indwe magazine – Jan 2005

The Surreal Surrealist
Text: Guillaume Celliers
Images: © Getty Images/Touchline Photo
The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad. – Salvador Dali
Salvador Dalí is arguably the most fascinating and controversial personality of the previous century, if not the most bizarre – his life and work fused together in a way that is both sublime and hallucinatory.
Best known for his surrealist works, Dalí’s work is noted for its striking combination of bizarre dreamlike images, with excellent painterly skills influenced by the great masters. Dalí was an artist with unmatched talent and boundless imagination.
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
There can be no question of the public recognition of Salvador Dalí. It seems everyone knows of the limp watches that appear in his paintings, though not everyone can give the title, The Persistence of Memory.
The secret to understanding Dalí’s work is to resist the temptation to attempt any kind of objective analysis of the work or the master. If there is to be any analysis it can only be self-analysis because the aesthetic appreciation of a work of art is an encounter, and in this encounter we create what is meaningful to us. As Dalí said, “To look is to invent.” Dalí knew that every viewer would bring to his works a quantity of personal qualities that would cause the viewer to see something different from others, something unique to the personality of the viewer. That is how Dalí wanted it because his art clearly goes beyond understanding, to an unusual level of empathy between his work and the inner selves of the viewers. With this notion, Dalí was able to rescue art from the cynical art critics and return it to the masses who appreciate art for what it was always supposed to be – something that is unique, beautiful, and meaningful to the viewer.
Dalí was also a master showman with an admitted love for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself, which sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, primarily because his eccentric theatrical behaviour would often overshadow and obscure his artistic genius.
Dalí gave new meaning to the old adage, “There is no such thing as bad publicity, only publicity.” He was a master at manipulating the press, and throughout his career, literally until the day he died, he would have the press at his feet, dominating everything from the front pages to the social pages. As early as 1933, at the age of 29, he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, and he remains the only artist to have become a mass-phenomenon in his own lifetime.
I don’t do drugs. I am drugs. Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.
Salvador Dalí was born on 11 May 1904 in the small town of Figueres in Spain. By the time he was ten he was working in oils, and at the age of fifteen he was painting ambitious and accomplished impressionist works. While attending the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, he fell in with the avant-garde crowd, where he befriended Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel. Garcia Lorca went on to become Spain’s greatest poet, while Buñuel became Spain’s greatest filmmaker. He was expelled from school twice – the last time for refusing to answer an oral exam question on the grounds that he knew more about the subject than all three examiners put together! Nevertheless, his first one-person show in 1925 (at the age of 21) was a success.
That same year he made his first visit to Paris, where he met with Pablo Picasso, a fellow Spaniard whom the young Dalí revered. Picasso had already heard favourable things about Dalí from Joan Miró, and so went to great length to advise and encourage the young Salvador Dalí. Over the next few years, still searching for his own identity and style, Dalí would produce a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso.
In 1928, Dalí would earn international recognition with three of his paintings featured at an art exhibition in Pittsburgh.
Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.
The next year, on his second visit to Paris, Dalí would meet and fall in love with Gala Éluard, the woman who would become his wife, lover, mother, muse, goddess and business manager. Although she was married to French poet Paul Éluard at the time, Dalí fell deeply in love with Gala. When Éluard and Gala visited Dalí in Spain during the next summer, Dalí’s love for Gala, a woman ten years his senior, exploded in bizarre fashion. He performed numerous extravagancies to capture her attention; such as waxing his armpit and dying it blue, applying goat excrements upon himself, and wearing a red geranium on his head. His emotion was such, that every time he tried to talk to her, he suffered uncontrollable attacks of laughter.
During a stroll in Cabo de Creus, Dalí fell on his knees laughing, and declared his love for her. Holding his hand Gala said, “My boy, let us never to be separated...” Dalí would later write that Gala’s words had imbued him with a feeling of being divinely understood.
From that point forward, Dalí would paint Gala over and over, finally transforming her into the Madonna of Port Lligat in his later paintings. “Without Gala,” he would later say, “there is no Dalí.”
In November of 1929, Dalí joined the Surrealist Movement, a group of writers, artists, and filmmakers, including André Breton, Buñuel, Éluard, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp. Influenced by Freud, the Surrealists looked to the unconscious and to the world of dreams to challenge the status quo with irrational, daring, and frequently shocking work – work like Dalí’s famous painting of soft or melting watches, The Persistence of Memory (1931).
Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.
During World War II, Dalí and Gala went into exile in the United States, where Dalí became an instant celebrity, working with Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney and Harpo Marx, designing ballet sets and jewellery, and becoming involved in countless and wide-ranging commercial activities. The Americans feasted on his persona, giving him the attention and recognition he had always craved.
While in exile, Dalí’s painting began to move away from Surrealism into a more classic era, punctuated by a series of monumental canvases – later called the Masterworks, which integrated Dalí’s interest in math, atomic theory, art history, Catalan identity and newfound faith in the Roman Catholicism of his mother. Returning to Spain in 1948, Dalí would go on to produce eighteen Masterworks over a period of twenty years.
Gala’s death in 1982 devastated Dalí. Already unable to paint for extended periods of time, he spent his last six years in seclusion and died on 23 January 1989.
While the last two decades of his life saw popular and major exhibitions around the world, Dalí would have to wait to be accepted as a serious artist in art critic and art history circles. Unable to figure out where the art began and the performance stopped, critics claimed that Dalí was little more than a walking publicity stunt whose artistic integrity could not survive his relentless self-promotion. How wrong they were!
Fifteen years after his death, the Dalí phenomenon shows no signs of abating, his person still arousing curiosity, his work still demanding admiration, and at last receiving the critical acclaim he never quite received while he was still alive.
Two major museums (the Teatre-Museu Dalí in Spain, and the Salvador Dalí Museum in the US) are dedicated to his work and draw millions of visitors each year – so many visitors, in fact, that smaller museums have sprung up hoping to capitalize on Dalí’s growing appeal. Apart from the dedicated Dalí museums, his works are displayed in all of the established modern art museums of the world.
Since his death there have been more Dalí exhibitions than all the other painters grouped together. Every year there are more and more books, biographical essays, articles, and documentaries devoted to the unceasing study and analysis of the Dalí phenomenon. Salvador Dalí websites are shooting up like mushrooms, and Dalí merchandise, from T-Shirts to Designer Jewellery, is selling at a rate comparable to the merchandise of modern pop stars. There is no doubt that Dalí lives on!
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
Today Dalí’s own prediction is coming true: “The crowds flock to see my paintings and will continue to do so because their instinct obscurely and amazedly suspects that my works hide treasures of blinding authenticity that nobody has yet perceived; artistic treasures that will be more and more coveted.”
Top >