Salvador Dali
Arrogance, Sex and Shit Ferdnando has the competence to judge me!” he exclaimed as he stormed out of an examination at the prestigious art school in Madrid. He was expelled, but this only encouraged the growth of his flamboyant personality. He found he could enthral and manipulate the public with his eccentric behaviour. When he almost suffocated inside a diving suit he had donned to give a speech at an exhibition, the crowd wildly applauded. To them, this accident was a brilliant, purposeful representation of the subconscious. He was, inimitably, ‘Dali’, and the genius could do no wrong. Dali at once horrified and delighted, repelled and fascinated.
“Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali” Salvador Dali, Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936.
Salvador Dali is probably the most famous surrealist artist of the 20th century. His paintings of melting clocks and open drawers are universally recognisable. Primrose Lovett looks into the man behind the art, entering the dark, twisted world of Dali’s unconcious, and the ideas that formed a movement.
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alvador Dali, Surrealist artist and purveyor of possibly the world’s greatest moustache, is best known for his bizarre paintings and eccentric furniture. From his humble birth in 1904 until his lonely death in 1989, he was both lauded as genius and dismissed as a fraud. His art scandalised audiences, yet was once blessed by the Pope. Today people remain confused, disturbed, amused, perhaps even aroused by his work, yet most move on after
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only a cursory glance. Few pause to consider the legend behind the paintings, the arrogant Freudian psyche which lingered on sex, shit and money. Salvador Dali, the selfproclaimed Saviour of Art. Throughout his life, Dali was convinced of his own genius. His arrogance both distinguished and alienated him from his supposedly imbecilic contemporaries, driving his stellar career. “None of the professors at the School of San
He appeared at parties with his wife, Gala, dressed in a foetus costume. He designed perfumes with bottles shaped as testicles, vaginas and mouths. He was the biggest primadonna of the age, and pushed every conceivable boundary. But was he whoring himself out to publicity or brilliantly exposing and poking fun at the tragic elements of high society? As when he had been a spoilt child, doted on by his parents, every action was excusable. He was, after all, a genius. Dali’s life was a textbook case of the Oepidus conflict, adoring his mother, despising his father and later becoming traumatised by his own sexual inadequacy. Believed by his parents to be the reincarnation of his dead elder brother and namesake, he spent his childhood
VIVID 2nd Edition March 2008