The Philippe Halsman Archive: Halsman Archive File 21 -Dali Picasso 1952

Halsman took a trip to Europe in 1951, and one of his subjects was the painter Marc Chagall. One afternoon Halsman went with Chagall to check on his pottery in Vallauris, France, and they ran into Pablo Picasso, who used the same ceramic kiln. Halsman photographed the two men together in a warm embrace. Dali, Halsman’s long time collaborator, had a psychological rivalry with his fellow Spaniard Picasso. In 1952 Halsman, perhaps inspired by Dali’s Freudian interests, made a fusion of Dali and Picasso. Halsman needed to invent his own analogue techniques to achieve the results he imagined (before there was Photoshop there were tiny scissors and tape). For this image, which predicted the face filter/deep-fake world we now live in, Halsman collaged a photo of Dali and his photo of Picasso from ’51. He then rephotographed the collage and retouched the hard edge where the two faces meet in the middle. In this archive envelope the un-retouched version can be seen. This experiment by Halsman would later inspire the Marilyn Mao image he created for Dali’s 1971 Paris Vogue cover, and the world of manufactured artificial images and face swapping which are becoming commonplace.