Dali Dabbled in Sports — in a Manner of Speaking, Anyway!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

In the shadow of America’s hysterically popular Super Bowl 52, let’s take a look at Dali the athlete. Come again? OK, the man was many things; a sports figure he was not.

But Salvador Dali’s life and work did include some sports references – yes, even to football. And Dali himself enjoyed at least some athleticism: he loved to swim; he had a strange penchant in his younger days for jumping from precariously high perches; and he even made jumping rope a famous photo op!

From its earliest manifestations, Dali’s art referenced sports, here and there. Examples when Dali was just a teenager included “Boxer” (1920) and “Portrait of Jaume Miravitlles as a Footballer” (1922), the latter a reference to what Americans call soccer.

Dali’s only depiction of American football players, at least to this columnist’s knowledge, was “Poetry of America,” in which several players are seen in uniforms that look old-fashioned by today’s standards, of course, but were on-trend (with some artist license) when Dali painted them in 1943.

“Poetry of America”

Actually, Dali nodded a second time to football – America style – in his 1979 “Sports” print suite, which includes a football player and a golfer. Oh, and Dali donned a football helmet in the mid-‘60s as a kind of performance art stunt to draw attention to his interest at the time in creating drawings inspired by typographical spirals or rivers of white space surrounding printed newspaper text. Dali said that, as a child, he would often gaze at these negative spaces and discern soccer games breaking out.

Meanwhile, it seems America’s pastime – baseball – commanded a bit more of Dali’s attention. Baseball players are seen in his statement on war, “Melancholy, Atomic, Uranic Idyll” (1945), with baseballs falling metaphorically like bombs.

A baseball game ensues on a black & white TV telecast direct from the left flank of a rhinoceros sporting skyscraper-tall stork legs in Dali’s amusing “Celestial Ride” oil on canvas of 1957. Baseball figured into some of the wonderful artwork Dali executed for the Disney film short, “Destino,” and famed photographer and Dali collaborator Philippe Halsman took a popular photo of Dali with his mustache strategically poking through baseball players’ hands on the sports page of The New York Herald Tribune.

Salvador Dali even reached Olympian levels with his large “Cosmic Athlete” (1960), featuring a discus thrower exuding the aura of the early Greek games, as well as designs for a popular set of Olympic Games medallions in 1984.

Basketball dribbled its way into Dali’s oeuvre in his unique montage for a 3-D hologram in “Polyhedron, Basketball Players Metamorphosing into Angels” (1972).

Finally, the bullfight is Spain’s national pastime, a “sport” that this blogger personally detests, and so did Dali’s wife, Gala. Dali produced prints and other works depicting bullfighting, including the ultimate tribute to the activity in “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” of 1970. It is in the upper left of this immense and beautiful canvas that we find a forlorn-looking Gala, indicating her disdain for the grisly spectator event.

‘First Days of Spring’ a Snapshot of Dali’s 25-Year-Old Mind

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

I so want to get a jump on spring! Can you blame me; it’s late January, and I’m based in Buffalo, New York. So the title of Salvador Dali’s 1929 surrealist painting, “The First Days of Spring,” strikes a welcome chord with me and hopefully with readers of this blog, which is brought to you twice weekly by The Salvador Dali Society, Inc.

Of course, while spring represents nature’s renewal, with the appearance of daffodils and tulips and warmer, sunnier weather, we don’t exactly get that sun-shiny feel in Dali’s “First Day of Spring” canvas, which hangs in the Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida.

Instead, spring is probably a metaphor for an awakening of a different kind. And if you think I’m going to say sexual awakening, you’d be right.

At age 25, Salvador pulled no punches in laying out, in a vast expanse devoid of any landscaping, his fantasies, clearly of a sexual – and maybe a little perverse – nature. Such a quest – to present a kind of hand-painted snapshot of his fantasies and fetishes – was completely consistent with Surrealism as an art form: essentially the transcription of one’s dreams and subconscious world onto canvas.

Just as dreams often involve disparate elements in unnatural space and time, here in “The First Days of Spring,” we find all manner of seemingly unrelated objects and actions positioned about the scene.

Two of those objects are autobiographical: a black and white photo of Dali as a small child, glued to the middle of the canvas on the stairs; and, to the right of that collage, the famous head profile with closed eye derived from a specific rock formation at Cape Creus in Spain, giving birth to Dali’s “Great Masturbator” obsession. Stairs, according to Freud’s findings about dream meanings, represent intercourse. And the grasshopper affixed to the aforementioned profile conveys the literal fear young Dali had of the clinging insect.

Some have suggested that the seated man off alone at left, facing away from the viewer, is Dali’s estranged father, while the bearded man at far right may have less than pure intentions with the young girl who seems to be lured toward him.

Dali was heavily influenced, of course, by Sigmund Freud, and one of the Austrian psychoanalyst’s contentions was that fish were a phallic symbol, accounting for the fleshy red fish prominent in the painting’s foreground.

Then, to the left of the fish-penis are two blatant sexual references: a woman with breasts exposed, and whose head looks like a vagina, while her necktie looks similar to the folds of female genitalia. The man to her right has hands that form a vaginal orifice about to be penetrated by a finger, under which two silver balls appear.

Little question what was on Dali’s mind at this time! He intended to lay it out bare. His philosophy of “concrete irrationality” is authentically expressed in this important early surrealist masterpiece. Irrational elements of a largely sexual nature are concretely executed with the technical precision for which he was renowned.

The bigger picture is that “First Days of Spring” is a kind of snapshot (“hand-painted color photography,” as Dali defined his technique) of the fetishes, fantasies, perversions, neuroses, obsessions and preoccupations that informed the young mind of a man destined to be one of the most successful artists of all time.

And by the way, 31 days until spring!

Dali’s ‘Telephone’ Paintings Expressed his Fear of War

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

A European friend of mine who’s almost obsessive about posting photographs on Facebook that pertain to Cadaques, Spain, recently posted this photo of a plate of grilled sardines.

While anything served to me with a face turns my stomach, the fish in a dish immediately called to mind a Salvador Dali painting: “Telephone in a Dish with Three Grilled Sardines at the End of September” (1939, The Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida).

It reminded me that, while much of Dali’s work was inspired by his imaginary visions – usually the result of mining his lively dream world – a great deal of his work was also pinned to what he actually saw. Everyday stuff. Whether it be some grandiose architectural marvel by Gaudi, or something as trivial and common as a plate of sardines.

In “Telephone in a Dish with Three Grilled Sardines…,” Dali again turns our expectation of reality on its ear. The juxtaposition of grilled sardines with, in effect, a “grilled telephone,” is virtually the very pictorial definition of surrealism. The initial visual impact is – you’ll pardon the expression – one of shock and awe. We simply don’t expect to be served up such a strange and unlikely pairing of objects.

But, contrary to what some believe – that Dali’s works were largely random, inscrutable dream images that had no particular meaning – the fact is that Dali was making statements through most of his surrealist pictures.

He did a series of canvases around this time in which a telephone receiver appeared – a symbol of the attempted but ill-fated telephone conversations between Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain and Adolf Hitler.

I like the way author Robert S. Lubar put it: “Chamberlain’s phone calls to the German leader resulted in the ill-fated Munich Agreement of September 1938, which was annulled when Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war on September 1, 1939. The signs of decay and failed hopes are patently visible in the form of the sardines and the pathetic receiver, which has been ‘cut off’ from the body of the telephone box.”

Lubar happens to contend that the black “boulder” appearing in the background of “Telephone in a Dish…” – first seen in “Enchanted Beach with Three Fluid Graces” (also in the Florida Dali Museum) – reappears as a black silhouette in the “Telephone…” painting.

But to my eye, this black space seems more like a cave than a boulder.

No matter.

The real point is the overall mood the picture evokes. It’s unquestionably one of melancholy and dread – an expression of Salvador Dali’s preoccupation with the threat of world war.

The Vatican Boasts a ‘Trinity’ of Salvador Dali Paintings

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

I’m not sure very many people – even card-carrying Dali aficionados – are aware that the Vatican in Rome has a Salvador Dali painting in its permanent art collection. Actually, it owns a trinity of Dali’s, each with varying degrees of religious imagery.

While much of Dali’s life and work had nothing to do with religion, a good part of it did. In the late 1940s he had his first small version of “The Madonna of Port Lligat,” for example, blessed by Pope Pious XII. Three of his most famous paintings are religious in nature: “Christ of St. John of the Cross,” “The Sacrament of the Last Supper,” and “Corpus Hypercubus.”

The study for “Corpus Hypercubus” is one of the paintings in the Vatican Museum. Sometimes Dali’s preparatory studies were wonderfully finished works in their own right. This study is a good example of that.

A second Dali painting in the Vatican collection is “The Trinity,” also a study – in this case for the large “Ecumenical Council” of 1960, which hangs in the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Dali clearly expressed his Nuclear-Mystical sensibilities in this preparatory canvas. While the figure of God the Father is painted along classical lines, those of Jesus and the Holy Spirit are composed of quick dashes of paint that capture the anti-matter particles as imagined by modern physicists.

But I believe there’s another unique technique seen here. Notice in the background a linear series of circles on either side of God. Can you guess how Dali may have created this circular pattern? Here’s my conjecture:

It’s known conclusively that a similar appearance of this strip of circles, which appears in the extreme top right corner of “The Ecumenical Council” (not easily discerned in reproductions) was made by Dali pressing an octopus tentacle onto the canvas! It’s my belief that Dali did the same thing in his “Ecumenical Council” study in the Vatican.

If that seems a bit peculiar, so does the third Dali work in Vatican City – “Soft Monster in Angelic Landscape.” As I understand it, this work was gifted to the Vatican by King Juan Carlos I in 1980. Its religious connection is seen in several angelic figures.

But the “monster” figure lying over the rock in the foreground is a variant of the well-known “Great Masturbator” head seen in “The Persistence of Memory” and many other Dali paintings.

It’s not clear whether the Vatican is aware of this reference, but the appearance of angels helps justify the work’s Vatican home. And while the Vatican boasts three original Dali’s, I don’t believe there are any other important works by the Catalan surrealist in the Eternal City.

Box of Pencils Inspired Salvador Dali Masterpiece

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

What inspired Dali?

Answer: all kinds of things. Anything. EVERYTHING!

The man possessed limitless curiosity. He could get excitedly creative over things you or I wouldn’t have given even a fleeting thought to. Or over something monumental, to which he would lend a special twist, making it uniquely his own.

We know Dali was profoundly inspired by nature – specifically the landscape around his beautiful life-long home of Port Lligat on Spain’s Costa Brava. We know his Russian-born wife, Gala, held incalculable inspirational sway over him. And that, in the 1940s, the explosion of the atomic bomb over Japan moved Dali to see and create in a whole new way, giving birth to his atomic/Nuclear-Mystical period.

But sometimes inspiration came in small and inconspicuous packages. Like a box of Venus-brand drawing pencils. That was, in fact, what gave rise to the development of one of Salvador Dali’s greatest double-image paintings – the remarkable “Hallucinogenic Toreador” of 1970 (Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida).

It’s rather extraordinary to realize that a pencil box literally was the genesis of what might arguably be Dali’s single greatest painting. We can thank the artist’s paranoiac-critical method for it. This was his unique ability to interpret the things he saw through the mind of a true paranoiac, known to perceive double images, hidden images – things not really there (or were they?).

So a glance by Dali at the right moment, with the right mental and visual discipline, transformed the abdominal and chest region of a picture of the Venus de Milo on a box of Venus pencils into what looked like the angled nose and mouth of a man. A man who would become a matador (toreador) in one of Dali’s most colorful, complex and spectacular paintings.

Dali often reminded us that Leonardo advocated the powerful potential of mere random water stains on a wall to evoke ideas and images that could inspire great art. Now Dali, eyeing a box of pencils, would exploit the same idea to impressive ends.

While I’ve stated many times that my favorite Dali painting is “Santiago El Grande,” the truth is that – were I given the opportunity to choose any one Dali painting to include in my personal collection – I dare say “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” would win out. What “Santiago” lacks, “Toreador” has in abundance: a stunning, rich kaleidoscope of color, and a diverse array of elements that make it worthy of Luis Romero’s book, translated as “All Dali in One Painting.”

It may be the most thoroughly Spanish and thoroughly Dalinian masterpiece of them all. And it all began with a pencil box. Now that’s inspiring.

Dali Never Lost Sight of the Masters who Helped make Him Great!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

For the real Dali enthusiast, it’s always enlightening to discover new things about the artist, how he worked, what inspired him.

I think I’ve found an influence that is not commonly cited for comparison when it comes to Salvador Dali’s first Nuclear-Mystical masterwork – the large and richly nuanced “Madonna of Port Lligat” of 1950.

Scholars have typically and sensibly seen the influence in Dali’s painting by the 15^th century painter Piero della Francesca’s picture, “The Montefeltro Altarpiece.” Its dimensions are similar to Dali’s canvas, but of course the key element of comparison and influence is the scallop shell from which an egg hangs.

“The Montefeltro Altarpiece” by Piero della Francesca.

That image is a symbol of birth and purity, and a slight variation of it appears at the top of Dali’s work (which this blogger saw and was very impressed by at the “Dali: The Late Work” exhibition in 2010-2011 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. I just wish it hadn’t been under glass).

But there’s another work – painted about 20 years after the Piero della Francesca – that, in my view, bears some significant parallels to Dali’s, and thus probably influenced him as well. Dali had a voracious appetite for research. He was a highly intelligent man and explored countless resources in creating his complex, deeply meaningful paintings.

Take a look at “Madonna and Child…” (a shortened version of its full title) by Piero di Cosimo, a Florentine painter who painted this canvas in 1493. The key details here are those that make up the stepped throne on which the Madonna sits, holding the Christ child.

“Madonna and Child…” by Piero di Cosimo.

The two sides of the throne can be easily compared with the architectural backdrop in the Dali. And assorted items at the base of the Cosimo painting find something of an echo in the various elements in the bottom portion of Dali’s canvas, albeit in his 1950 work most everything floats in space – representing Dali’s newly found fascination with intra-atomic matter.

What is admirable about the way Dali approached art is that he never lost sight of the debt he owed to his precursors – great artists he admired and emulated. Chief among them were Velazquez, Raphael, and Vermeer. But surely others of the Renaissance, and other periods, also helped shape Dali’s vision.

And not only did Dali never lose sight of these artists’ contributions to art history, but he paid direct homage to them by including elements of their works in his – sometimes unabashedly quoting details quite exactly.

Just one example is how Dali portrayed the Madonna and Child in his 1959 masterpiece, “The Virgin of Guadalupe.” Look at Dali’s work alongside Raphael’s, from which, of course, Dali took unmistakable guidance. The only real change is the supplanting of the Virgin’s face in the Raphael with the face of Gala in the Dali.

Ingeniously, Dali managed to keep alive the great artists of the past, while creating something entirely new and not only unique for his time, but often well ahead of it.

Dali Celebrates Peace & Freedom: Let’s Hope for a Great 2018

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

It’s safe to say the one hope for fast-approaching 2018 that everyone would surely wish for is that peace and freedom may be as ubiquitous around our world as soft watches and tall crutches were around Dali’s surrealist world.

In homage to such a glorious goal, I invite you to take a look at a few Salvador Dali works that celebrate peace and freedom through the lens of Dali’s inimitable creative vision.

One is his “Peace Medal” of 1978, whose front image is that of two curvaceous women, each shaking hands with someone not shown except for his or her hand; and a third adult in the middle (it appears to be a male) holding a child. An angel figure is seen at right. The verso of the medal – issued in both silver and gold – reveals a double-image of a human face formed by a series of doves, bracketed by two olive branches – symbols of peace, a word seen written in a multitude of languages around the circumference.

Now turn your attention to Dali’s magnificent “Peace Medal” created in the 1950s as part of the artist’s world-famous Art-In-Jewels – originally the 35-piece collection of the Owen Cheatham Foundation and now displayed in a special room of the Teatro-Museo Dali in Figueres, Spain. Dali described this stunning work this way:

“Across a world of lapis lazuli, four pair of hands, in prayer, each sculptured differently, form a Cross, and, with rays of gold and diamonds, reach out to all points of the earth – and beyond, into space. The Cross is the Hope for Peace for all the world.”

In my view, the concept and execution here make this jeweled masterpiece one of the most sensitive and beautiful of any works ever created by Salvador Dali. Equally beautiful was how he described the ultimate value of this incomparable collection of jeweled art:

“My collection of jewels…will be, ineluctably, of historic significance. To history, they will prove that objects of pure beauty, without utility but executed marvelously, were appreciated in a time when the primary emphasis appeared to be upon the utilitarian and the material.

“Freed of materialism and serving a philanthropic purpose,” Dali continued, “the Dali jewels are a new Ambassador for America – to Russia, to Europe, to all the world; a symbol of the cosmogonic unity of our century.”

I saw the Dali Jewels years ago in a special loan to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond, and subsequently wrote a lengthy article with color reproductions that appeared in The Buffalo News. They completely upstaged the museum’s permanent Faberge eggs collection!

Finally, Lady Liberty got a Dalinian makeover when, in 1972, Dali took the iconic Statue of Liberty design of Frederic Bartholdi and gave it a lift – by showing both arms and torches raised in victory, titling the work “The Victory of Liberty.”

The original stands at the Vascoeuil Castle in rural France, while a bronze copy sits atop the tourist bureau in Cadaques, Spain –a gift to the town from Dali’s original secretary/manager, Captain John Peter Moore.

Dali’s ‘Nativity of a New World’ Remains Largely a Mystery

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

If I had to name a Salvador Dali painting very few people know about; one which almost nothing has been written about; and which, in my view, is one of the most colorful, nuanced and intriguing of Dali’s oils – it would be “Nativity of a New World.”

The privately owned 14-inch x 19-inch work is seldom seen on exhibition and is not commonly shown in most books on Dali. I’ve always been struck by the relative obscurity of the work, because it’s such a wonderful canvas. It did appear in December of 1942 as an illustration for an article Dali wrote for Esquire magazine.

What always strikes me first about the painting are the rich blue and green hues that characterize most of the color palette, contrasted with the two figures in red. They, along with others in the tableau – including one shrouded prayerful figure – have gathered before what I’m presuming is meant to be the birth of a child.

The infant appears below (or is he holding up?) an intra-uterine-like transparent sphere that perhaps is representative of – as the title suggests – a new world. We can’t help but recall here Dali’s 1943 Picture, “Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man,” in the Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida.

Assembled at a kind of ramshackle altar are a supplicant man in a floppy hat, holding a lamb; another posed in a kind of religious ecstasy; and a third whose praying hands are all we see of him. Music-making angels cavort at the tenuously constructed canopy above the globe, and owes whatever stability it has to the support of Dalinian crutches.

Joining that well-known and ubiquitous Dali prop is a small cluster of ants in the lower right, plus the iconic soft watch on the short flight of stone or marble stairs. Yet another popular surrealist device is seen in the hole cut in the trunk of one of the trees in the background, continuing the spiritual aura of the painting back into the landscape.

Since this intriguing work was painted in 1942, I think we can see it as perhaps Dali’s recognition that a new world would soon be unfolding, sometime after the ongoing world war would mercifully end.

This is not your typical nativity scene. But as this blog post appears on Christmas Eve, 2017, it seems fitting that the mystery of “Nativity of a New World” occupy the spotlight today.

Happy holidays – happy Dalidays – to all!

Dali’s study for “Nativity” seems to exude a more obviously religious aura.

Dali’s ‘Trinity’ Especially Meaningful this Time of Year

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Given the real reason for the season, let’s today look at Salvador Dali’s wonderful – and unusual – “The Trinity,” which was an oil study for “The Ecumenical Council,” both works created in 1960.

“The Trinity,” while a preparatory study for the much, much larger “Ecumenical Council,” in the permanent collection of the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, is itself of museum quality. Indeed, it can be found in the permanent art collection of Vatican City in Rome.

“The Ecumenical Council” hangs in Dali Museum in Florida.

There is, in my view, a paradox of sorts in the way Dali treated the three figures of the Trinity: God the Father in the top center, Jesus Christ at left, holding a cross; and the Holy Spirit at right. Normally any image of God would, in theory, be the least distinct of the Trinity figures, since no one really knows quite what the Creator looks like – and that is by design.

Yet, in Dali’s view of it all, God is clearly distinct in body, while his face is shielded, just as it is in the finished masterwork. Contrasting with the relatively tight rendering of God is the far looser, sketchier technique seen in the Christ and Holy Ghost images.

This approach nodded in two distinct directions: the nuclear age, with atomic particles whizzing through space; and the close-up brushwork technique seen in the details of some of the paintings of Spanish master Diego Velazquez, whom Dali considered his all-time favorite artist and greatest influence.

Interesting enough, all three figures in the study appear remarkably similar to those in the “Ecumenical Council.” Notable differences, however, would be that Dali rendered facial features of Christ and the Holy Spirit. And, while male genitalia is obvious in the study of God, that anatomical region is fully obscured in the final painting. A dove appears over the head of the Holy Spirit, but is absent in the study.

More so than in the final canvas, the figures’ robes in the study look very much like the rocky outcropping in the lower portion of the Dali Museum work.

Of course, the major difference between the study and the 118-inch x 100-inch painting is Dali’s wonderful self-portrait in the latter. When I was publicity director of the original Dali Museum in Beachwood, Ohio, near Cleveland, I remember a lecture about this painting, delivered by Eleanor R. Morse. She, along with her husband Reynolds, owned the collection and went on to become the benefactors of the collection now permanently housed in St. Pete, Florida.

Dali’s “3-D” self-portrait at bottom of “Ecumenical Council.”

Eleanor was talking about Dali’s then-current work with holograms, and opined that Dali had, in effect, already achieved the illusion of three-dimensionality in the way his right hand seems to project from the canvas in “The Ecumenical Council.”

The Master painting “Ecumenical Council.”

Dali Never Drove, But He Got Around in Style!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Very shortly, a larger-than-life character-hero traverses the globe in a rather unlikely vehicle – a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. Salvador Dali – our own brand of character-hero – never got a driver’s license. But he managed to get around in a variety of conveyances – including one of his own invention.

 That would be his Ovocipede, which he created and presented to the world, in Paris, France, in 1959. It was to be a new means of locomotion, and it seems it was inspired by Dali’s oft-discussed memories of the paradise-like nature of his vivid intra-uterine memories.

Egg-like, “intra-uterine,” and ready to roll!

The transparent sphere, fashioned of plastic, was occupant-propelled – no motors or engines, thank you very much. Instead, the operator would run along on the inside track like a caged hamster on a wheel. Explained one description: “Dali claimed it could be rolled over land, water, ice or snow. The operator stands and holds the two hand bars on the axis, or can sit on the seat to coast. Steering is managed by shifting the weight along the axis in the direction of the turn. The driver turns around to reverse.”

To my knowledge, this “vehicle” never rolled on beyond a one-off prototype. You can bet, however, that it served as a great photo-op for the master of performance art. And another example of his constantly propelled imagination and inimitable sense of creative innovation.

Since we’re talking vehicles, let’s look at some other means of travel Salvador Dali chose. As noted, he never drove himself. I think most would agree Dali was simply too disconnected with the practical side of life to be steady and trusted enough to operate heavy equipment! Geniuses often have difficulty with things most of us take for granted.

With winter here, let’s look at a photo of Dali being spirited around New York’s Central Park in a horse-drawn sleigh. He’s accompanied by Gala – and a firearm! Just why Dali was pointing a (toy?) gun at someone is unclear – a playful move that would be very politically incorrect in today’s social climate.

Armed but not dangerous!

The photo of Dali and Gala in a taxi here reminds me of what the artist once said about his fame. He noted that, for example, if artist Joan Miro were spotted in a taxi, no one would recognize him. But with Dali, people constantly exclaimed, “Look! Look! It’s Salvador Dali!” His mustache needed to take a bow, for sure.

Catalan in a cab.

While Dali never drove an automobile, he had no aversion to bicycling. And his pose on a motorcycle is a classic, as it was with his surreal idea: a grass-covered Volkswagen!

Fishing boats were an everyday fixture at Port Lligat, Spain, and we see Dali here, relaxed upon the bay. Bigger boats, to be sure, ferried Dali, Gala, Capt. Peter Moore – even Dali’s pet ocelot – to and from America on the SS France and SS America.

Dali was often paraded through the streets as the conquering hero, and sometimes these grand chariots took on elephantine characteristics!

Dali riding high!

Finally, in a flight of promotional fancy, a jetliner was painted with a Dali mustache and related information when the remarkable “Dali: The Late Work” exhibition soared to high-flying attendance results at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2010 – 2011. And late in life, Dali finally got over his fear of flying.

Coffee, tea — or Dali?