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…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian It’s Gala’s turn. At least that’s how most are viewing the newly opened Gala Salvador Dalí exhibition at the National Art Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona, which runs through the rest of the summer and into the fall until the 14th of October. After all, the show…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian Are there some paintings by Dalí – or prints, drawings, or sculptures for that matter – that just keep speaking to you? Calling your name? Inserting themselves in your mind’s eyes? And are you sometimes puzzled by just what it is about a particular Dalí work that…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian BREAKING NEWS (St. Petersburg, Florida)… What meteorologists are calling a freak hurricane, packing far more punch than would be expected this time of year, has destroyed virtually all of the permanent collection of priceless art in the Salvador Dalí Museum here, sources say. Major paintings by the…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian Salvador Dalí, one of history’s great writers. What? Writer? I thought Dalí was an artist? You know, the Spanish surrealist who was a press agent’s dream, with his penchant for publicity and ability to make headlines with every twitch of his mustache. All true. But Salvador…
By Paul Chimera Salvador Dalí Historian Can you name one of the most important keys to Salvador Dalí’s genius? Something the average Dalí aficionado probably doesn’t know about? Something intangible yet widely considered among scholars to be of enormous consequence in the ability of Salvador Dalí to create so many extraordinary paintings, prints, drawings…