By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian One of my Dalí dreams? To tour an exhibition of all of Salvador Dalí’s “masterworks” in one mind-blowing exhibition! I believe it was Salvador Dalí’s leading collector (and benefactor of the Salvador Dalí Museum, first in Beachwood, Ohio, then when it relocated to St. Petersburg, Florida), Reynolds…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian Salvador Dalí specialist and friend Elliott King, Ph.D., again finds himself mentioned here, due to his recent sojourn to the land of the rising son. He has shared a little about the wealth of great Dalí paintings he finally got to see in person while visiting Japan. One…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian Everything Salvador Dalí did was calculated. Well-thought-out. Purposeful. Deliberate. Carefully crafted. Nowhere is this more evident than in the studies (a.k.a., preparatory sketches) he made in the process of creating masterpieces. In some cases the studies are mini-masterpieces in themselves. At least I think so, and I…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian I wish blogs could somehow give readers an actual tactile sensation of how certain paintings by Salvador Dalí can make a person feel. I don’t know about you, but there’s something about certain Dalí’s that stir my sense of awe, wonderment, and passion more than others. It’s…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian My friend, Dr. Ellliott King – a widely respected Salvador Dalí expert – has just returned from a very special trip to Japan, and now he finally got to check off a major bucket list item: seeing in the flesh the remarkable Dalí masterwork, The Battle of Tetuan….
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian Sunny-side up! Fried eggs. They were a fetishistic obsession for Salvador Dalí. They seemed to turn up everywhere. And like so many things in this genius’s life, there were multiple meanings and interpretations associated with these popular breakfast items throughout his surrealist feasts on canvas. One suggestion is…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian I sense there’s a tendency among Dalí aficionados to focus only on the artist’s works up to 1970, the year he painted his last truly great and inspired masterpiece, The Hallucinogenic Toreador of 1970 (Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida). Dalí’s post-1970 pictures – those works he still…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian Salvador Dalí will forever be remembered, first and foremost, for those soft, melting watches — his signature dish, served up like warm Camembert cheese. Dalí made the droopy clock famous when, at the ripe age of 27, he painted The Persistence of Memory. Little did…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian Was Dalí too focused on death? And if so, why? Intriguing questions. Of course, “too” is a relative term. How overboard Dalí may have gone in his preoccupation with death-related images is a matter of perspective. But there’s little debate that it most certainly sprang from some very…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian Where is it written that a professional Dalí blogger has to like everything Salvador Dalí created? Nowhere. So today I’m focusing on a peculiar work from 1929: The Sacred Heart of Christ, which features this outrageous statement by Dalí: Sometimes I spit on the portrait of…