SALVADOR DALI

Art

Cedric Maldonado on the eccentric surrealist artist who turned dreams into art and back into dreams again

Idon’t do drugs, I am drugs.” – Salvador Dalí Looking aslant, the bright, causticallyshadowed Catalan sunshine casting deep shadows among phallic, cervic and fantastical rock shapes, a painter stands at his easel, wearing an unconvincing dark wig, the red breeches of a Zouave and the pointed slippers of an Ottoman bey, as the country flies that live on Catalan olive trees gather hungrily at his moustaches and lips, which he has helpfully covered in date palm sugar and honey to lead one into his mouth: a human Venus Fly Trap. This can be none other than the self-styled ‘concentric-eccentric’ artist, Surrealist and proto-Pop-Art showman, Salvador Dalí. “Dandyismo was en vogue, and Dalí’s eccentricities brought him into the closed dandy set at the apex of student life. English customs and manners were all the rage: an illustration declared the watchword of the dandies: ‘Desperation for tea! Tea! Tea! Tea!’”

Modern Rhapsody, 1957

Born in Figueras, Spain on 11th May, 1904 to Salvador Dalí Cusí, a ‘notary public’ and Felipa Domènech Ferrés, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was an intended replacement for an older sibling who had died young of meningitis nine months before, also called Salvador (‘Saviour’ in Spanish). Later he said that all his art emerged from the twin traumas of leaving the Paradise Lost of the intra-uterine stage to enter our world of apparent reality at birth, and the second trauma of having to face Death, this trauma reinforced by having to replace this ‘other’ Salvador, who had been an infant prodigy on whom his parents had doted.

Salvador Dalí claimed, using the image of a pair of fried eggs alive with phosphorescence, seen across several of his paintings, that he could remember this Paradise before birth with astounding clarity. Indeed, Sigmund Freud confirmed this, after a visit Dalí paid to him in London, when he brought his masterpiece The Metamorphosis of Narcissus for the inventor of psychoanalysis to analyse. Dr. Freud remarked that the painting itself showed that he had also done the job of analysis himself, and that Freud’s role beside the couch was therefore superfluous. Dalí, for his part, was delighted that Freud had called him a fanatic.

At 16 Dalí remarked, “I’ll be a genius, and the world will admire me. Perhaps I’ll be despised and misunderstood, but I’ll be a genius, a great genius, I’m certain of it.” As a teenage painter, he experimented in every ‘ism’ from pointillism to futurism and cubism, and his father helped organise his first exhibition of charcoal drawings in Figueras, Catalonia, at the local theatre, which the artist would, years later, buy and turn into his famous Theatre-Museum (right). The artist would also end up being interred in its basement.

In 2018 Dalí’s body was disinterred to extract his DNA, because a tarot-card reader called Pilar Abel had claimed to be his illegitimate love-child (which later proved to be false). His embalmer Narcís Bardalet was thrilled to discover that the preparation he had used to set the artist’s moustaches for all eternity at his favoured ‘10 past 10’ angle had survived three decades perfectly intact. Dalí had favoured a Hungarian Moustache Wax sold in the Place Vendôme, Paris. He confirmed that at night it drooped like Fu Manchu’s, but by day (and we now know even in the longest sleep, of death) remained perfectly erect.

From 1922 to 1926 Dalí studied at the Academy of San Fernando, Madrid, Spain’s top art school, but rapidly brushed up against the teaching staff, being removed three times for various misdemeanours, the final expulsion when he had his oral exam in front of three lecturers whom he accused of knowing less about Raphael than he did.

At the same time he was staying at an institution known as the Residencia, a progressive university residence started by Professor Alberto Jimenez, where students could lodge and hear lectures from the world’s great minds on a variety of subjects. Dandyismo was en vogue, and Dalí’s eccentricities brought him into the closed dandy set at the apex of student life, along with poet and playwright Federico García Lorca and future surrealist filmmaker Luís Buñuel. English customs and manners (and to a certain extent modes of dress, in imitation, like the Residencia itself, of Oxford University) were all the rage, and an illustration of the time declared the watchword of the dandies: ‘Desperation for tea! Tea! Tea! Tea!’

This was the heyday of the three artistic geniuses of Spain’s 20th century. At Dalí’s new home in the fishing hamlet of Cadaques, he is believed to have had an affair with Lorca. The break-up came soon, when Lorca shot to fame with his Gypsy Ballads, a collection of brilliant poems that summed up his Andalusian culture and sense of rebellion. Dalí and he were never to meet again, and cruelly Buñuel seemed to be calling him a dog with the title of their surrealist collaboration, Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog) produced in Paris not long after, a short film that imprinted them both as two of the leading surrealists of the day in Paris. In 1936 Lorca was shot by fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

As a result of the eye-catching and scandalous frisson the Surrealists created, an enterprising maker of some of the first cinematic commercials made an ad involving several Surrealists, including Dalí, to advertise a furniture company that wanted to stress the solidity and stability of their product. The Surrealists appeared to be involved in some sort of séance, becoming wobblier and shakier in contrast to the sturdy, sane table. Eventually the whole room, apart from the table, rocks and wobbles from side to side. This ad, shown in small cinemas in the 1930s, perhaps set the store for the future more than any Dalí painting.

Dalí’s sojourn in Paris was to last until the War, but it encompassed the height of the Surrealist avant-garde movement and in the eyes at least of Dalí himself, he was its leader (it has been remarked that each surrealist would say the same thing of himself). By the time of the War, Dalí had to appeal to Picasso for the money to get to America, which

Gala helping Salvador develop the Dalí brand

the fellow Spaniard duly lent him. Appealed to in his turn by Buñuel, Dalí not only didn’t help, but also told the authorities he was a communist.

It was in this period that Dalí’s clothing started to metamorphose into the fully surrealistic. Instead of a hat, he wore a bread roll on his head. He created his famous ‘Aphrodisiac Jacket’ with four buttons on each sleeve, four on the front, and forty-one shot glasses, each containing a straw, crême de menthe and a fly. Perhaps the first Mohican on a white man sprouted shockingly from his head.

Dalí also worked with designer Elsa Schiaparelli on a dress which was bought by Mrs. Wallis Simpson, perhaps in error, trying to make an impression on the Prince of Wales. Unfortunately the hyperreal lobster motif appeared to be emerging from between her legs in the Cecil Beaton photograph, but most surreally of all, the image had the desired effect of creating erotic delirium in the blood-royal. Dalí was not just under a roll, but also on one.

Helped at all times in his business affairs by Gala (neé Elena Ivanovna Diakonova), a Russian emigré he had fallen in love with when she was still married to the surrealist Paul Elouard, and whom he was later to marry, Dalí was able to develop a veritable publicity machine that meant his name was mentioned in the media every single day he was in America from 1940 to 1970. He rightly claimed to have invented Pop Art in the sense Warhol later intended, ensuring the continual media presence of the artist whatever the content of the creation, and perhaps in spite of it. Gala remained a distant and muse-like creature of enigma

“Instead of a hat, he wore a bread roll on his head. He created his famous ‘Aphrodisiac Jacket’ with four buttons on each sleeve, four on the front, and forty-one shot glasses, each containing a straw, crême de menthe and a fly. Perhaps the first Mohican on a white man sprouted shockingly from his head”

Photo Credit: The Museum of the City of New York/Art Resource, NY.

and mystery, and her presence loomed ever larger in the subject matter of his paintings as they gave way from the initial ‘paranoid-critical’ stage of Surrealism to his ‘Nuclear Mysticism’, which brought in ideas of science and metaphysics, Catholicism and optics into the purview of the artist.

Installed in 1501 Fifth Avenue, at the Hotel St. Regis, Dalí was a famous sight there, holding court with Gala with a small bear or an ocelot on a lead, with a bath filled with easels, pill-filled bikinis and Aphrodisiac Jackets. In a luxury department store nearby, Dalí had accepted a commission to use these elements in a window display (above). Unfortunately the owners saw fit to adjust and edit certain elements so as not to offend certain upmarket sensibilities, and when Dalí saw this he was as enraged, got into the window and re-arranged the display, before breaking the plate glass window by mistake. Police were called and he was advised by his lawyer to hand himself in, as a friendly judge was on the circuit that afternoon. After being committed to jail and threatened with violence by inmates, a Puerto Rican gangster protected him when he discovered to his delight that Dalí had committed his act on Fifth Avenue.

Post-war, Dalí became the toast of a prosperous America that worshipped ‘enigma’ as a foil to the nuclear age, replete with product, advertising hoardings and TV evangelism. Its millionaires flocked to be painted in society portraits that were anything but conventional, and a large Dalí foundation was filled with his works in St. Petersburg, Florida.

In 1948 Dalí returned to Spain and claimed he admired General Franco, a statement that made him deeply unpopular with everyone from George Orwell to Buñuel and the other Surrealists. Of Picasso, he remarked:

“Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.”

He claimed to be both metaphysically a monarchist and an anarchist, and a member of no political party; the King of Spain, an admirer, eventually made him Marquis de Dalí de Púbol. He bought the bombed-out shell of the theatre at Figueras to turn it into the theatre-museum, and installed Gala in her own castle, to which he had to obtain written permission to visit. Accused by many of merely monetising his past glories, the famous moustaches seen in Alka-Seltzer and Chocolat Lanvin TV ads across the world, people forget that he was not only a pioneer in art but also in advertising, and even of the self and its deepest motivations. n