Sospeso celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's and 's famous short film Un Chien Andalou with four new musical scores, in collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in 2004.

Dalí was born into the happy, if ideologically confusing, family of a respected notary. His father was a Republican and atheist, his mother a Roman Catholic. Early landscapes show the influence of Pichot’s Impressionism, but by 1921, when he entered the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, his work already exhibited a characteristically paradoxical interest in both formal innovation and aspects of the academic tradition. He was experimenting with such styles as divisionism and Futurism, but publishing (in the review Stadium) his admiration for Velázquez, Goya, El Greco, Dürer, Leonardo and Michelangelo.

At the Academia, Dalí met the poet Federico García Lorca and the film maker Luis Buñuel. These friendships nurtured Dalí’s natural arrogance and exhibitionism, until he was suspended and eventually expelled for inciting the students to rebel and for withdrawing from an examination because he felt the teachers were not qualified to judge his work. Expulsion, however, coincided with artistic recognition, and increasing success at student shows culminated in his first one-man exhibition at the Galería Dalmau in Barcelona in 1925. 

In 1929 he made the film Un Chien andalou with Buñuel, which aimed to disorientate the viewer by simulating the conditions of the dream. It also made use of montage to achieve a transformation of objects, which was to become characteristic of Dalí’s version of Surrealism, but which his paintings had not as yet achieved. The film was made and screened in Paris and brought Dalí to the attention of André Breton, the principal theorist of Surrealism. In summer 1929 the dealer Camille Goemans, René and Georgette Magritte, and Paul and Gala Eluard visited Cadaqués to look at his paintings. They found him in a state of hysteria, working on Dismal Sport, a tiny yet frantically detailed painting, which established both the hallucinatory realism of his mature technique and the principal elements of his private cosmogony. In the deep space of a dream world a dislocated, auto-erotic drama is played out. Dalí’s characteristic symbols of grasshopper, lion and ants proliferate around the mouthless self-portrait mask that reappeared in the Great Masturbator and among the soft watches of the Persistence of Memory (1931). This mask provides both a foretaste of the double images of the 1930s and a memory of the mutating objects of Un Chien andalou: its shape was inspired by a large rock on the coast at Cadaqués. (Grove Art.)