9 Things You Should Know About Salvador Dali

1. He had a massive ego, which nearly got him killed.

Salvador Dali loved to make a scene and fuel his own vanity. He was never one to shy away from his self-proclaimed genius, and never passed up the opportunity for an outrageous stunt.

He once showed up to his lecture with the International Surrealists Group in 1936 dressed in a scuba suit, complete with a snugly-bolted helmet. The intention of the suit was undoubtedly to show off his unique individualism. Suffocating and unable to breathe, Dali finally escaped the suit thanks to the help of his wife and a hammer. The audience appreciated the moment, suffocating suit and all, as an emblem of that crazy man Dali.

Another time, he appeared on the show What’s My Line, where a panel of blindfolded judges attempted to guess the identity of the show’s guest based on his answers to their questions. Dali fancied himself a Renaissance man, and claimed to be known for his performances, athletics, writing, and art. At one point, a frustrated questioner exclaimed, “There’s nothing this man doesn’t do!”

2. He illustrated a special edition of Alice in Wonderland, making a curious book even curiouser.

Most people wouldn’t associate the Surrealist artist with a work of children’s literature, but turns out Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic children’s book had just the right amount of dreamy eccentricity for Dali.

Or maybe he was just offered an enormous paycheck. Dali’s lifestyle wasn’t cheap–he divided his time between hotels in Paris and New York, which he would completely trash before vacating the penthouses. His lavish life was supported by commercial work in the 1950s and 60s, which damaged his reputation as a serious artist. He designed window displays, appeared in commercials, and even illustrated a book of Mao Zedong’s poems.

3. He did really creepy mashup of Mao Zedong and Marilyn Monroe’s faces.

Philippe Halsman and Dali created this portrait in 1952, combining America’s enemy and favorite celebrity into one disconcerting face. Before the days of Photoshop…

4. At university, he was in love with poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

Dali’s sexuality has long been in question, as has his relationship with his friend Lorca. Though the pair mostly likely never had a sexual relationship, their friendship continued from their time at school in 1923 to Lorca’s death in 1936. According to Dali, he resisted Lorca’s attempts at seduction, although letters between the two might suggest he was tempted to give in. He wrote to Lorca in a 1928:

“You are a Christian storm and you are in need of some of my paganism […] I will go get you and give you some seaside medicine. It will be winter and we will light a fire. The poor beasts will be trembling with the cold. You will recall that you are an inventor of marvelous things and we will live together with a portrait machine…” 

5. Dali was a virgin when he met his wife Gala.

In 1929, when Dali met Gala, she was muse to the Surrealist group and married to writer Paul Eluard. Twenty-five year old Dali suffered from anxiety around sex– his fear of impotency is seen in works from this time such as The Great Masturbator and Little Ashes. Gala, confident in Dali’s potential, sought him out as her new lover, and pair soon married.

He was so devoted to her that he began signing his work as “Gala Dali.” He even bought her a castle, where he was only permitted to visit with a written invitation. Gala was perhaps not quite as devoted–she entertained many lovers through her life, though she continued to love Salvador.

6. He was terrified of grasshoppers.

Dali often used grasshoppers to symbolize fear in his work. Rumor has it when he was a child, other children used to throw grasshoppers at him. The terror kicked in when he realized the grasshoppers had faces like fish.

7. Those melting watches in The Persistence of Memory are inspired by cheese.

As the story goes, Dali was supposed to go see a movie with Gala and their friends, but at the last minute felt under the weather and decided to stay home. They had topped off their meal with soft Camembert cheese, and as Dali relaxed at the table, he noticed the landscape he’d been working on of Port Lligat. It was unfinished–but suddenly Dali knew how to complete it. Ignoring his headache, he added three flaccid, melting watches to his painting.

Dali used the paranoiac-critical method in working on his Surrealist paintings, meaning he’d surrender himself to a paranoid state in order to break down his mental barriers and see connections between things that aren’t related. Cheese and watches? But of course.

Oh, and that fleshy creature in the center of the picture? That’s Dali.

8. The Persistence of Memory has a sequel.

It’s called The Deconstruction of the Persistence of Memory (1951), a response to the original painting.

9. He killed a boy.

Or so he claimed. His autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dali was a bed of fabrications, written as an entertaining piece of propaganda for the rise of Dali, the wacky mustachioed celebrity. Many of his accounts in this book are suspect, including one where he claimed to have pushed a boy to his death when he was a child.

“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.

Explosion in a Shingle Factory

Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 (1912) resists attempts to be categorized.

It mocks Cubism yet integrates Cubist principles; it combines a dash of whimsy Dada with mechanical Futurism; it prominently features a nude yet subverts traditional convention as to what a nude should be.

Nude was not well received by art critics. The New York Times bestowed the memorable label “an explosion in a shingle factory” on it, and it was spoofed with titles such as “The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)” and “A Staircase Descending a Nude.”

I named this blog after my favorite of these ridiculing titles for two reasons.

First, I want to acknowledge an artist, who challenged how we think of art and it’s very definition. Take a bow, Marcel!

Second, the title serves a reminder to keep an open mind while observing art. Nude, after all, was not painted in all seriousness, and pokes fun at convention while opening a forum for discussion on what exactly art is. What some might see as a catastrophic “explosion” can be viewed by others as a monumental achievement.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2, 1912