through the birth canal, is the cause of all human suffering, he said.

Despite such declarations, Dali believed that he was unfathomable. His explanation of “City of Drawers,” in which he painted dresser-like drawers as body parts, tells you that: “The only difference between the immortal Greece and contemporary times is Sigmund Freud, who discovered that the human body, purely platonic at the Greece epoch, nowadays is full of secret drawers that only the psychoanalysis is capable to open.”

This doesn’t stop people from trying, of course.