“When You’ve Got It, Flaunt It”: Salvador Dali’s Success in Commercial America

“Some day perhaps one will discover a truth as strange this mustache—namely that Salvador Dali was possibly also a painter.” 

                                                                                                                         Salvador Dali, 1954

The American art scene during the 1950s scoffed at commercial artists. A serious artist, the Abstract Expressionists maintained, must be rigid in his or her beliefs, sacrificing comfort to uphold artistic values. Andy Warhol was too “swish”[1]; Roy Lichtenstein was an unoriginal plagiarist, they thought. A serious artist would stoop to designing window displays as a last resort, not to win prizes for the work. He collected money for these commercial jobs under pseudonyms, not out of shame for his poverty, but because respected artists simply did not do window painting.

Spanish artist Salvador Dali would have none of that.

He wanted a decadent lifestyle, an adoring nation of followers, and a cache of money to solve all his problems. Deaf to accusations of his alleged selling-out, he turned his attention to commercial art. Though he had garnered fame with his 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, his 1940 move to New York established his notoriety as a celebrity with an outrageous mustache. The waning popularity of Surrealism in America prevented him from marketing his paintings[2], forcing him to manufacture his celebrity through new means: designing department store window displays, appearing in commercials, and branding his outrageous lifestyle, all with the same Dalinian flair. By the sixties, his trademark mustache was one of the most identifiable symbols in America. By embracing consumer values and becoming a commercial success, he engineered a fresh public face, shedding the image of old Surrealist painter in favor of a delirious mustachioed celebrity. He took advantage of the culture of the mid-fifties and sixties, which were characterized by the decline of stability and ascension of individualism, to foster his success as a celebrity. Due to the uncertain and repressive nature of the previous decade, this new era featured a vibrant culture focused on radical progress, individual expression, and rampant consumerism. He embraced American commercial values and thwarted the popular trope of a starving, serious artist in order to feed his commercial success. Largely circumstantial, Dali’s success as a celebrity depended on the cultural climate of the time and his ability to cater to the wants of the American public.

In order to examine the postwar success of Salvador Dali, we must first understand the mentality of the country that made his achievements possible. After the calamity of World War II, America was a place of radical change. In response to the waste-not, want-not lifestyle of the war, Americans spent a decade from 1945 to 1955 uncertain about the revival of free market capitalism. However, dresses were soon adorned with little embellishments again, women purchased nylons rather than going without, and metal could finally go back to automobile production rather than toward the war effort. Once more, the American people could finally afford to be consumers, to freely live their American dreams. The fifties fostered proud “exceptionalism”[3] and nostalgia for “the good days before the War and the Depression”[4], and ultimately revived the people’s faith in an “acquisition based lifestyle”[5], highlighting the renewed prevalence of material goods in everyday life. The stability of the American Dream ideal set the stage for the rampant ads and consumerism that emerged in the mid-fifties. By the time the sixties rolled around, gone were the “comfortable”[6] designs of the prior decade. In its place were radicalism and change, a public starved for a fresh style that screamed “‘What the Hell’”[7], a country united by its collective desire for individualism. At the center of it all was New York, home to Pop Art and wild parties, celebrities and crass commercialism. America was ready for the reemergence of a cultural icon: Salvador Dali.

Dali sells Lanvin chocolates.

Dali’s eccentric persona fit neatly into the 1960s American culture, which enjoyed experimenting with complementary opposites. As a “display window for a national consumer culture”[8], advertisements reveal the radicalism of the sixties, which opted for “anything to provide an excuse for color, variety, shock, and attention.”[9] Naturally brilliant in all four of these areas, Dali found a home in advertising: he appeared in commercials and print advertisements, and even used his artistry to design his own. His advertisements blend two unlikely concepts, be it using art to sell pain reliever or insanity to sell chocolates, calling attention to both himself and the product. As the man who had previously paired a lobster and telephone in an art piece, Dali was a genius at the zany ideas which embodied the model of “enormously creative and idiosyncratic advertising”[10]. This brand of idiosyncrasy prevailed whenever Dali himself appeared in commercials “not to endorse a product but to create unlikely juxtapositions that seize the reader’s attention”[11]. In the star-studded 1971 television and print ad campaign for Braniff Airlines, art director George Lois pairs Dali and baseball player Whitey Ford as seatmates. Dali has the last word: at the advertisement’s end, he exclaims the campaign’s catchphrase, “When you got it, flaunt it!”[12] This could not have been truer for Dali, as his ability to fit his brandish his eccentricity in order to follow the trends of the time contributed to his celebrity success.