Much has been written about the rocky relationship between Salvador Dali and his father. The senior Dali disowned his son – and the feeling was mutual – when Salvador brought Gala into the picture. It also didn’t help that the young artist’s irreverent personal and artistic tendencies further drove a wedge between him and his strident notary father (happily, there was an eventual reconciliation).
Nevertheless, Dali painted a number of portraits of his father. They depicted an imposing figure, inseparable from his smoking pipe and, in Dali’s view, from a harsh reputation that preceded him.
Photo of Dali’s parents.
By contrast – though he adored his mother, who greatly doted on her future artist son – there are only two significant portraits of her of which I’m aware. Of course, fate intervened when Dali was just 17, taking away his beloved 47-year-old mother on February 6, 1921, after she was struck with uterine cancer. There wasn’t much of a window of opportunity for Dali to paint her.
Biographer Ian Gibson wrote, “Dali himself recalled that every morning, when he woke up, his mother would look lovingly into his eyes and recite the traditional formula: “Cor que vols? Cor que destiges” (‘Sweetheart, what do you want? Sweetheart, what do you desire?’).”
Importantly, Dali wrote in his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, that the death of his mother was the greatest blow in his young life: “With my teeth clenched with weeping, I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death and destiny with the swords of light that someday would savagely gleam around my glorious name!” (A great example, here, of Dali’s extraordinary artistry with words as well as with a paint brush.)
Gibson noted, “Dali’s ten-page diary entry for October 1921 confirms that, once he assimilated the shock of his mother’s death, he did indeed get to work with renewed vigor on the construction of his public image and of his fame.”
The two portraits here of the artist’s mother are solemn depictions of her. No background distractions, no sense of joy. Just honest likenesses of an enormously important woman in young Dali’s life, whose untimely death motivated him to fulfill a promise he made to her that he would become a world-famous artist. A promise he made good on.
Both Dali and his mother are surely proud to this day.
(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)
Dali jokingly proclaimed, “There’s never a dully moment with Dali!” The man had a great sense of humor, even if that particular one-liner could have benefited from some support from his iconic crutches.
There’s also never a moment when Dali isn’t in the news. Or so it seems. People often ask me, “How are you able to write regularly about an artist who’s been dead for nearly 30 years now?” The answer is simple: Dali is more popular than ever before!
He’s certainly more collectible than ever. His prices at auction have steadily risen over the years since his passing on January 23, 1989 at age 84. His prints are in high demand.
Exhibitions of his work continue to be held all across the globe, invariably shattering attendance records. And while some of them are retrospectives that take a broad measure of Dali’s enormous contributions to the history of art, others home in on quite specific aspects of the man’s life and work, permitting a careful examination of fascinating details.
One such exhibition is on now at the Freud Museum in London: Freud, Dali and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus (October 3, 2018 – February 24, 2019). Curated by Dawn Ades, it explores the connection between Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; and Salvador Dali, the kingpin of Surrealism. As the museum’s website notes, these men were two of the most influential figures of the 20th century. And this year marks the 80th anniversary of their famed meeting on July 19, 1938 in London.
Dali brought with him his truly incredible oil on canvas, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, which is of course the core image on which the Freud Museum special exhibition is based. The painting’s on loan from London’s Tate Museum. And visiting Freud inspired Dali to execute several interesting sketches of him — whose cranium Dali likened to that of a snail’s shell! Freud declared that Dali was a “complete example of a Spaniard — what a fanatic!” But added that he, Freud, was now reevaluating his view of the Surrrealists after meeting and appreciating his special mustachioed guest, and greatly admiring the double-image painting about narcissism he brought along with him.
I was fortunate to have seen this remarkable work some years back at, as I recall, the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, to which it was on loan. It is quite simply one of the greatest paintings – ever!
And one of the most important pieces of writing ever was Freud’s seminal book, Interpretation of Dreams, which Dali read voraciously and which went a long way in propelling Dali’s surrealistic symbolism.
Not only did Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus painting inspire the present exhibition at the Freud, but it gave rise to the eponymous book, seen here, which featured a poem written by Dali.
SPEAKING OF BOOKS . . .
You could take so many individual Dali paintings alone – such as Metamorphosis of Narcissus and certainly The Persistence of Memory – and be confident it would have ensured him a place in art history. But even if Dali had never picked up a paint brush, his prodigious writing would have etched his name in the halls of history’s geniuses.
It suddenly occurs to me just how prolific a writer Dali was. In addition to his many essays and articles and even manifestos, consider this astounding list (still only partial) of books he penned:
Babaouo
The Conquest of the Irrational
The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus
Hidden Faces (novel)
Metamorphosis of Narcissus
The Secret Life of Salvador Dali
Dali on Modern Art
Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship
Dali’s Mustache
Manifest Mystique
Open Letter to Salvador Dali
Diary of a Genius
Dali by Dali
The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali
Les Diners de Gala
Le Wines of Gala
If that’s not genius, my friends, I don’t know what is.
(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)
The issue of nudity in art recently hit home with me in connection with my own amateur art career, but I won’t bore my readers here with details. It raises an important issue, though: that of the naked human form in art. How much, if any, is too much? What is in “good taste” and what is not? And how did it factor into Salvador Dali’s art?
It amazes me that, even in our ostensibly less-puritanical, more enlightened era, many people – often, though not always, women – still find the naked male and female body offensive when captured by an artist’s brush or sculptor’s chisel.
I’m not going to pontificate on the matter, however. Beauty – and disgust – are in the eye of the beholder, the height of subjectivity. The same would have to be said for what is acceptable and what goes too far. I also speak from an American perspective; it appears the European lens through which the matter is viewed seems a bit less judgmental or – dare I say it – prudish. At least that’s the impression I get.
For instance, while some were (and are) repulsed by Gustave Courbet’s controversial painting, The Origin of the World, seen below, others recognize it as art, pure and simple. Nothing more, nothing less.
Courbet’s Origin of the World oil on canvas
That said, Salvador Dali’s art ran the gamut – from traditional standards of good taste (however that is defined) to what some would term marginal, and to what others would call pornographic, if not conscience-shocking.
It seems clear that Salvador Dali always did what he felt he needed or wanted to, and damn the torpedoes. It wasn’t necessarily only with the issue of nudity. Scatological references weren’t off limits, either, as witnessed in works like The Hand – Remorse and The Lugubrious Game, in which, like it or not, viewers are not spared the formidable presence of feces.
Unabashed depictions of male and female genitalia appear in a wide range of Dali’s works. And simple yet total nudity showed up even in very early works, such as The Picnic of 1921 and Nude in a Landscape of 1922-1923, when Salvador was a teenager.
Of all art genres, perhaps Surrealism was the most conducive to embracing nudity – and certain forms of perversion. Certainly many Dali works – paintings, prints and others – delved into masturbation, cunnilingus, fellatio, incest, and sadomasochism.
Now, in terms of the nude as subject matter in Salvador Dali’s works, examples abound. I’m going to look at just a small sampling from a large reservoir of Dalinian immodesty . . .
Many of Dali’s nudes would fall into what most would likely call “traditionally artistic,” if I can coin a phrase here. I would include, for example, Gala’s Back, which is a beautiful work painted along classic lines. Even Galarina – where Gala’s left breast is uninhibitedly revealed – invites a classic and, I think, more respectful appreciation.
But then there’s nudity in Dali’s art – full-body or partial – that for some begins to cross the line of decency. These might include William Tell (the voyeuristic treatment of the exhibitionistic penis is undeniable, not to mention a suggestion of castration, thanks to the scissors); Two Adolescents; and Female Seated Nude.
And Dali’s creative world was well-stocked with many additional references to nudity, erotic and otherwise . . .
(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only).
It’s curious how dots sometimes get connected in the world of Salvador Dali. Often when you least expect them to. Often in most arcane and peculiar ways.
Alicja said she was very excited to visit “the place where one of my idols is…Officially there was no guide for our group,” Alicja shared, “but in fact I was a guide…I saw many of Dali’s works I hadn’t seen before, so I expanded my knowledge very much.”
She tells me among her favorites was the alteration Dali did of an anonymous Flemish still life – a work few Dali aficionados know about or seldom consider.
It’s really quite an extraordinary work, measuring about 6 feet x 10 feet, and titled When It Falls, It Falls – the literal quotation, according to the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, of a tautological aphorism. “Dali seems to be illustrating the very process of the decomposition of matter,” the Foundation writes, “not without a tragic sense of humor: the soft (and edible) matter that transforms the figure of the pictures and converts the culinary elements of the picture into a lucid and foreboding nightmare of the physical disasters of death.”
It reminds us that Salvador Dali did a number of truly remarkable works in which he used someone else’s finished picture as his own starting point – then worked his transformative magic. Among other examples are his magnificent The Sheep…
And The Ship…
His Portrait of Mae West, Which Can be Used as an Apartment (gouache with graphite on a commercially printed magazine page)…
The cover of an old Antiques magazine…
And his popular suite of limited-edition prints called Changes in Great Masterpieces…
AND NOW TO A
‘WORLD EXCLUSIVE’!
But back to those dots. And how they got connected in a manner some may find quite provocative – because it just might be another clue to the ultimate inspiration that led to Salvador Dali’s most iconic, most famous painting subject of his career: those irrepressible soft watches.
While looking up references pertaining to Flemish still life’s Dali may have studied (in addition to the large, altered painting discussed above), look what I came across: another Flemish painting, whose title I do not know, but whose central images of salmon steaks absolutely look like soft Dali clocks!
Did the salmon steaks in this old Flemish still life inspire Dali’s “soft watches”?
Indeed, the top salmon steak actually looks like it has on it the hour and minute hands of a clock, as well as that overall limpid look that made Dali and watches an inseparable pair. The bottom one similarly resembles a Dalinian watch.
Could this early Flemish painting be one Dali saw, admired, studied, and appropriated in his 1931 The Persistence of Memory in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City? Granted, it might be a wild and random association, completely and utterly arbitrary and coincidental.
Or it might just be another heretofore undiscovered link in the endless chain of mystery that so defined the life and work of Salvador Dali.
(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)
Dali the influencer. That’s the Dali I want to talk about today. The man not only influenced virtually every aspect of contemporary art and popular culture during his prolific career, but continues to do so long after his passing nearly 30 years ago.
We see the influence of Dali’s uniquely “Daliesque” style of Surrealism everywhere: in print and electronic advertising. ..
In fashion and popular music…
Going Gaga over Dali!
In theater…
In gift wear (think melty clocks and runny wrist watches)…
In the hugely popular and growing interest in body art; i.e., tattooing – frequently showcased on the Salvador Dali Page on Facebook…
Even in celebrities such as Dustin Hoffman affecting a dramatic Dali stare…
We see all manner of artists — serious and commercial — channeling Dali’s unmistakable double-imagery magic in their work . . .
And there’s his influence on present-day artists. Both in terms of these artists’ painting style, and with respect to the subject matter of many artists, who’ve chosen to portray the mustachioed Catalan painter and genius in myriad ways.
Bethel, Connecticut artist Louis Markoya, who was a Dali collaborator and protégé, has made it his life’s mission to carry on the Surrealism and Nuclear-Mysticism of his celebrated mentor. Markoya recently completed a series of 12 portraits of influencers in his life, of course including Dali. The ultra-fluidity of the series – which includes Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan and other luminaries – suggests the fluid intra-atomic world, but inevitably also extends the sinewy, fluid look of so many of Salvador Dali’s oils, prints, drawings and even sculptures.
Louis Markoya interprets Salvador Dali
St. Petersburg, Florida painter Steven Kenny adopts a neo-surrealist style in his meticulous pictures, including this outstanding tribute to Mr. Dali…
Steven Kenny’s portrait of Dali
And Doug Auld of Hoboken, New Jersey, created a series that captured the likeness of famous people in tableaus comprised of butterflies, fish, bees, birds and other elements. His portrait of Salvador Dali – composed of leaves and insects – is nothing short of amazing…
Doug Auld’s hidden Dali
Perhaps the main take-away of what I’m imparting today is that, unlike most other artists, Dali’s influence is still so very much alive, so vibrant, so relevant. New books on the artist; novelty items, such as a just-released “action figure” whose mustache can be formed to the owner’s tastes; even Dali socks …
…and frequent exhibitions around the globe, examining all aspects of his boundless creativity, serve to demonstrate that, as some scholars are indeed now contending, Salvador Dali just might be the greatest artist of all time. Certainly the most popular in his own time.
Yes, such a grandiose statement may still be a little difficult to carve in stone. But it’s getting less and less difficult every day.
(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)
Salvador Dali could be a man of opposites. He would, at times, say one thing, yet mean something diametrically opposed to what he’d stated. He could, for instance, claim to not like children (he called them “embryons”), yet could be seen with his arm around his godchild. He could say he drank only mineral water, yet some photos show him and Gala at a café with a bottle of beer in front of him.
Dali could insist that he detested all animals except ant eaters and rhinoceroses, yet be photographed cozying up to man’s best friend. Or monkeying around with a chimpanzee. And, of course, he often had his pet ocelot on a short leash.
He could categorically reject abstract art, yet create a masterwork subtitled Homage to Rothko.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that one of Dali’s final paintings has a title that seems utterly inconsistent with the work’s extraordinarily ghastly image. I’m talking about Salvador Dali’s 1980 oil on panel, The Cheerful Horse.
Cheerful?
If this horse is cheerful, I’d hate to see what a downtrodden horse of Dali’s would look like!
I truly thought the title of this work, which Dali unveiled during a press conference very late in his life — one of his rarest appearances since the world had known he was seriously ill – was The Rotting (or Rotten) Donkey. Incorrect.
Indeed, Dali did in fact paint a work with such a title – back in 1928. And around the same period he painted The Spectral Cow, which reminds me of the 1980 oil.
Rotting Donkey, left, and Spectral Cow
Moreover, the rotting donkey motif, if you will, also appeared in film – in the early cinema classic, Un Chien Andalou, on which Dali collaborated with French filmmaker Luis Bunuel.
The Cheerful Horse – looking, of course, anything but idyllic – is really quite extraordinary. One has to presume Dali couldn’t escape his demons during the twilight of his life and career. His thoughts became increasingly preoccupied with death and decay. With calamity. With catastrophe. This is evidenced in a host of paintings he created in the early 1980s, featuring beds and nightstands and stringed instruments swirling about in a maelstrom of angst.
The Cheerful Horse exudes tremendous energy. It’s fecund with emotion. The color palette is somber where you’d expect it to be, then brighter, sunnier, and more cheerful elsewhere – justifying, albeit marginally, the work’s title.
The overall handling of paint reminds me of his work of two years earlier: Allegory of Spring.
Allegory of Spring
Seeing the photo of Dali and Gala at that press conference in Figueras, Spain, with this large painting behind them, saddens me. I remember when this event made international headlines. And I felt hopeful that the great man seemed tenacious and indomitable. On the other hand, you couldn’t escape the fact that he looked old, weak and drawn, while Gala looked every bit 10 years his senior.
And yet through it all, Dali brought the world a “cheerful” horse – a description quite the opposite of what appeared on his canvas. Dali had painted again!
The horse had long symbolized energy, strength and power as it appeared in countless paintings, drawings, prints, watercolors, and sculpture by our dear friend, the divine Salvador Dali, Marquis de Pubol. In the aged and ailing Dali mind, his curious horse painting was a cheerful one, even if it doesn’t look that way.
And the fact that Dali wasn’t quite ready to hang up his paint brushes gave us reason to cheer.
(Images used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)
Salvador Dali had a lifelong love and respect for the Old Masters. He acknowledged their influence in very specific ways, at times, in certain of his works. And he emulated their technique and affinity for craftsmanship in his sharp, careful painting style.
References to great masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Velazquez, Vermeer, and Michelangelo – among others – can be found throughout Dali’s prodigious career.
One of the earliest is seen in his 1930 oil on canvas, Imperial Monument to the Child-Woman. Direct your gaze to just below the center of the canvas and you’ll find a rendition of Leonardo’s iconic masterpiece, The Mona Lisa.
Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in Dali’s surrealist canvas.
And as I’d pointed out in a recent blog post, Dali quoted the pointing angel from Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks in his 1952 painting, Anti-Protonic Assumption. Both of these Dali’s were relatively early works when we take the long measure of the artist’s astonishingly productive catalog.
But the very last works by Salvador Dali punctuated a period that was by no means devoid of his appreciation of these masterful precursors. One work in particular is truly surprising, because it combines a nod to one of the most famous works of art of all time – the statue of David by Michelangelo – with Dali’s penchant for hidden/double imagery.
I’m talking about Landscape with Hidden Image of Michelangelo’s David, completed in 1982. Dali literally turned our vantage point on its head, cleverly camouflaging a full-length image of David within the rocky landscape – readily discerned with a 180-degree turn of the picture.
I cannot think of any other Dali work – be it a painting, drawing, print, etc. – where this “upside down” device was employed.
Increasingly, as more focused attention is given to Salvador Dali’s serious work at the easel, we’re seeing the strong connection between him and the great old masters.
Indeed, two distinguished art historians and authors – Dr. Christopher Heath Brown and Jean-Pierre Isbouts – are putting the finishing touches on a substantial book that delves into this very subject – the connection between the art of the Old Masters and the art of the 20th century master, Salvador Dali.
When it comes to examining the extraordinary, complex, and often confounding life and work of Salvador Dali, you never quite know how – or if – you’ll connect the dots. But sometimes the solution comes when you least expect it.
Such was the case recently. In the most oddly-timed, esoteric, yet fascinating of ways.
It involves the interesting painting, Melancholy, Atomic, Uranic Idyll. This strange and haunting composition is a dramatic statement by Dali on the horrors of war, with World War II obviously on the artist’s mind as he executed this 1945 canvas.
Stay with me. Because I’m about to connect the dots in what I think is an intriguing way. One that is not my interpretation, but Dali’s own explanation. Delivered in the most unlikely of contexts.
In Melancholy, Atomic, Uranic Idyll, virtually the entire scene is a dark, foreboding sort of underground space – a suggestion created by the appearance of a hint of daylight in the upper right, where bomb-dropping spider-legged elephants are on the march, together with an angel-like figure before them.
Elsewhere, human facial features are poignantly supplanted by a bomber airplane unleashing its deadly load, while at lower left an anguished-looking man is seen, out of whose neck an orb descends – and that is where we begin to connect some dots.
Because, in Salvador Dali’s remarkable mind – while he was in exile in the United States during the war – he associated baseballs (orbs) from America’s favorite pastime with bombs dropping from the sky!
BUT THIS IS STILL NOT THE KEY TO THE MYSTERY. READ ON . . .
We see them from the aforementioned man’s neck; raining down from the upper portion of the canvas; from the right cheek of the face formed by the bomber; from the pachyderms mentioned earlier; from the baseball bat-like shape running vertically along the right side of the painting; from a crutch and vase – even out of the face of the baseball player swinging his bat.
Why baseball? Was it merely that the balls make a conveniently plausible metaphor for bombs?
For years, I presumed it was simply Dali melding two starkly contrasting realities: the horrors of the raging war, and the persistence of America’s favorite sport (speaking of “Persistence,” notice the long soft watch on the side of the bomber face). He was, after all, now residing in New York City, and wouldn’t return to Spain for another half-decade. One could not help but be exposed to baseball, if only on television.
But my conjecture was replaced by fact – straight from Dali’s mouth – when I finally got to see him recently on a clip of the old Dick Cavett show. As fate would have it, baseball legend Satchell Paige was also one of Cavett’s guests that evening. So, when Cavett was growing increasingly confounded by Dali’s hard-to-follow loquaciousness, he digressed by asking the artist if he liked baseball.
Dali said he did not, explaining that he was familiar with the game only through photos – not actually viewing the sport in action – and that everybody was always “on the ground, in the dust – looking melancholy.” Dali even emphasized his point by leaning over toward the floor, in a kind of gesture of depression, to further illustrate what he meant.
And that was my “Aha!” moment. There’s where the “Melancholy” in the painting’s title comes in. And that’s why Dali appropriated the sport of baseball here – to symbolize a sense of melancholy. And the balls-turned-bombs made perfect sense. It was, in a way, genius!
Or at least genius, Dali-style. And, if you look at the painting carefully, you’ll even see a couple of players sliding in the dirt and the dust.
I recently expressed great joy in finally seeing Salvador Dali’s appearance on the old Dick Cavett Show, after literally decades of not-so-patient waiting. Dali was such a colorful, unpredictable, amusing and, yes, seemingly crazy character, that watching him talk and explain his ideas and thoughts in a forum like a TV talk show is a truly special experience.
Dick Cavett did a decent job of handling the wildly unpredictable actions and responses of his surrealist guest, even if at times Cavett’s conduct was a bit on the juvenile side. On balance, I think he followed Dali’s inscrutable mash-up of English and Catalonian fairly well. He had at least a reasonable grasp of some of Dali’s ideas and concepts. And he did a respectable job of showing and guiding Dali’s own descriptions of a series of new prints Dali had on view at the time – Memories of Surrealism – at a New York gallery.
Three of the graphics in Dali’s Memories of Surrealism print suite
But there are two other clips of Dali on American television that this Dali historian/blogger is still sleuthing through sources and resources to find. One I’ve seen once before, flashed quickly in some archival newsreel, while the other I’ve seen only pictures of.
The first is news footage of a press conference Dali held, presumably somewhere in New York City. Seated in the front row was Harry Reasoner, at the time probably the best-known TV journalist in America, if not the world.
At one point, Dali was signing his name – or perhaps creating some other spontaneous image – on a blackboard, using a can of shaving cream instead of a paintbrush! He held a razor in his other hand.
In a flurry of frenetic activity, the shaving cream spattered wildly about – and a sizeable clump landed on the expensive double-breasted suit of Mr. Reasoner! The newsman sat motionless, either trying to be cool, or perhaps paralyzed by what had just happened!
I saw this clip only once, so many years ago I can’t begin to guess when or where. But I must see it again, if it would only somehow show up on Youtube or in another forum.
The last missing link in the spectrum of TV appearances of Salvador Dali occurred on January 29, 1961. That’s when Salvador Dali shot onto the stage at the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York. The “shot” was literal.
Dali’s performance art involved him pointing a pistol, loaded with paint-filled capsules, at a large canvas and shooting it to create a rather remarkable image of the Crucifixion. He called this technique “bulletism.”
Bulletism of the rifle variety.
The affable Cavett was one thing. But how on earth did Sullivan – a kind of stoic, stone-faced host – react to Dali’s appearance on his show? How did Sullivan introduce his guest to begin with? What did he say Dali was going to do? And what did the two say after Dali shot his way into further fame?
Fellow Dali nuts who know me well know that, for countless years, I lamented and expressed serious frustration over the fact that I was aware Salvador Dali had appeared on the old Dick Cavett Show, but had never seen a clip of it. And honestly thought I never would.
What’s more, when I was told Dali came on Cavett’s set holding an ant eater and that he tossed it onto the lap of actress Lillian Gish, my level of intrigue – and frustration – grew ever more intense. “I must see this appearance of Dali, if it’s the last thing I do!” I’d insist.
But how? When? Will I ever? Am I hopelessly obsessed?
Many, many years of frustration passed. I could only try to picture in my mind’s eye such eccentric acts of the man whose flamboyant personality and kooky antics were as colorful as the palette with which he painted.
Then, not more than a few months ago, someone pointed out to me (I think it might have been my friend, Elliott King, himself a well-known Dali specialist), that there was a clip of the Dali Cavett Show appearance — finally — on youtube. I was elated and quickly went there and played the video. It was truly wonderful to see. Such as it was. But it was only a brief snippet of what was clearly a much lengthier interview. Still, my long-anticipated wish was finally fulfilled, albeit not entirely.
But now, which I ecstatically learned only a day or two ago, the entire interviewis online! The Holy Grail! I literally waited decades to find it. And it didn’t disappoint. Here it is, my friends . . .
But why? Why, for some of us, is seeing Dali in such contexts so important?
I have a theory that most probably won’t share it. Here goes: some of us want to observe the famously eccentric artist “in action” to determine for ourselves if he was genuinely a bit crazy, or if it was simply a put-on to get noticed and make headlines. Below, check out Dali on the Ed Sullivan Show, on BBC Radio, and on I’ve Got A Secret . . .
I mean, there have been productive and successful people who were, at the same time, certifiably a little nuts. Was Dali one of them?
You’d have to watch more than just the Cavett clip to answer that. But, especially for those not particularly familiar with Dali, it wouldn’t be hard to find Dali’s appearance on the show not only way out there, but potentially indicative of a man with — let’s be blunt — a major screw loose!
He rambles on about rhinoceroses…the way he always pronounces “butterfly” “booterflyeeeeeee”…how Madame Dali chooses his clothing but the rest of him is his domain, including his famous mustache, which is “the constant tragic element of my face”…and how that celebrated facial hair becomes melancholic and depressing at night…how he never jokes…and how he doesn’t like children or animals (cats and dogs are vulgar, he declared), but two exceptions are the rhinoceros and the ant eater, which he keeps referring to not as an ant eater, but as an “eat-ant.”
Cavett asks him if he likes baseball, and Dali says he only looks at photographs of the sport and that, for him, it is all about people “down on the floor, catching dust, creating one tremendous melancholic effect, because everybody’s in this position,” as Dali leaned over, “in the floor, in the dust.”
When Lillian Gish carefully composes a perfectly sensible and interesting question to Dali – “Have you, from the beginning of your work, your great craftsmanship in painting, a message to give the people that we perhaps don’t understand?”, Dali dead-pans a coldly blunt, “No message,” shaking his head. The audience laughs and claps. “Could you invent one?” Cavett interjects, to sort of soften the dissing of Miss Gish’s gently posed query.
Dali, though, claims he is against any kind of message. And when the host comments that Dali’s paintings have a dream-like quality to them, Dali corrects him, noting, “It’s never a dream, it’s hypnogogical images. It’s 10 or 15 minutes before you fall sleeping. Vivid, irrational images, and catch images and paint with a more careful photographic style.”
Enjoy the clip!
* * * * * *
And speaking of video clips, this one’s a hoot – and demonstrates quite the opposite of the “craziness” observed in the Dick Cavett Show appearance. Indeed, it reveals a down-to-earth charm and wit – not to mention a bit of fancy foot work – as Salvador joyfully treats us to his interpretation the Charleston. It’s nothing less than delightful! Perhaps the most playful footage ever of the controversial and eccentric Master.
Was Dali a little crazy? Um, yes — like a fox! In fact, a psychiatrist once observed that Dali had one of the “most ordered” minds of anyone he’d ever examined.
But did Dali act the part of a crazy man, in part because he was admittedly eccentric but even more so because he knew it would cleverly and irrepressibly help market his art and heighten his fame? Claro que si! (Look it up if you don’t know Spanish).
One thing’s for sure: Dali was fun to watch on shows like Dick Cavett’s. He had a great sense of humor and a profound love of Charlie Chaplin. And, I think, it showed.
(All images/videos used under Fair Use provisions for journalistic purposes only)
