Author Archives: Paul Chimera

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‘Toreador’ Puts ‘All of Dali’ into One Painting!

By Paul Chimera

Dali Society Historian/Writer

The year 1970 was another prolific and productive year for then 66-year old Dali. But it shall forever be remembered for his completion of a single painting — what some consider the greatest of all of his paintings: “The Hallucinogenic Toreador.”

As a Dali expert, I’ve devoured hundreds of Dali works — probably to an obsessive level. I’ve always found his surrealism far more interesting and inventive than that of his contemporaries. Whether it’s Dali prints, oil paintings, sculpture — even a Dali catalog or book he illustrated — these creations have, for me, soared above the rest.

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And many believe “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” (Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida) represents the pinnacle of Dali’s undeniable genius. For this blogger/historian personally? “Toreador” might be the one Dali canvas I’d choose to own, if I could (OK, it’s too big for my house, but stay with me here), though it would do bloody battle with his magnificent “Santiago El Grande” of 1957. (Please don’t ask me to choose!)

Dali works begin with an original idea, of course, but you may be surprised where they sometimes come from. In the case of “The Hallucinogenic Toreador,” it actually all began when Dali gazed upon a simple box of Venus brand drawing pencils! In a little-known yet rather historic moment, Dali discerned in the abdominal and breast area of the Venus de Milo image on the box’s front cover, the suggestion of a nose and mouth.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Before long, the news would be out: Salvador Dali was developing what historians might now consider his magnum opus of masterpieces. The mouth and nose he saw on that box of pencils set in motion a year-long labor of love. With a series of Venus de Milo’s as the central image, Dali turned the iconic Greek statue into a huge face of a toreador or matador, including his white shirt, collar button, green necktie, and, of course, the red cape (which also serves as one of the Venus’s dress) draped over his left shoulder.

A partially hidden, fallen bull also appears below, along with other hidden images formed from ingeniously devised highlights and shadows.

But let’s imagine what was going through our boy’s mind at the time. Moving up in years, might Dali have figured that this immense, wall-sized picture might serve as his final masterpiece? Consider, after all, that it pays homage to his beloved Spain, for whose spirit and passion the bullfight is something of a metaphor. And look at the little boy in a sailor suit in the lower right — that’s young Salvador. It’s quoted directly from one of his best miniature paintings, “The Specter of Sex Appeal” (1932, Teatru-Museu Dali, Figueres, Spain).

And in the upper left, a solemn portrait of his wife Gala (she detested bullfighting), while his fellow Spanish cubist painter, Juan Gris, is paid homage to in the cubist Venus image on a chair in the lower left.

And there’s more: the remarkable double-image from his 1940 masterpiece, “Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire” (Dali Museum, Florida) appears toward the bottom of the red cape/dress.

Little wonder, then, that Spanish author Luis Romero wrote a book about this one incomparable Dali work, translated as “All Dali in One Painting.” With its surrealism, its pop, op and psychadelic art references, it’s tight craftsmanship, its inclusion of Dali and Gala, and its overarching “Spanishness,” this great painting would have ensured Salvador Dali a place in the pantheon of great artists, even if he’d painted nothing else.

Did Dali know this all along? Was he giving us his final masterpiece, determined to make it his best? So many things to ponder when we consider Dali…praise Dali…buy Dali…dream Dali!

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Dali ‘Horns’ in on Interpretation of Vermeer’s ‘Lacemaker’

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By Paul Chimera

Dali Society Historian/Writer

“I always want the public to completely understand what I do, and how I do it, right from the start,” said no Spanish Surrealist master named Salvador Dali, ever!

It was, of course, very much the opposite. Dali thrived on consternation, bewilderment, confusion, and mystery. He was a living enigma, and he cultivated that distinction as carefully as his iconic, manicured mustache.

So when the then 51-year-old artist took up the challenge of interpreting one of his favorite artist’s key works — “The Lacemaker” by Flemish master Jan Vermeer — the assignment took shape a bit unconventionally. It started, in fact, with rhinoceros horns!

An inimitable master of showmanship, self-promotion and performance art (people like Elton John, Lady Gaga and Alice Cooper are clearly in his debt), Dali set up shop in the rhinoceros exhibit at a zoo in Paris. What better way, after all, to accurately capture the logarithmic curve of a rhino horn (a naturally occurring curve that was key to the mathematical construction of many Dali works) than to have the animal model its hood ornament in the flesh!

And, figured Dali, why sit on a chair to paint when the edge of a wheelbarrow will do just fine! (See photo)

The first few horns on the canvas’s muted background left onlookers scratching their heads. “How is this an interpretation of a Vermeer?,” they wondered. But Dali’s Paranoiac-Critical Method — a unique system he developed, allowing him to tap into his subconscious and see things in a different way yet be able to express them “critically” for others to see, too — was about to kick in.

And voila! Those seemingly meaningless rhino horns began to take shape, with the help of other artful brushstrokes, to reveal a recognizable likeness of the woman sewing the delicate laced item in Vermeer’s masterpiece. But now deconstructed in Dali’s Nuclear-Mystical manner to represent his fascination with nuclear physics, and how all matter is ultimately discontinuous: atomic particles “rumping and jumping about!” as Dali colorfully expressed it.

Think Salvador’s “simultaneity” here. A fancy noun, simply meaning that Salvador Dali loved several things going on simultaneously — a strong reason he was so drawn to double- and hidden-imagery.

In the present work, three key things took place at the same time: Dali’s respect and admiration for Vermeer, long-noted as one of his favorite artists; Dali’s expression of his Nuclear-Mysticism, demonstrating a modern, atomic re-imagining of a classical painting; and, of course, another opportunity to create a sensation by being swarmed by the international press as he sat on a wheelbarrow, inches from a multi-ton rhinoceros — and began creating another Dali masterpiece.

“The ‘Lacemaker’ is, morphologically, “a rhinoceros horn,” Dali declared.

 

 

 

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All in a Day’s Work for Dali . . .

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali historian

 

If this Dali painting doesn’t make you smile, you may need serious counseling.

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Salvador Dali had a sense of humor the size of California, and “Celestial Ride” (1957) is a great example of it. Who else but Dali would depict a rhinoceros (average weight 3,300 lbs.) towering over a landscape, supported on skyscraper-tall flamingo legs, and carrying scantily clad (make that unclad) cargo!

Forget about surrealist symbolism for now. Put aside any deep Freudian meaning. Just be present with the image — and delight in how it brings a smile to your face! Surely it does. And that’s exactly what Mr. Dali had in mind. His sense of humor was irrepressible and undeniable.

Dali was human. He loved to laugh. He called himself “one cloon (“a clown”), acknowledging idol Charlie Chaplain, and suggesting such buffoonery was not mutually exclusive with artistic genius. The man had fun. 

Was Dali also conveying some serious ideas here? You can count on it. But let’s not get too serious too quickly. I haven’t chuckled enough yet, and I bet you haven’t either.

So now consider the rhino’s flank. Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing, that is, except for a BLACK & WHITE TV SET BEAMING AN AMERICAN BASEBALL GAME! Preposterous! Outrageous! Hilarious!

But why?

Why not?! This is Surrealism, friends: spontaneous transcription of thought without any control exercised by reason, ethics or morals. So Salvador Dali — who, while in New York during the winters for many years, couldn’t help but catch flashes of America’s pastime on television or in the newspapers — decided to broadcast a baseball game on a TV set installed on the side of a rhino that anticipated the fantasy of Cirque du Solei by 27 years!

“What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.” — S. Dali

All in a day’s work for Dali.

Didn’t matter that Dali didn’t know an R.B.I. from a UFO. He couldn’t have cared less about the game itself. But you can bet it was the “choreography” of the game, the surreal look of a catcher’s shield-like mask, and the turtle-like appearance of the home plate umpire’s attire that curled the Catalan’s mustache. It was a spectacle to Dali, and Dali loved the spectacular.

And so, it took the genius mind of Salvador Dali to meld humorous elements with some important and serious obsessions. Like the notion of ascension and levitation, represented by, well, the celestial ride itself. And Dali had a real preoccupation with the curve of a rhinoceros horn. Because he discovered it was one of the few shapes in nature that correspond to a logarithmic spiral — a phenomenon that underpinned the mathematics on which many of his compositions were based.

In “Celestial Ride,” then, we get a pictorial expression of Dali’s interest in mathematics and spiritual ascension, while at the same time enjoying one of the most amusing pictures you’re ever going to set  your eyes on.

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