“Salvador Dalí, Jean Clemmer, an encounter, a work” in collaboration with the Jean Clemmer archive is the title of the exhibition which promoted by the Sozzani Foundation which will open in Milan on June 17th.
Salvador Dalí met the Swiss photographer Jean Clemmer in 1962 and for the occasion, in the house in Port Lligat where Dalí lived with his wife and muse Gala, they began to create together some photographs of "mises en scène" and "tableaux vivants”. Here, at Dalí's suggestion, it will be Clemmer who will bring a girl (Ginestra) he has just met, who becomes the subject of a first photo shoot that establishes their friendship and professional collaboration.
The theme that inspired Dalí was that of the “Levitation” in trying to create a dreamlike scene between mythology, science and magic. She suspends the young Ginesta upside down and pours eight kilos of chickpeas bouncing off her body, simulating a chain reaction, like a nuclear explosion. Dalí, disguised as Hermes Trismegistus, wraps Ginestra with a canvas recovered from US Air Force parachutes and asks her to wrap herself and writhing in a sort of dance.
A few years later, in 1968 the Daily Telegraph asks Dalì to offer a new interpretation of Spanish fashion. He chose his friend Jean Clemmer as photographer and in Cadaques he designed a set where he staged a large Christ as the wreck of a barge stranded among bones, trunks and tyres.
With these experiences, Dalí asks Clemmer to represent him as an apparition. Thus was born the cycle of “Metamorphoses”, the metamorphoses of Jean Clemmer, where the artist is born from the female body in scenes with paintings and silhouettes of female nudes.
Jean Clemmer who senses the extraordinary filmic potential of performances, introduces Salvador Dalí to his friend and director Claude Joudioux. In 1964 Dalí and Joudioux filmed the film "The Divine Dali", a short film, while Clemmer is assigned to take still pictures.
The central scene of the filmThe cannibalism of the angelic” was built on several glass floors, each with an angel, to simulate the idea of ascension. The angels devoured each other, regurgitating in a constant cycle of renewal. While a young woman with a calf's head, she simulates the Minotaur and rejects: "Vomiting, you know” according to Dalí, “is the closest thing to love”. While cannibalism represented for the artist an allegory to alchemy as transmutation and rebirth.
Unfortunately the film is destroyed in a fire shortly after. Fortunately, the photographs that Clemmer took on the set remain to testify to the work of this surrealist short film.
Jean Clemmer was born in Neuchâtel in Switzerland in 1926. He attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts Chaux-de-Fonds. In 1946, after the war, he settled in Geneva as a set designer of the Grand Theatre. He moved to Paris in 1948, where he met and frequented Cocteau, Ossip Zadkine, Louise de Vilmorin, Jacques Fath and Marcel Rochas. He realizes projects for furniture, books, drawings and paintings, but he is fascinated by photography and in 1962 he opens his own photography studio.
