Salvador Dali: cult of personality or sheer provocation? Biography of Salvador Dali, interesting facts and quotes from Dali's friends Temporary exhibitions of Salvador Dali.
Undoubtedly, the name of Salvador Dali is known all over the world. And this is primarily the merit of himself: Dali was an artist, sculptor, writer, director. He had his own peculiar view of the world and was a prominent representative of surrealism.
Surrealism is a direction in art, the birthplace is France, a distinctive feature of which is a combination of paradoxical forms and illusions. It also has such a concept: the combination of dream and reality. This direction has many followers, among whom was Salvador Dali.
His muse, and part-time wife Gala, left a big imprint on his work. It was she who was often depicted by the artist on his canvases. Also, many people remember the sculptures of the great Spaniard.
Among them is just a telephone receiver with a lobster located on it. The lobster itself is made of plaster, but the phone is real. Dali in this sculpture wanted to show protest to the whole world against the development of technology. He believed that technological communications alienate people from each other.
The exposition itself was first presented in 1936 at the London Exhibition of Surrealist Art. In total, the sculpture was made in five versions and can now be viewed in various museums around the world: in Australia, in Liverpool, and so on.
On May 11, 1904, a son was born in the family of a wealthy Catalan notary Salvador Dali i Cusi. By that time, the couple had already experienced the loss of their beloved first-born Salvador, who died at the age of two from brain inflammation, so it was decided to give the second child the same name. It means "Savior" in Spanish.
The mother of the baby, Felipe Domenech, immediately began to patronize and pamper her son, while the father remained strict with his offspring. The boy grew up as a capricious and very wayward child. Having learned the truth about his older brother at the age of 5, he began to be burdened by this fact, which further affected his fragile psyche.
In 1908, a daughter, Ana Maria Dali, appeared in the Dali family, who later became a close friend of her brother. The boy from early childhood became interested in drawing, and he did it well. In the back room, Salvador built a workshop, where he retired for hours for creativity.
Creation
Despite the fact that at school he behaved defiantly and studied poorly, his father gave him painting lessons to local artist Ramon Pichot. In 1918, the first exhibition of the young man's works took place in his native Figueres. It featured landscapes inspired by Dali's picturesque surroundings of the city. Until recent years, El Salvador will remain a great patriot of Catalonia.
Already in the first works of the young artist it is clear that he masters the techniques of painting by the Impressionists, Cubists and Pointillists with particular diligence. Under the guidance of art professor Nuñens Dali creates the paintings "Aunt Anna Sewing in Cadaqués", "Twilight Old Man" and others. At this time, the young artist is fond of the European avant-garde, he reads the works,. Salvador writes and illustrates short stories for a local magazine. In Figueres he acquires a certain notoriety.
When a young man turns 17, his family experiences a great loss: his mother dies of breast cancer at the age of 47. Dali's father will not remove the mourning for his wife until the end of his life, and the character of Salvador himself will become completely unbearable. As soon as he entered the Madrid Academy of Arts in the same year, he immediately began to behave defiantly towards teachers and students. The antics of the arrogant dandy caused outrage among the professors of the Academy, and Dali was expelled from the educational institution twice. However, staying in the capital of Spain allowed the young Dali to make the necessary acquaintances.
Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Buñuel became his friends, they significantly influenced the artistic growth of El Salvador. But not only creativity connected young people. It is known that Garcia Lorca was not shy about his unconventional orientation, and contemporaries even claimed his connections with Dali. But Salvador never became a homosexual, despite his odd sexual behavior.
Scandalous behavior and the lack of academic art education did not prevent Salvador Dali from gaining world fame a few years later. His works of this period were: "Port-Alger", "Young woman seen from the back", "Female figure at the window", "Self-portrait", "Portrait of a father". And the work "Basket of Bread" even gets to the international exhibition in the USA. The main model, who constantly posed for the artist to create female images at this time, was his sister Ana Maria.
The best paintings
The first famous work of the artist is considered to be the painting “The Persistence of Memory”, which depicts a liquid clock flowing from a table against the backdrop of a sandy beach. Now the painting is in the USA at the Museum of Modern Art and is considered the most famous work of the master. With the assistance of her beloved Gala, Dali's expositions begin to take place in various cities of Spain, as well as in London and New York.
The genius is noticed by the philanthropist Viscount Charles de Noel, who buys his paintings at a high price. With this money, the lovers buy themselves a decent house near the town of Port Lligata, which is located on the seashore.
In the same year, Salvador Dali takes another decisive step towards future success: he joins the surrealist society. But here, too, the eccentric Catalan does not fit into the framework. Even among the rebels and rebels of traditional art, such as Breton, Arp, de Chirico, Ernst, Miro, Dali looks like a black sheep. He comes into conflict with all participants in the movement and eventually proclaims his credo - "Surrealism is me!".
After coming to power in Germany, Dali begins to have unambiguous sexual fantasies about a politician, which finds expression in art, and this also outrages his colleagues. As a result, on the eve of World War II, Salvador Dali breaks off his relationship with a group of French artists and leaves for America.
During this time, he managed to participate in the creation of Luis Bonuel's surrealistic film "The Andalusian Dog", which was a great success with the public, and also had a hand in the second film of his friend "The Golden Age". The most famous work of the young author of this period was The Riddle of William Tell, in which he portrayed the Soviet leader of the Communist Party with a large naked gluteal muscle.
Among several dozen canvases of this time, which were exhibited at solo exhibitions in the UK, USA, Spain and Paris, one can single out "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, or Premonition of Civil War". The picture appeared just before the start of the Spanish Civil War, along with the Exciting Jacket and Lobster Phone.
After visiting Italy in 1936, Dali began to literally rave about the art of the Italian Renaissance. Features of academicism appeared in his work, which became another of the contradictions with the surrealists. He writes "Metamorphoses of Narcissus", "Portrait of Freud", "Gala - Salvador Dali", "Autumn Cannibalism", "Spain".
The last work in the style of surrealism is considered to be his "Dream of Venus", which appeared already in New York. In the US, the artist not only paints, he creates advertising posters, decorates stores, works with and helps them with the decoration of films. At the same time, he writes his famous autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, written by himself, which is instantly sold out.
Last years
In 1948, Salvador Dali returned to Spain, in Port Lligat, and created the canvas "Elephants", personifying post-war pain and desolation. In addition, after that, new motifs appear in the work of the genius, which turn the viewer's gaze to the life of molecules and atoms, which is manifested in the paintings "Atomic Ice", "The Splitting of the Atom". Critics attributed these canvases to the style of mystical symbolism.
From this period, Dali also began to paint canvases on religious subjects, such as the Madonna of Port Lligata, The Last Supper, The Crucifixion or the Hypercubic Body, some of them even received the approval of the Vatican. In the late 50s, at the suggestion of his friend businessman Enrique Bernat, he developed the logo of the famous Chupa Chups lollipop, which was the image of chamomile. In its updated form, it is still used by production designers.
The artist is very prolific on ideas, which brings him a constant considerable income. Salvador and Gala meet the trendsetter and befriend her for the rest of her life. The special image of Dali with his invariably curled mustache, which he wore already in his youth, becomes a sign of his time. A cult of the artist is being created in society.
The genius constantly shocks the audience with his antics. He repeatedly takes pictures with unusual animals, and once he even goes for a walk around the city with an anteater, which was confirmed by numerous photos in popular publications of that time.
The decline of the artist's creative biography began in the 70s due to the deterioration of his health. But still Dali continues to generate new ideas. During these years, he turned to the stereoscopic technique of painting and created the paintings "Polyhydras", "Submarine Fisherman", "Ole, Ole, Velasquez! Gabor! The Spanish genius begins to build a large house-museum in Figueres, which is called the "Palace of the Winds". In it, the artist planned to place most of his paintings.
In the early 80s, Salvador Dali received many prizes and awards from the Spanish government, he was made an honorary professor at the Paris Academy of Arts. In his will, which was made public after Dali's death, the eccentric artist indicated that he transferred his entire fortune of $ 10 million to Spain.
Personal life
1929 brought changes in the personal life of Salvador Dali and his relatives. He met the only love of his life - Elena Ivanovna Dyakonova, an emigrant from Russia, who at that time was the wife of the poet Paul Eluard. She called herself Gala Eluard and was 10 years older than the artist.
After the first meeting, Dali and Gala never parted again, and his father and sister were horrified by this union. Salvador Sr. deprived his son of all financial subsidies on his part, and Ana Maria broke off creative relations with him. The newly-made lovers settle on a sandy beach in Cadaqués in a small shack with no amenities, where Salvador begins to create his immortal creations.
Three years later, they officially sign, and in 1958 their wedding took place. For a long time, the couple lived happily, until in the early 60s, discord began in their relationship. Elderly Gala longed for carnal pleasures with young boys, and Dali began to find solace in the circle of young favorites. For his wife, he buys a castle in Pubol, where he can only come with the consent of Gala.
For about 8 years, his muse was the British model Amanda Lear, with whom Salvador had only platonic relationships, it was enough for him to watch his passion for hours and enjoy her beauty. Amanda's career ruined their relationship, and Dali broke up with her without regret.
Death
In the 1970s, El Salvador began to experience an exacerbation of his mental illness. He is extremely debilitated by hallucinations, and also suffers from an excess of psychotropic drugs that doctors prescribe for him. Doctors, not without reason, believed that Dali was suffering from schizophrenia, which received a complication in the form of Parkinson's disease.
Gradually, senile disorder began to take away from Dali the ability to hold a brush in his hand and paint pictures. The death of his beloved wife in 1982 finally mowed down the artist, and for some time he was in the hospital with pneumonia. After 7 years, the heart of the old genius can not stand it, and he dies of myocardial insufficiency on February 23, 1989. Thus ended the love story of the artist Dali and his muse Gala.
Camille Goemans could be pleased: almost all of Dali's works from his solo exhibition were sold out. Including the "Gloomy Game" with a character who shocked the public and managed to get into the collection of the de Noailles spouses. In this, and in other works of Dali in 1929, one can already see not only an attitude to interpreting one’s complexes and fears through the prism of psychoanalysis, but also the first attempts to apply the invented creative method, which he called paranoid-critical. It is difficult to explain in a nutshell what it is, but the approximate essence is that with its help one can try to systematize the "most crazy phenomena and states", put them under the control of the mind and, with the help of analysis, decide whether or not to allow them. into the realm of art. In other words, to conquer a dangerous disease and use it as a vaccine, sublimating it in creativity. However, we will not delve into the jungle of the subconscious, we will try to proceed from the principle of the necessary and sufficient, as far as the volume of the narrative about the life and work of our hero allows us, bearing in mind that in the dark forest of psychoanalysis, and even in the fog that Dali let in there, it is not difficult and get lost.
Let us dwell only on the most powerful work of that period called "The Great Masturbator". There are other translations into Russian: "The Great Onanist" and "The Great Masturbation". So if any of these names are found in the texts, you can be sure that we are talking about the same thing.
On this large canvas (110x150), the composition is dominated by the phantasmagoric head of a dreamer with his nose buried in the sand, with a grasshopper clinging to his face, whose belly is being devoured by the ubiquitous ants. Fear of grasshoppers, I must say, Dali did not get rid of even in his mature years - so, living in America on the estate of Caress Crosby, he always drank coffee on the porch of the house, and not on the lawn, like everyone else, afraid of meeting this vile insect.
From the dreamer's head to the upper right corner of the canvas, to the lower part of the male torso in tight shorts with clearly marked male genitalia, a female head crawls out; her nose and lips are as close as possible to male nature. A hint of oral sex, as Gibson suggests? It seems, but we already talked about this in the previous chapter. Under a grasshopper clinging to the dreamer's face, there is an embraced couple. It can be assumed that this is Gala and Dali on the beach of Cadaqués. Dali himself said that the outlines of this head were inspired by one of the ugly stones of Cape Creus, and the female image came to him from a postcard where a girl smells a lily. She is also depicted here in an erotic refraction: a huge tongue clinging to the woman’s neck, or something similar to it, reaches out to the flower, wriggling. The woman herself with a fly on her shoulder is like a sphinx - on her face, as well as on the man’s thigh, there are cracks, as if they were not fully animated statues of a crazy modern Pygmalion, and it is completely incomprehensible whether the characters turn to stone, turning into a state of sculpture, or, on the contrary, they come to life, throwing off an already unnecessary clay form.
Rather the latter. This picture was painted shortly after meeting and stormy declaration of love with Gala and symbolizes the transition to a new frontier, so to speak, of the artist's erotic worldview. He admitted that here he reflected "the feeling of guilt of a creature completely deprived of life due to active onanism." Dali did not sell this work and did not part with it until the end of his life.
So, the meeting with Gala became a turning point in the fate of our hero. Arriving with a shaved head, as a sign of a break with his family, head to Paris from Cadaqués, he met not only with her, his dream come true and desired ideal, but also with the ghost of his glory. The name Dali became famous in the cultural capital of Europe, both as one of the creators of the Andalusian Dog, which enjoyed great audience success, and as a painter who managed to make a fair amount of noise with his exhibition. The Surrealists accepted him into their ranks with open arms. André Breton wrote an introduction to the catalog, where he said that "Dali opened our inner floodgates" and his work "helps us understand what is hidden behind the shell of objects, sharpens the susceptibility to the subconscious ... is fraught with a huge charge openly aimed at evil ".
And evil in the understanding of the surrealists is a philistine bourgeois society. But here's what is curious: representatives of this most hated class willingly consume those cultural values that are produced by rebels. Paintings by Picasso, Miro, Arp, Ernst, Margritte, Dali, as well as many others, have replenished the collections of, one might say, the pillars of this society - magnates, financiers, wealthy aristocrats. The books of Eluard, Breton, Aragon, Tzar and others ended up on the shelves of their libraries. Yes, and they ate the Andalusian Dog. With giblets. And I must say frankly that without the money of patrons, such as the de Noailles and the like, surrealism could hardly have blossomed in such a terry color. In this contradiction, as the classic wrote, between labor and capital, the powers that be took the right position. They did not at all want the red dawn in the East to ignite the furious noon of revolution in Europe.
The Surrealists, on the other hand, really enthusiastically welcomed the social renewal in Russia and naively believed - at any rate, Breton - that a combination of surrealism and dialectical materialism was possible. "Youth and hope of the world" - that's what they called communism. Breton and Aragon joined the French Communist Party on January 6, 1927, on the day of Epiphany. Later, Picasso would also become a member of the PCF. Other members of the movement rejected any kind of political recruitment as an attack on individual freedom. The young Dali joined the movement in a difficult time of split and at first fanatically collaborated with Breton, supplying articles and other materials to his journal and giving lectures, including in his homeland, in Barcelona. The gifted orator inspiredly smashed the so-called lofty feelings and propagated the slogans of the surrealist revolution; among them, in addition to hackneyed ones, such as automatic writing and the power of chance, communism also appeared, for some reason adjacent to African art, and Trotsky stands next to the Marquis de Sade, whom Dali called "a model of morality, like a diamond of pure water."
And yet, in the theoretical works of Dali of that time, disagreements with Breton had already begun. In particular, the founder of surrealism and his faithful associates tried to free the subconscious mind, give it an anarchic principle, hence automatic writing, recording dreams, and so on. Dali also advocated that the unconscious was only an object of the creator, would be controlled, hence his paranoid-critical method.
Conflicts began to arise on a purely ideological level. Surrealism of the late 1920s was stubbornly aimed towards politics. Rebels from art with hope and faith looked to the East, where freedom finally triumphs over the ruins of the broken bourgeois system. The most ardent admirer of communism was Louis Aragon, who visited Russia in 1930 at the congress of revolutionary writers. His speech with attempts to introduce the ideas of surrealism with its cult of the subconscious into the general context of proletarian culture did not meet with approval, moreover, he was forced to engage in self-criticism and recognize Freudianism as an idealistic ideology, a kind of Trotskyism.
Dali continues, both in his work and in life, the line of pure surrealism: shocking, scandalous lectures and witty ideas like a thinking machine - a rocking chair with mugs of hot milk. Aragon generally did not like Dali, he was terribly annoyed by the eccentric antics of the Spanish artist, and the idea of \u200b\u200ba thinking machine infuriated him. Milk, he cried, must be given to the hungry children of the proletariat. Dali remarked to this that he had no acquaintances named Proletariat.
On the pages of "Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution" in December 1931, Dali places the already mentioned essay "Dreams", where he describes his childhood onanistic experiences. The object is the mythical Dullita, who turns into the real Julia, the adopted daughter of Repito Pichota, who in the finale assumes the image of Gala.
This opus outraged the leaders of the French Communist Party so much that they called members of the party of Aragon, Sadoul and others to the carpet to give explanations about the appearance of such a vile text in their press organ and made them seriously understand that such surrealism was incompatible with the ideology of the communists.
Breton, however, continued to defend Freudianism, and when an article appeared in L'Humanité with attacks against the "pseudo-revolutionaries-surrealists", he accused the orthodox of puritanism and a complete misunderstanding of the value of that destructive contribution to the cause of the revolution, which art innovators make with their outrageous activities. Dali's individualism grew stronger, of course, not without the influence of Gala. Dali before Gala and after - different people. His complexes and timidity seemed to be hidden somewhere. He is also changing outwardly: he becomes elegant and respectable - shaved, combed, beautiful suits with ties are replaced by sweaters and all sorts of hoodies in which he flaunted before. He is fully mastered in high society, and if he behaves there extraordinary, it only serves his popularity, he not only invades the world of the rich as an extravagant artist living on patronage donations, but also feels equal with them. His ideals and worldview crystallize into an unshakable conviction that has existed since childhood about his chosenness. Living upstairs is his destiny, and he will achieve this at any cost.
In this he is supported by Gala, who also considered success to be the main thing in life. Fearing that the squabbles, scandals and troubles that arose among the surrealists because of her baby Dali could affect the image of the artist and cause unnecessary talk among the elite, she asks her husband Eluard to settle such conflicts.
But Dali's antics become simply intolerable, and his connections with the powers that be are outrageous for many.
The cup of patience of the surrealists was filled with Dali's dangerous and irresponsible talk about Hitler, his next obsession. Of course, he did not feel sympathy for the Nazis, their views and policies did not seduce him, our hero understood perfectly well that in the event of Hitler's victory over Europe, artists like him would only find a place in a crematorium. The Nazi leader was interested in Dali not as a politician and demagogue, but as a person with a sick psyche, he saw in him "a complete masochist, obsessed with the obsession to unleash a war in order to heroically lose it later. In essence, he planned to carry out one of those unmotivated stocks that were so highly valued in our group..."
Later, in 1937, he will paint the painting "Hitler's Riddle", where he will depict a telephone receiver hanging on a branch with a gnawed microphone and a falling drop from the part of the receiver that is applied to the ear. A drop is about to fall into the plate, where there is a tattered photograph of Hitler, beans and a bat. Hanging on a branch is Chamberlain's umbrella. This was the artist's ingenious foresight of the collapse of Nazism. Another riddle - "The Riddle of William Tell" - was written earlier, in 1933. This is a huge canvas measuring two by one and a half meters, where in the image of William Tell - none other than the leader of the world proletariat Lenin with a hypertrophied buttock, so large and elongated that she needed the famous Dalian crutch as a prop. Once again I remember how amazed I was by the reproduction of this work when I first saw it in my youth (see the first chapter). The communist surrealists "The Riddle of William Tell" not only amazed, but also outraged so much that they decided to destroy it right at the exhibition in the Grand Palace, dedicated to the half-century anniversary of the Salon des Indépendants, where the group decided not to exhibit, and Dali disobeyed. To their annoyance, the picture hung so high that it was impossible to remove it. Enraged by all this, they issued a resolution on February 2, 1934, on the opening day of the exhibition, branding Dali as a counter-revolutionary and accomplice of fascism. The resolution also included a proposal to exclude the obstinate artist from the group. For this purpose, a trial was appointed on the fifth of February, where the culprit and the defendant appeared with a thermometer in his mouth and wrapped in warm clothes - he had a sore throat. He had a clown's video, and for all the seriousness of the event, many, including Breton, could not help laughing when Dali either took off his coat and unwound his scarf, then put it back on and constantly measured his temperature. In the literature about Dali, one of the curious moments of this meeting is often cited. Dali said to the leader of the Surrealists: "Breton, I dreamed that I had you in the ass." To which he replied seriously: "I do not advise you to do this."
The proceedings lasted a long time, almost until the morning. What accusations were brought against the disgraced artist? We do not know the protocol of the then meeting of the group, but there is a long letter from Breton to Dali, written before the trial. In it, Breton demanded from the obstinate answers to such questions: why did Dali rejoice at the failures of his friends; why he praises academic art and vilifies modern art, while the Nazis do the same, and artists are forced to emigrate from Germany, their art is recognized as degenerate in the Third Reich, and so on. There were also questions about the "William Tell Mystery" and about the artist's too close contacts with the so-called "society". Dalí answered in the same lengthy way, on eight pages. To the first question, he replied that the Marquis de Sade, his authority in the field of morality, advised to take pleasure in the mistakes of friends. As for academic art, it is only with the help of classical technology that dreams, visions, daydreams and other images of the unconscious can be conveyed, and it does not protest against all modern art - after all, it is a contemporary, how can it protest against itself? Tanguy, Ernst, de Chirico, Margritte - yes, they are ours, but Mondrian, Vlaminck, Derain, Chagall and Matisse annoy him with their stupid intellectualism, they do not understand anything either in painting or in surrealism and Freudianism. As for his alleged passion for fascism, this is a pure misunderstanding. His paintings and books in Nazi Germany would have met the same fate as his German colleagues, he is by no means a fan of Hitlerism, but he is obliged, as an artist and researcher, to dig and get to the bottom of the essence of fascism.
He probably said the same thing at the meeting, in any case, many years later he writes in the "Diary of a Genius" that then he convinced the audience of the right of the artist to any creative experiment, but as a surrealist, a member of the movement that proclaimed unlimited freedom , may well consider himself free from any kind of "aesthetic or moral coercion." In the end, he has the right to “grow three-meter buttocks for Lenin, season his portrait with jelly from Hitlerism, and, if necessary, stuff it all with Roman Catholicism. Everyone is free to be himself and give the opportunity to become another what they please, in all their manifestations and departures, intestinal disorders and phosphene hallucinations - even a moralist, even an ascetic, even a pederast or shit-eater. Dali beat opponents with their own trump cards. And he was once again convinced of how right Gala was when, in the memorable summer of 1929 in Cadaques, she advised him not to go to the surrealists, since among them he would experience all the same prohibitions and complexes as in the family - they are the same bourgeois as his father. But then he firmly believed in the sincerity of the programs and slogans of surrealism and did not heed it.
When Dali came to Paris after breaking up with his family, Gala met him as the closest and dearest person. She made the final decision to be with him, seeing in him someone who would wipe the nose of all these Parisian celebrities, because he was from that fertile material from which one can mold a great man. She wanted the same from Paul Eluard, then from Max Ernst, but these people did not live up to her hopes, turned out to be on a smaller scale than Dali - this firework of ideas, completely crazy at first glance, but concealing an unusually rich potential. In addition, he knew how to infect others with his ideas, high-frequency currents beat around him, as if around a generator, and people were drawn to him, despite his super-manic obsession with his own person. Shortly after Dali's arrival in Paris, Gala dragged him south to the Carry-le-Rouillet resort near Marseille. The artist then possessed, like an obsession, the idea of a picture with an invisible man. Why did this particular plot excite Dali at that time? Did he want to hide, disappear, become invisible to the all-seeing eye of his father, who betrayed him with a curse and anathema? On a subconscious level, it could be. He never finished the picture, but he experienced all the delights of carnal love, which he admitted in letters to Buñuel, who at that time had begun filming their common brainchild, the film The Golden Age.
Dali writes to his friend not only about the delights of love, he constantly returns to the script, advises adding this and that, provides drawings for imaginary scenes, offers new plot twists and even the idea of tactile cinema - if fur appears on the screen, the viewer must feel the fur with his fingers, if he sees and hears the splash of water, he must feel the water, and so on. The idea is witty, but still not in demand in mass cinema, in a home theater with servants or other technical means, this is possible, but still it is still a utopia.
Letters to Galya from Eluard also come here. He cannot believe that she is leaving him, and constantly returns in letters to her divine, created for love body, describes all its seductive parts, including the most intimate ones, while admitting that he masturbated, imagining her.
But Gala only occasionally answers him, and even then because she still needs him, but her choice is final, she has no regrets, no nostalgia left, she is all focused on the future, she really became Gradiva, walking ahead. Yes, "there is no past for a woman." This is from Bunin:
I wanted to shout out:
"Come back, I'm related to you!"
But for a woman there is no past:
She fell out of love - and became a stranger to her.
Well! I'll light the fireplace, I'll drink...
It would be nice to buy a dog.
And it's time, time, dear reader, to look at Gala through the eyes of her chosen one, the brilliant painter Salvador Dali, who painted her countless times. She was a character in many of his works, appeared there in various outfits and images, up to the Virgin Mary and even Jesus Christ. In 1978, he will paint two almost completely identical canvases (for the sake of stereoscopic effect, one canvas had to be viewed with the left eye and the other with the right), where Gala is crucified on a cross located parallel to the ground, raised to a silent height. We also see her naked in the immortal masterpiece "Atomic Leda", worthy of the brush of the masters of the high Renaissance, where the artist elevated the beauty of his Goddess and Inspirer to the ideal. She appears in his paintings either with a lobster on her head, or with an airplane on the tip of her nose, or as a half-witch-half-witch reflected in the mirrors, omniscient and, as it were, extracting her omniscience from the mysterious, created by the artist, magical Looking Glass; then we see her from the back in the work "My naked wife, contemplating her own flesh, which has turned into a ladder, into three vertebrae, columns, into the sky and architecture", one of the best works of world painting in the nude genre.
But special attention, dear reader, deserves a portrait of the artist's wife, created in 1945 and called "Galarina", in consonance with "Fornarina" by Raphael. The portrait was created according to the canons of the high Renaissance, and Dali said that he worked on it, like his beloved Vermeer; for a whole six months he created this masterpiece, spending a total of five hundred and forty hours at the easel.
Nothing here distracts the viewer from the image - Galya has no jewelry, except for a ring and a bracelet, and she is dressed in a golden satin blouse, her left breast is bare, but all the viewer's attention is directed to her face and hands.
The long-fingered left hand, embracing the right forearm, carefully worked out by the artist, is full of life and energy - such a hand, if it takes something, will never let it go. Such hands, strong and confident, with a powerful hillock of Venus, are created to take and rule with them - these are not the hands of a spoiled soft woman given to the power of a man - no, these are the hands of a predator.
Close-set eyes seem to follow the viewer, from whichever side you look. This is an amazing effect, and it’s hard to say how Dali achieved it, but what else is amazing in her eyes: they are, as it were, shielded, they don’t let someone else’s gaze inside, melting the world of the female soul hidden behind them and those mysterious forces that reveal divine intuition . And Gala owned it, she even managed to predict the date of the start of World War II. Many considered her a sorceress and a witch. Maybe she had a bit of that magical dark knowledge, being to a certain extent a medium, but she used them only in a narrow space, which was called Gala and Salvador.
Together they formed a single and indivisible whole. It was an alloy from which, like, say, bronze, it is no longer possible to isolate copper and silver separately. Dali's inner world, filled with deep creative fantasy, prone to metamorphoses, hoaxes and tragic childhood complexes, was very attractive to Gala, whose dark and mysterious soul found there, in Dali's rich imagination, familiar signs, symbols and states. Moreover, with her sometimes blind obedience to any whims of a genius, she called to creative life the still dormant images of the indefatigable Dalian fantasy, she constantly convinced her husband of his superpowers, never allowed him to forget that he was a genius, the only super-artist on the planet who has no equal.
Many researchers of Gala's life, in particular, Dominique Bona in her book "Gala, the Muse of Artists and Poets", talk about her great life risk when she decided to link her fate with a young Spanish provincial artist, although promising, but known only in among representatives of the radical artistic movements of that time. After all, then it was difficult to imagine that this introverted, on the verge of mental illness, young man would be able to rise to the very heights of life and creativity. Gala, from the point of view of everyday logic, took a very big risk, leaving Eluard, although he spent his father's millions with her, but still a wealthy bourgeois, to the son of a provincial notary, who was also deprived of his inheritance. But Gala foresaw, she knew that Dali was not an ordinary person, but a genius, to whom from birth the Creator invested what the majority is denied. She read it, as if on mysterious tablets, using her gift to guess the future to a certain extent. But let's look at her portrait again. The right eye, under a straight eyebrow, located below the left one, seems empty and lifeless, it looks like an agate stone or an olive, but the left one beckons and calls to itself, it is full of young and inexhaustible life, it does not have that painfully motionless secret that fettered right eye, but together they produce a surprisingly attractive feeling of power and strength, and the power is not tyrannical, cruel, but the self-confident force of female attraction, which invitingly shows through in every line of her face full of unknown intrigue, broad-cheeked, with a strong-willed chin and predatory wings of the nose . With this portrait, Dali told everything he knew about his wife, what he guessed in this secretive, secretive soul, hiding from everyone and from him, who had the magical gift to subdue the sweet power of female power, which the artist was subdued, who admitted that he experienced the joy of feeling to be the slave of this woman... And at the same time, when looking at this portrait, there is, despite the warm golden color, a feeling of dumbness, stiffness and lifelessness. Gala, as if in the legend of King Midas, seems like a gilded statue that has not been completely unraveled, and has not revealed all its secrets ... But we left our heroes in a modest hotel in the south of France, where Dali worked on The Invisible Man, and Gala read and guessed on the cards, which told her that from a certain person they would receive money that they badly needed. And so it happened. The Viscount de Noailles sent a check for twenty thousand francs on account of the future work of the artist. This was most opportunely, because the Goemans gallery was closed, the reason for which was the owner's divorce proceedings, and Buñuel temporarily took over the gallery. Gala immediately rushed to Paris to demand money from Goemans for Dali's works sold at the exhibition, and she succeeded.
Thus, they ended up with the amount that Dali decided to spend on buying a home in Cadaqués. He did not want to live anywhere except for his native land dear to his heart, with which he was connected too much. Here for the first time he felt like an artist and became stronger in his spiritual chosenness, spent many charming hours contemplating the great chaos of nature on the rocks of Cape Creus; here friendship with Lorca grew stronger and filled with creative mutual enrichment, and here, finally, he met his fate, the enchantress Gala, Gradiva, who saved him from madness. So, he had an idea with this money to buy a tiny fishing house in the farthest corner of Cadaqués, in a village called Port Lligat, from the sons of the half-crazy Lydia, nicknamed Clever. From "Secret Life":
"The sons of Lydia lived in Port Lligat, from where it was a fifteen-minute walk to Cadaqués. There, by the sea, stood their miserable shack with a collapsed roof, hung with fishing tackle. There, immediately behind the cemetery, begins a dry, rocky, alien landscape - another such not on earth. In the morning, clear and austere, it glows with some kind of wild, bitter joy, and at dusk it swells with painful, burning melancholy. The olives, shining and soaring in the morning, turn gray at sunset, pouring with heavy lead. The morning breeze wrinkles the waves with a smile, and in the evening, the sea at Port Lligat freezes like a lake, reflecting the celestial drama of the sunset. What prose! What wonderful prose, poetic, close to Lorca. With pleasure and envy I quoted this passage. What a great writer would have come out of Dali if he had only dealt with literature! In Barcelona, from where they intended to go to Cadaqués, Dali and Gala went to the bank to cash the check. There, as Dali writes in The Secret Life, "... I was amazed that the cashier turned to me extremely courteously:" Welcome, Senor Dali! "If I knew that I was known to all of Barcelona, I would have taken it as due and probably rejoiced at such evidence of his popularity, but I had no idea about it and got scared. Turning to Galya, I whispered:
He knows me, but I don't know him!
Gala got angry - again these childhood fears, this provincial clumsiness! I signed on the back of the check, but when the cashier held out his hand for him, he said that I would not give the check, and explained to Galya:
When he brings the money, then I'll give the check!
What, will he eat your check, or what?
Maybe eat!
Yes, for what reason?
And with such that I would have eaten it in his place!
Yes, even eat it! Your money is not going anywhere!
They won’t get away, but what’s the point? Anyway, we won’t see any mushrooms or game for dinner today!
The cashier looked at us with an impassive look - he could not hear what we were talking about (I prudently took Gala aside). Finally she convinced me. I went up to the cash desk and, having measured the attendant with a contemptuous look, threw a check into the window:
Please!
I never got used to the dull abnormality of people who inhabit the world - you have to deal with them! Normality confuses me. I know: “What can happen never happens.” Very rightly noted. In the world, everything happens as it happens. And a person is not free to make a single amendment to the program of his own destiny.
Salvador showed up in his native Cadaques with his companion in March 1930 and bought for 250 pesetas from the sons of Lydia a house of twenty-one square meters, without light and water. Having learned about his son's plans to settle in Port Lligat, the notary Dali Kusi was furious and tried his best to prevent this. Gala and Salvador were not even allowed into the hotel, and they had to rent a room in a boarding house, where Dali's former maid arranged for them.
They hired a carpenter to repair the dilapidated housing and, having explained what he needed to do, left for Barcelona to give a lecture, and when they returned to see how things were going, they had an unpleasant conversation with the gendarmes, who acted at the instigation of their father. At the notary, as we say, everything was taken care of. For El Salvador, this was just a nightmare, he could not even imagine his life anywhere outside his homeland and was completely discouraged by such a turn of affairs. But nevertheless, he firmly decided to build a house in Port Lligat, and Gala supported him in this, although it is completely incomprehensible why she, a Parisian spoiled by comfort, wanted to settle in this outback, where only a dozen and a half fishermen lived.
Dali's father was also firm in his intention to prevent his son from living here with this, as he called her, "la madam." He even wrote a letter to Bunuel, where he frankly threatened his son with physical violence if he decides to build his own housing here.
The lovers were forced, at the insistence of the gendarmes, to leave Cadaqués and go to Paris. Dali was terribly annoyed that the shooting on location of the "Golden Age", which was supposed to begin on the rocks of his native coast in April, would take place without him.
Buñuel was not threatened with the wrath of the Figueres notary, so, as planned, he went to Dali's homeland with a film crew, where Max Ernst, who played the leader of the robbers in this film, was also present. The director took local fishermen into the extras, dressing them in episcopal robes, and all this movie fuss made a lot of noise in Cadaqués.
Before leaving, Buñuel filmed Dali's father with his wife Catalina, El Salvador's aunt. A lover of the theater and cinema, knowing that Buñuel's film was anti-clerical, the old atheist happily posed for the camera. Thanks to Buñuel, we know what this man who tyrannized the artist looked like in real life. At that time he was fifty-eight years old. In these documentary footage, Father Dali voluptuously eats sea urchins, smokes a pipe in a wheelchair, tends to the garden. It can be seen that this person is used to ruling, he has a cool character, and he will not let go of resentment to anyone, even to the closest person. We see his wife. She is twelve years younger than him, but she looks almost the same age, and there is nothing but fear in her eyes.
In Paris, Gala fell ill with pleurisy, and to improve their health, they went to Malaga, Picasso's homeland, to live for several weeks at sea. In a tiny fishing village called Torremolinos, a strange house stood on a rock just above the sea, built long ago by some eccentric, romantic-obsessed Englishman. It was adapted as a hotel, where Gala and Dali settled. Torremolinos turned out to be a paradise - the sea, the fiercely scorching sun and the coast overgrown with bright red carnations. Here Gala, again, did not constrain herself with any clothes, she walked in one short red skirt with a bare chest. The locals were indifferent to this, but the poets and writers who visited Dali were shocked by the free behavior of the mistress of the great Catalan artist, as the Malaga press called him.
They tanned there to blackness and, very pleased with the rest, returned to Paris, stopping by for a couple of hours in Cadaqués to see how the house was being renovated. They intended, despite the displeasure of their father, to spend the summer here. The carpenter did his best, it was already possible to live there. True, when Dali sent a photo of this building to his benefactor, the Viscount de Noailles, with whose money the house was built, he remarked, not without poison, that if Dali had not succeeded in painting, he would have found himself in architecture. The viscount, it must be said, was very fond of gardening and architecture and knew a lot about it.
Salvador Dali
- " Surrealism is not a party, not a label, but a unique state of mind, not bound by slogans or morality. Surrealism is the complete freedom of a human being and his right to dream. I'm not a surrealist I am surreal."
full name Salvador Domenech Felip Jacinte Dali and Domenech, Marquis de Pubol
No one is born immediately adult, but some are born geniuses. This was probably Salvador Dali - a genius from an unusual childhood. The first years of Salvador's life were filled with all-consuming parental love,
not allowing young parents to see that their son is not entirely happy and quite unusual.
Almost a year before the birth of Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali, a tragedy occurred in the family of the respected Figueres notary Salvador Dali Sr. and his wife Felipa - before they were two years old, their first-born Salvador Gal Anselm died. Tormented by remorse and fear of losing their second son, the Dali couple tried to give Salvador Jr. everything that loving parents can give. Being one of the richest residents of Figueres, they did not refuse little Salvador anything and tried to fulfill even the most unusual wishes of the boy. At the same time, the father wanted to see his child as ordinary and considered his creative hobbies a whim, and the pious mother regularly took her son to the grave of his brother.
At the age of 5, after another visit to the cemetery with his mother, Salvador formed his own opinion about parental love, deciding that it was not intended for him, but for his dead brother. To justify his right to be a beloved son, Salvador called himself the reincarnation of his brother and began to master the techniques of manipulating his parents.
Thus, it can be assumed that a certain mental conflict that provoked the development of such an unusual worldview arose in Salvador Dali in early childhood. After all, he was sure that the attention of his parents was not a manifestation of love for him, but only an attempt to come to an agreement with his conscience.
In 1921, Felipa Domenech Dalí died of cancer. Salvador was 17, and he was very upset by the loss. By that time, the future surrealist had already fully formed as an artist, but remained completely unadapted to everyday life.
The artist's father, at first, believed that nothing would come of his son's passion for art. He wanted to give his offspring a good “normal” education and was very upset that his son was not interested in general education.
Shortly after Felipa's death, Salvador Dali Cusi married her sister Catalina. This event was another brick laid in the wall of alienation between the artist and his father. The young painter chose an independent creative path, left home and did not seek rapprochement with his family.
In 1933, Salvador Dali painted one of his most controversial paintings, The Riddle of William Tell.
The plot, Dali himself explained, was an attempt to depict fear of his father.
The main character, according to Dali himself, is Lenin in a cap with a huge visor.
In The Diary of a Genius, Dali writes that the baby is himself, yelling "He wants to eat me!". There are also crutches here - an indispensable attribute of Dali's work, which has retained its relevance throughout the artist's life. With these two crutches, the artist props up the visor and one of the thighs of the leader. In the picture, the father can eat either a cutlet or a child, which means that Dali was never able to overcome the feeling of danger posed by his father.
Anna Maria entered the life of Salvador Dali in 1908, when the boy was only 4 years old. In Spain, where family values are above all, and the word of a man is law, the adoration and admiration that a sister gave to her brother were natural and ... destined. The relatively small age difference brought them even closer.
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| Anna Maria 1924 |
"Self-portrait with a Raphaelian neck" - written in 1921, when his mother died, which, according to the artist, was one of the hardest experiences of his life. This is one of the first works of Salvador. Made in the impressionistic style.
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| Fixture and Hand (1927) |
Experiments with geometric shapes continue. You can already feel that mystical desert, the manner of painting the landscape, characteristic of Dali's "surreal" period
Also called "Invisible", the painting demonstrates metamorphoses, hidden meanings and contours of objects. Dali often returned to this technique, making it one of the main features of his painting.
This picture reveals Dali's obsessions and childhood fears.
The "Great Masturbator" is of great importance for the study of the personality of the artist, as it was inspired by his subconscious. The painting reflects Dali's controversial attitude towards sex. In his childhood, Dali's father left a book on the piano with photographs of genitals affected by venereal diseases, which led to the association of sex with decay and turned young Dali away from sexual relations for a long time.
Dali kept this painting in his own collection at the Dalí Theater Museum in Figueres until his death.
At 25, Salvador Dali was still a virgin and not only was in no hurry to know women, but was also afraid of them, trying to avoid physical intimacy. What had to happen in order for cardinal changes to take place in the personal life of the then-future genius? What was needed was an explosion, fireworks, a celebration ... mind-blowing gala performance.
And it happened. This festive show, which was destined to last more than 50 years, began in 1929, when the then famous French poet Paul Eluard came to Cadaqués to visit the young eccentric artist with his daughter and Russian wife, who called herself Gala. It is believed that it was from this moment that the star duo Gala - Salvador Dali began its existence. In fact, in August 1929, the love triangle Gala - Paul - Salvador arose, which became a duet only in 1952, after the death of Eluard.
It is difficult to say how the life of Salvador Dali would have developed if it had developed according to the scenario of Anna Maria. The artist's early paintings are no doubt sensual, talented, but devoid of the madness that spurts from the works of the surrealist of the Gala era. One way or another, on the 29th, Dali made his choice
Did Paul Éluard hate his happier rival? Did Dali feel remorseful because he "stole" his wife from his comrade? Did Gala doubt that she was making the right choice, leaving Eluard for El Salvador? No no and one more time no.
As for Dali, he was so stunned by the surging feelings that he did not even think about the fact that Gala did not come to him alone, but her husband and child were with them.
On that memorable visit, Salvador Dali painted a portrait of Paul Eluard. Throwing out on the canvas all his doubts and passions, tearing apart all the participants in the events, he explained it this way: "I felt that I was entrusted with the duty to capture the face of the poet, from whose Olympus I stole one of the muses."
Since 1930, Gala began to live with Dali, having left Paris. The story of their love, although known to almost the whole world, still remains a mystery. And Paul Eluard went on his journey, and in 1930 he met a new love, Maria Benz, a dancer who performed under the stage name Nusch (Nusch). A recognized beauty, Nush was endowed with many talents: she danced, sang, was an acrobat, wrote poetry and even painted. Her beauty inspired many artists of the early 20th century: Pablo Picasso
invited Nush as a model for his paintings
But, despite a completely happy personal life, almost until his death, Paul Eluard wrote love letters to Gala and believed that one day she would return. And she, in turn, out of respect for her ex-husband, did not marry Dali until Paul was alive.
Dali and Gala settled in Paris. The artist began a period of great creative upsurge, he painted pictures without resting, but without feeling any particular physical or nervous fatigue. He wrote easily - as he breathed. And his paintings fascinated, changed ideas about the world. He signed his paintings like this - "Gala Salvador Dali." And rightly so - she was the source from which he drew his strength. "Soon you will be the way I want you to be, my boy" Gala told him so. And he agreed with this.
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| My wife 1945. |
The entire central part of the canvas is occupied by a strange construction of human arms and legs, reminiscent of the outline of Spain in its shape. The structure seems to hang over the traditional Dali low horizon. Boiled beans are scattered on the ground below. The combination of these objects creates an absurd, sickly fantastic combination that conveys Dali's impression of the events that took place in those years in Spain.
The candy pink sofa is drawn in the shape of the lips of American actress Mae West. The hair is made in the form of curtains framing the entrance to the room, the eyes are in the form of paintings, and the nose is a fireplace on which the clock stands. The shade of the lips became very popular at one time, gained "scandalous" fame
The idea in the form of an illusion room was realized in the Dali Theater Museum in the city of Figueres by Oscar Tusquets under the guidance of Dali himself. The exposition was opened on September 28, 1974.
The head of roses is rather a tribute to Arcimboldo, an artist beloved by the surrealists. Arcimboldo, long before the emergence of the avant-garde as such, painted portraits of courtiers, using vegetables and fruits to compose them (eggplant nose, wheat hair, and the like). He (like Bosch) was something of a surrealist before surrealism.
The most famous of Dali's inventions. The boxes were always depicted by him as open. They denoted a search carried out unintentionally. Here, Dali clearly has some kind of stable memory, the roots of which remain unknown. Dali outlined where the boxes should be, and Marcel Duchamp, whom Dali treated with great respect, made a mold for casting. A series of new castings were made from the same mold in 1964. Venus is now in the Salvador Dali Museum in Florida. The Salvador Dali Museum is the only museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist.
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| Lobster phone , 1936 |
The work was presented at the first London Surrealist Art Exhibition in 1936. During a promotional event for the exhibition, Dali gave a lecture on the influence of the subconscious while wearing a diving suit.
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| Metamorphoses of Narcissus , 1937 |
Dali himself spoke of Hitler in different ways. He wrote that he was attracted by the soft, plump back of the Fuhrer. His mania did not cause much enthusiasm among the Surrealists, who had sympathy for the left. On the other hand, Dali later spoke of Hitler as a complete masochist who started the war with the sole purpose of losing it. According to the artist, once he was asked for an autograph for Hitler and he put a straight cross - "the complete opposite of the broken fascist swastika."
Dali described his work on this painting as an attempt to make the abnormal look normal and the normal look abnormal.
Gala often poses for her husband - she is present in his paintings both in the allegory of sleep, and in the image of the Mother of God or Elena the Beautiful. Periodically, interest in Dali's surrealistic paintings begins to fade, and Gala comes up with new ways to make the rich fork out. So Dali began to create original gizmos, and this brought him serious success. Now the artist was sure that he knew exactly what surrealism really was.
Salvador and Gala did not know the need, they could afford to tease the audience with strange antics. This provoked rumors that pissed off people with a different temperament. So, they said about Dali that he was a pervert, sick with schizophrenia. Indeed, his long mustache, bulging eyes involuntarily suggest that genius and madness go hand in hand. But these rumors only amused the lovers.
Amanda Lear - "angel" Salvador Dali
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Salvador Dali was one of the first to "discover" Amanda. She was 19, she was charming and seemed to him an angel. Then she was known as Pecky D'Oslo. Some researchers believe that the name Amanda Lear is a pun in French, L "Amant Dalí, which means "Dali's mistress."
Dali, with the spontaneity inherent in any madman, introduced his "angel" to his wife. They often walked, dined and attended receptions as a threesome or in the company of another young favorite of Gala.
Amanda became a frequent guest of the "court of wonders" - evenings in Suite No. 108 of the Meurice Hotel, which took place daily from 17:00 to 20:00. She came here with Dali, who was the center and the ideological inspirer of the "gatherings". Amanda, with due understanding, perceived Dali's spicy and often obscene jokes in her address and willingly participated in many of his crazy adventures.
Not inclined to fidelity herself, Gala, however, was not ready to put up with the presence of another woman in her Salvador's life.
Soon Gala realized how good Salvador was in Amanda's company (and this seems to be the real genius of this woman) and changed her anger to mercy: she helped financially and instructed to take care of Dali. Gala took a promise from Amanda that she would marry Salvador after her death.
In July 1982, Gala died, but Amanda did not fulfill this promise - she was not at all up to it. By that time, the passport already had a marriage stamp with Alain Philippe Malagnac, the adopted son of Roger Peyrefitte (a French homosexual writer).
In her declining years, Gala somewhat moved away from Dali. He bought her a medieval castle - Pubol, where she enjoyed the last joyful days with her young men. But when she broke her hip, the gigolos, of course, abandoned their mistress, and she was left alone. Gala died in the clinic in 1982.
With the departure of Gala, the artist's oddities began to manifest themselves even more strongly. He left the canvas and brushes forever and could eat nothing for days on end. If they tried to persuade him, entertain him with a conversation, Dali became aggressive, spat at the nurses, sometimes even rushed at them. But he did not beat the women - he only scratched their faces with his nails. It seemed that he had lost the gift of articulate speech - no one could understand the artist's lowing. Now everyone was sure that madness had completely taken over the mind of a genius.
Dali gave Amanda, perhaps the most valuable thing he had - the amulet Gala, which she always carried with her: a small piece of wood, which, as she believed, brought good luck. Dali always had exactly the same amulet.
The artist accepted Amanda in the dark, asking not to turn on the light: the great surrealist felt that he was losing strength, and did not want the beauty to remember him as a weak old man.
Without his muse, Dali lived for another seven years. But can these years be called life? Too big was the bill that fate presented to the artist for his brilliant insights.
When the attacks did not torment the artist, he simply sat at the window with closed shutters and stared into the void for hours.
Dali was buried at the Theater Museum in Figueres. The artist bequeathed his fortune and work to Spain.
Born Advertising Genius
The most successful Salvador Dali advertised himself. Fame, fame, and with them money literally "stuck" to him, wherever he appeared, whatever direction of creativity he developed. The ability to draw attention to oneself is a virtue especially valued by representatives of the film industry. That is why, once in America, Dali naturally ended up in Hollywood, becoming for some time one of its most prominent figures.
Dali became close to Hollywood celebrity Walt Disney. On January 14, 1946, Disney signed a contract with the artist to create the animated film Destino. The project, for which Dali managed to draw 135 sketches, was soon closed due to financial problems. It was only in 2003 that the artists of the Disney studio managed to complete the work on the cartoon, having realized the main ideas of the master and using a short fragment drawn personally by Dali.
Wear a sensual jacket for dinner tonight!
The sensual jacket, also known as the Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket, was invented by Salvador Dali in 1936. 83 cups of mint liqueur were hung from a tuxedo on thin straws.
To make this jacket even more surreal, Dali placed a dead fly in each glass. A bra instead of a shirtfront emphasizes the sexuality of the chosen image.
Dali himself later “flaunted” in a jacket reminiscent of the 1936 model: numbered crystal glasses replaced the liquor glasses. It is in such a strange outfit that the maestro is captured in the picture taken during one of the receptions. Today, this photograph is stored in the BBC archives, along with other black-and-white frames, called symbols of the 20th century.
Wine labels
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| Wine label Chateau Mouton Rothschild |
The most famous work of the maestro is the flower from the Chupa Chups logo, which has survived to our days since 1969, having undergone only minor changes. Enrique Bernat (founder of the Spanish company Chupa Chups) turned to the famous surrealist artist, and he suggested placing the name Chupa Chups inside a chamomile flower.
The participation of the great surrealist could not but affect the results of the competition: that year the winners were as many as 4 countries, including Dali's native Spain.
The maestro did not limit himself to "creativity" and managed to personally appear in several commercials. Dali's mustache trembling with delight in a chocolate ad and the surreal depiction of Alka-Seltzer's hangover cure are the most famous commercials featuring this great Spanish artist.
At the beginning of the 20th century, surrealist ideas were in the air, penetrating the minds of extraordinary personalities like a virus. Salvador Dali, the most famous of the carriers of this virus, never denied himself the pleasure of collaborating with representatives of other areas of art who share his surrealist views of the world.
Dali's acquaintance with Jean Cocteau and the outrageous designer Elsa Schiaparelli, which took place in the 20s of the last century, was a foregone conclusion: Elsa did not miss the opportunity to shock the public by implementing the principles of surrealism in the design of clothes, and Salvador and Jean were fascinated by the idea of creating art masterpieces in dresses and costumes.
The idea of a hat-shoe came to Dali back in 1933, when, photographing Gala, he put a slipper on her head. In 1937, the idea was realized and added to the Schiaparelli hat collection.
It was in this collection that the pillbox hat first appeared. Yes, yes, it was this headdress in the form of an aspirin tablet that was fashionable at that time became the prototype of the very hat that “only” 30 years later became part of Jacqueline Kennedy's style.
Together with Dali, Schiaparelli came up with another amazing and creepy dress: ribs, a spine and pelvic bones were drawn on tight-fitting jersey. Dali also came up with the idea of many mysterious accessories made by Elsa Schiaparelli. These include apple bags, gloves with false nails and much more.
Surrealism in its purest form is the exit of familiar things beyond the ordinary, their journey through mystical worlds and return to reality in a new fantastically beautiful form.
Such magic was owned by Salvador Dali, who, taking an ordinary object as a basis, could turn it into mystical beauty.
Perhaps the brightest and most famous such subject - a sofa in the shape of lips.
satin scarlet sofa, the outlines repeating the shape of the lips of the scandalous and unusually sexy Broadway star, actress Mae West, appeared in 1937,
Dali himself considered Mae West an erotic monument of the era.
Lips are one of Dali's favorite symbols, the personification of sexuality, mystery and temptation. Decades later, in 1974, Salvador Dali returned to the idea of creating a sofa in the shape of lips and, together with the Spanish designer Oscar Tusquets Blanca, created a bright red leather sofa.
Dali called surrealistic sculpture fetishistic and completely useless, created solely to give vent to his crazy fantasies. The main surrealist of the 20th century had a lot of fantasies, and there was no less madness.
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| Retrospective bust of a woman |
In 1933, Dali created a mystical and inconceivable sculptural collage of elements of a completely different nature, objects of his fetish and symbols of his own fear - "Retrospective bust of a woman."
The combination of bread and corncobs with the tender face of a woman and her exciting breasts create an image of fertility. However, the ants crawling on the forehead and the shape of the baguette symbolize the woman as an object of consumption and are a hint of a carefully concealed depression.
Initially, the bust was made using a real loaf and during the first exhibition, in 1933, in the Pierre Cot gallery, Salvador Dali's dog ate a piece of the baguette.
Surreal Cadillac - "Rainy Taxi"
The Rainy Taxi first appeared at a surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1938. Dali promised the organizers that this would be the most amazing and exciting exhibition of the first half of the 20th century.
The maestro decided to create a car inside which it rains, the floor is covered with ivy, and snails crawl on a mannequin sitting in the back seat. It cost Dali a lot of work to convince the exhibition management of the need to implement his idea, since the arguments that seemed convincing to the surrealist himself did not convince anyone but himself. However, the bewitching mysticism of the object was so obvious that the "go-ahead" for the installation was given with the only restriction - the object must not be in the building.
After the name was approved, in front of the entrance to the exhibition, they began to build a “Rainy Taxi” - a car with a perforated water tank reinforced under the roof and a special plumbing system that provides a continuous supply of water. Dali had only to decorate the interior with moss and wait for the scenery to take root. Having seated the mannequins, the surrealist “decorated” them with two hundred Burgundy snails.
During his long life, most of which Salvador Dali spent "with a brush in his hand", the brilliant surrealist created a huge number of masterpieces and took part in many unusual projects: from drawing cartoons to writing books.
Working on his own version of the Tarot deck can be considered one of Dali's most unusual projects: the artist was far from the occult and magic, considering himself the only creator of his own life. But his beloved Gala was delighted with the ability of mysterious cards to reveal the secrets of the past, present and future. Maybe it was for Gala that the great Salvador decided to draw his Tarot.
It is difficult to say whether the deck has a special predictive power, but there is no doubt that the engravings by Salvador Dali that underlie its creation are works of art.
| Dali could not deny himself the pleasure of perpetuating his image. And he chose a very suitable card: the King of Pentacles fully reflects the commercial success of El Salvador's undertakings. You will also find Dali on the Major Arcana - the Magician, and his beloved Gala - on the Empress card. |
Symbols have always been the main elements of the work of Salvador Dali. Living in his own world, the surrealist saw around him a lot of hints, symbols and promises. Of course, one cannot ignore the symbolic fact that the future genius was born shortly after the release of the first passenger car, in 1904.
No, Dali did not become a car fan, and he was left indifferent to technical achievements and innovations in the automotive industry. However, the surrealist was inspired by the forms of "automatic carriages" and the power hidden in them: cars became the "central figures" of some of his paintings and the "heroes" of the plots of several literary works. In 1938, "Rainy Taxi" became the centerpiece of an exhibition in Paris.
In 1941, Dali purchased his first car, a Cadillac.
The Cadillac bought by Dali was one of the five special Caddies equipped with an automatic transmission. General Motors released a limited edition of unique cars that were purchased by the most famous, influential or outrageous personalities of the time. One belonged to US President Roosevelt, the second to Clark Gable, the third was owned by Al Capone, who had been released by that time, the fourth became the property of the Gala and Salvador Dali couple. The name of the owner of the fifth car is still unknown.
When the management of General Motors, wanting to improve the Cadillac brand, planned to produce an even more luxurious and complex car than the first models of the series, Salvador Dali was asked to make a sketch. The first thing that Dali proposed was the name of the new car - "Cadillac de Gala" (Cadillac de Gala). According to the artist obsessed with his wife, only this name could fully reflect the impressiveness of the model.
Dali's idea was interesting and completely new, but ... technically unfeasible in mass production. The Surrealist sent his sketch to General Motors and received no response. And one or two years later, the American automaker released ... "Cadillac de Gala"! True, only the name remained from Dali's ideas in the car.
After consulting with his lawyers, the artist sued the company for $ 10,000 (this is the minimum unit of measure in Dali's system of financial calculations). The very next morning, by registered mail, he received a check for the requested amount. And no explanation.
Philippe Halsman and Salvador Dali
Halsman met Salvador Dali in 1941. They maintained creative and friendly relations for 30 years.
Philippe Halsman photographed almost all the celebrities of the 20th century - politicians and millionaires, intellectuals and pop divas, eccentric artists and poets. For 30 years, the creative collaboration between Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsman, the founder of
surrealism in photography.
Philippe Halsman's most famous photo of Salvador Dali is Dali Atomicus. The surreal photo was created without editing and tricks - only a carefully thought-out staging, painstaking preparation, many attempts and incredible patience of all participants in the shooting.
Works by Philippe Halsman and Salvador Dali
Like an amazingly cut diamond, Salvador Dali's talent has many facets, each of which sparkles with a special brilliance and changes hue depending on the angle of view. He was not just a genius in everything, be it painting, sculpture, graphics or literature. The uniqueness of the genius of Salvador Dali also lies in the fact that he was commercially successful.
Any project that the expressive Spaniard undertook, sooner or later turned into an economic benefit. Dali successfully earned a comfortable life, his eccentric hobbies and expensive gifts for his muse Gala. Did the maestro love money? Unknown. But the fact that money loved Dali is beyond doubt.
Crazy maestro, crazy genius, eccentric surrealist - it's all about him. Salvador Dali and extraordinary are almost synonymous. Reproductions of the Spanish artist's paintings sell like hot cakes, his image is used for photo shoots, and his single inventions are dreamed of being released into circulation. Dali managed to work in several areas at once: he contributed to interior design, and to the fashion industry, and to ... the design of sweets. We invite you to recall the most striking works of the brilliant Spaniard (perhaps you did not even know about some of them).
lobster phone
The artist came up with a sketch of an unusual telephone set in 1935, and a year later an interesting idea was brought to life. In many ways, this was facilitated by the British millionaire Edward James - he sponsored the artist, who was faced with a lack of funds, in exchange for his work (and was also a good friend of the Spanish genius).
By the way, according to a beautiful legend, the idea of creating such a phone was born during one of the friendly gatherings, when one of the participants dropped a lobster ... on the phone.
Dali repeatedly hinted at a sexual connotation in his idea - during a conversation, the speaker's lips should be in the genital area of the lobster. In addition, lobster is known as an excellent aphrodisiac. In total, the world saw 11 copies of the invention - 5 colored and 6 white. Almost all of them are in museums around the world. The copy that belonged to James is currently up for auction at Christie's. Its cost was estimated at 850,000 pounds (more than 68 million rubles). Whether there is a buyer, we will find out in September. In the meantime, let's look at another lobster created by Dali.
Lobster dress
Dali was interested in all spheres of art, including fashion. In the 1920s, he met another creative person with crazy ideas. It turned out to be the legendary Italian Elsa Schiaparelli, an innovator and revolutionary in the fashion world.
The designer and Dali have created some outrageous (and now legendary) wardrobe pieces. Their imagination, long before Philip Tracy and Stephen Jones, gave rise to distinctive headwear, including the shoe-shaped hats and pillbox hats made popular by Jackie Kennedy. Later, they came up with apple-shaped bags and gloves with false nails. But the main creations of this star tandem are dresses. The most famous of them depicts Dali's favorite boiled lobster surrounded by green leaves. Perhaps it would not have become so popular if none other than Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, had decided to wear an interesting thing, for the sake of marrying whom Edward VIII abdicated (it’s good that times have changed, otherwise we would not have seen Meghan Markle's lavish wedding. By the way, even the latest collection of Schiaparelli included dresses with the image of "relatives" of lobsters - crabs.
sofa lips
This unusual piece of furniture was created especially for the Schiaparelli boutique. Dali was inspired to create it by Mae West, one of Elsa's main clients and part-time sex symbol of her time. However, Edward James again sponsored all the fun. Dali said more than once that the sofa is unsuitable for sitting - firstly, it is terribly uncomfortable, and secondly, it is not worth spoiling art objects. And yet a strange thing aroused genuine interest and delight among those around him.
Yes, such that in 1974 Salvador decided to return to work on the sofa, taking the promising designer Oscar Tusquets Blanca as his assistant. The fruit of their creative fusion is stored in the room of Mae West of the Figueres Museum (the one stylized as the face of an actress). Well, in 2004, the Blanca Bd Barcelona Design company, which has exclusive rights, began mass production of Dalilips (the so-called sofa), adding three more colors to the “canonical” red version - black, white and pink.
But that's not all. If you want to get your hands on the original sofa, you have a chance: it, like the lobster phone, was put up for auction. The starting price is only 400,000 pounds (more than 32 million rubles).
Aphrodisiac jacket
Dali worked on clothes not only with Schiaparelli, but also on his own. One of the fashionable inventions of El Salvador is the aphrodisiac jacket. The first version of the unusual outfit appeared in 1936 - then it was decorated with about 80 cups of real mint liqueur (and it was hard not to spill the whole thing!). They were attached to the jacket with thin straws, and in each of them lay ... a dead fly (apparently, for plausibility).
Unfortunately, this version has not survived, although they tried to recreate it from memory for a number of art exhibitions. But the later version of the jacket, in which glasses were replaced by numbered crystal glasses, remained not only in the memory of the contemporaries of the Spanish genius - Dali is captured in his uniform in a photograph that is stored in the BBC archive and is considered one of the symbols of the twentieth century.
Venus de Milo with drawers
Sofa lips and a lobster telephone were not the only pieces of furniture that were born in the imagination of Dali. Another unique work appeared in 1936. As you might guess, the classical Venus served as the basis for it. Taking an ancient relic as a basis, Salvador recreated its plaster copy, deliberately dividing the woman's body into boxes: one of them is in the head, others are in the chest, stomach and legs. The artist once again recalled the secrets of the female body and its sexuality.
In 1973, Dali "republished" his sculpture. The new Venus à la Giraffe got a long neck, which made it impossible to reach the box in the head (oh, those feminine thoughts), but from her belly, symbolizing fertility, comes a long box that cannot be closed.
In his works, the artist repeatedly addressed the topic of female sexuality - his sketches included chairs and tables with female legs and arms. By the way, they were all brought to life in the same Bd Barcelona Design, as the Menagere table set with unusual forks, spoons and knives in the form of snails and plants was once recreated according to the sketches of a genius.
lollipop logo
Rounding out our selection of the artist's creations is a sweetness that we encounter every (well, almost every) day. As a great inventor and creative, Salvador simply could not leave his mark on the history of advertising, marketing and design.
The production of the famous Catalan lollipop began in 1958, but only 11 years later, its creator Enric Bernat turned to his compatriot and good friend for help in design.
For a very decent amount (the artist did not suffer from modesty), Dali invented the logo, which we see to this day almost in its original form. It was the genius of surrealism who guessed to place the logo at the very top of the candy so that it was clearly visible and difficult to damage. The customer was satisfied.
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