Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech, 1st Marquis
of Púbol (May 11, 1904
– January 23, 1989) was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.
Dalí (Spanish pronunciation: was a skilled draftsman,
best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist
work. His painterly
skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance
masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was
completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire includes film,
sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a
variety of media.
Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is
gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothesto a
self-styled Arab lineage claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for
partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to
himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his
critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than
his artwork
Biography
Early life
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, was born
on May 11, 1904, at 8:45 a.m. GMT in the town of Figueres,
in the Empordà
region, close to the French border in Catalonia,
Spain.
Dalí's older brother, also named Salvador (born October 12, 1901), had died of
gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador
Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary
approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her
son's artistic endeavors. When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's
grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, a
concept which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said, Dalí also had a
sister, Ana María, who was three years younger In 1949, she published a book
about her brother, Dalí As Seen By His Sister. His childhood friends
included future FC Barcelona footballers Sagibarba and Josep
Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqués,
the trio played football together.
Dalí attended drawing
school. In 1916, Dalí also discovered modern painting on a summer
vacation to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot,
a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year,
Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family
home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in Figueres
in 1919.
In February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer.
Dalí was sixteen years old; he later said his mother's death "was the
greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not
resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the
unavoidable blemishes of my soul. After her death, Dalí's father married
his deceased wife's sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, because he had a
great love and respect for his aunt.
Madrid and Paris
Wild-eyed antics of Dalí (left) and fellow surrealist
artist Man Ray
in Paris
on June 16, 1934, photographed by Carl Van
Vechten.
In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students'
Residence) in Madrid[7]
and studied at the Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine Arts). Dalí already
drew attention as an eccentric and dandy. He wore long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and
knee breeches in the style of English aesthetes of the late 19th century.
At the Residencia, he became close friends with (among
others) Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel,
and Federico García Lorca. The friendship with
Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí rejected the erotic
advances of the poet
However, it was his paintings, in which he experimented
with Cubism,
that earned him the most attention from his fellow students. At the time of
these early works, Dalí probably did not completely understand the Cubist
movement. His only information on Cubist art came from magazine articles and a
catalog given to him by Pichot, since there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at
the time. In 1924, the still-unknown Salvador Dalí illustrated a book for the
first time. It was a publication of the Catalan
poem "Les bruixes de Llers" ("The Witches of Llers") by his friend
and schoolmate, poet Carles Fages de Climent. Dalí also
experimented with Dada,
which influenced his work throughout his life.
Dalí was expelled from the Academia in 1926, shortly
before his final exams, when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent
enough to examine him. His mastery of painting skills was evidenced by his
flawlessly realistic Basket of Bread, painted in 1926. That same year,
he made his first visit to Paris, where he met with Pablo Picasso,
whom the young Dalí revered. Picasso had already heard favorable reports about
Dalí from Joan Miró. As he developed his own style over
the next few years, Dalí made a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso
and Miró.
Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout
his life were already evident in the 1920s. Dalí devoured influences from many
styles of art, ranging from the most academically classic to the most cutting-edge
avant garde
His classical influences included Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer,
and Velázquez He used both classical and modernist
techniques, sometimes in separate works, and sometimes combined. Exhibitions of
his works in Barcelona
attracted much attention along with mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from
critics.
Dalí grew a flamboyant moustache,
influenced by seventeenth-century Spanish master painter Diego
Velázquez. The moustache became an iconic trademark of his
appearance for the rest of his life.
1929 through World War II
In 1929, Dalí collaborated with surrealist film director Luis Buñuel
on the short film
Un chien
andalou His main contribution was to help Buñuel write the script for the film.
Dalí later claimed to have also played a significant role in the filming of the
project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. Also, in
August 1929, Dalí met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala,
born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant
eleven years his senior, who at that time was married to surrealist
poet Paul Éluard.
In the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and officially
joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse
quarter of Paris.
His work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years. The
Surrealists hailed what Dalí called the Paranoiac-critical method of accessing the
subconscious
for greater artistic creativity.
Meanwhile, Dalí's relationship with his father was close
to rupture. Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance
with Gala, and saw his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his
morals. The last straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona newspaper that
his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing of the "Sacred Heart of
Jesus Christ", with a provocative inscription, "Sometimes, I spit for
fun on my mother's portrait.
Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant
publicly. Dalí refused, perhaps out of fear of expulsion from the Surrealist
group, and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on December 28, 1929.
His father told him that he would disinherit him, and that he should never set
foot in Cadaquès again. Dalí later claimed that, in response, he handed his
father a condom containing his own sperm, saying, "Take that. I owe you
nothing anymoreThe following summer, Dalí and Gala would rent a small
fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He bought the place, and over
the years enlarged it, gradually building his much beloved villa by the sea.
The Persistence of Memory
In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory. which
introduced a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket
watches. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft
watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic.
This idea is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding
landscape, and the other limp watches, shown being devoured by insects.
Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were
married in 1934 in a civil ceremony. They later remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958.
Dalí was introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy
in 1934. The exhibition in New York of Dalí's works, including Persistence
of Memory, created an immediate sensation. Social
Register listees feted him at a specially organized "Dalí
Ball." He showed up wearing a glass case on his chest, which contained a
brassiere.[25]
In that year, Dalí and Gala also attended a masquerade party in New York,
hosted for them by heiress Caresse Crosby. For their costumes, they
dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper.
The resulting uproar in the press was so great that Dalí apologized. When he
returned to Paris, the Surrealists confronted him about his apology for a
surrealist act.
While the majority of the Surrealist artists had become
increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous
position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art.
Leading surrealist André Breton accused Dalí of defending the
"new" and "irrational" in "the Hitler
phenomenon," but Dalí quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I am
Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention. Dalí insisted that surrealism could
exist in an apolitical context and refused to explicitly denounce fascism.
Among other factors, this had landed him in trouble with his colleagues. Later
in 1934, Dalí was subjected to a "trial", in which he was formally
expelled from the Surrealist group. To this, Dalí retorted, "I myself am
surrealism.
In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist
Exhibition. His lecture, entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques, was delivered
while wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet. He had arrived carrying a
billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the
helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just wanted
to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind.
Also in 1936, at the premiere screening of Joseph
Cornell's film Rose Hobart at Julian Levy's gallery in New
York City, Dalí became famous for another incident. Levy's program of short
surrealist films was timed to take place at the same time as the first
surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, featuring Dalí's
work. Dalí was in the audience at the screening, but halfway through the film,
he knocked over the projector in a rage. “My idea for a film is exactly that,
and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made,” he
said. "I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen
it." Other versions of Dalí's accusation tend to the more poetic: "He
stole it from my subconscious!" or even "He stole my dreams!
At this stage, Dalí's main patron in London was the very
wealthy Edward James.
He had helped Dalí emerge into the art world by purchasing many works and by
supporting him financially for two years. They became good friends, and James
is featured in Dalí's painting Swans Reflecting Elephants. They also
collaborated on two of the most enduring icons of the Surrealist
movement: the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.[citation needed]
In 1939, Breton coined the derogatory nickname
"Avida Dollars", an anagram for Salvador Dalí, and a phonetic rendering of
the French avide à dollars, which may be translated as "eager for dollars
This was a derisive reference to the increasing commercialization of Dalí's
work, and the perception that Dalí sought self-aggrandizement through fame and
fortune. Some surrealists henceforth spoke of Dalí in the past tense, as if he
were dead.[citation needed] The Surrealist
movement and various members thereof would continue to issue extremely harsh
polemics against Dalí until the time of his death and beyond.
In 1940, as World War II
started in Europe, Dalí and Gala moved to the United States, where they lived
for eight years. After the move, Dalí returned to the practice of Catholicism.
"During this period, Dalí never stopped writing," wrote Robert and
Nicolas Descharnes.
In 1941, Dalí drafted a film scenario for Jean Gabin
called Moontide. In 1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.
He wrote catalogs for his exhibitions, such as that at the Knoedler Gallery in
New York in 1943. Therein he expounded, "Surrealism will at least have
served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at
automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system. ...
Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in
the psychological signification of the current use of the college." He
also wrote a novel, published in 1944, about a fashion salon for automobiles.
This resulted in a drawing by Edwin Cox in The Miami
Herald, depicting Dalí dressing an automobile in an evening
gown.[32]
Also in The Secret Life, Dalí
suggested that he had split with Buñuel because the latter was a Communist
and an atheist.
Buñuel was fired (or resigned) from MOMA, supposedly after Cardinal
Spellman of New York went to see Iris Barry,
head of the film department at MOMA. Buñuel then went back to Hollywood where
he worked in the dubbing department of Warner
Brothers from 1942 to 1946. In his 1982 autobiography Mon Dernier
soupir (English translation My Last Sigh published 1983), Buñuel
wrote that, over the years, he rejected Dalí's attempts at reconciliation.
An Italian friar, Gabriele Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an exorcism
on Dalí while he was in France in 1947 In 2005, a sculpture of Christ on the
Cross was discovered in the friar's estate. It had been claimed that Dalí gave
this work to his exorcist out of gratitude, and two Spanish art experts
confirmed that there were adequate stylistic reasons to believe the sculpture
was made by Dalí.
Later years in Catalonia
Starting in 1949, Dalí spent his remaining years back in
his beloved Catalonia. The fact that he chose to live in Spain while it was
ruled by Franco drew criticism from progressives and from many other artists As
such, it is probable that the common dismissal of Dalí's later works by some
Surrealists and art critics was related partially to politics rather than to
the artistic merit of the works themselves. In 1959, André Breton
organized an exhibit called Homage to Surrealism, celebrating the
fortieth anniversary of Surrealism, which contained works by Dalí, Joan Miró,
Enrique Tábara, and Eugenio Granell.
Breton vehemently fought against the inclusion of Dalí's Sistine Madonna
in the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York the following year.[36]
Late in his career, Dalí did not confine himself to
painting, but experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: he
made bulletist
works and was among the first artists to
employ holography
in an artistic manner Several of his
works incorporate optical illusions. In his later years, young
artists such as Andy Warhol proclaimed Dalí an important
influence on pop art.
Dalí also had a keen interest in natural science and mathematics. This is
manifested in several of his paintings, notably in the 1950s, in which he
painted his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns. According to Dalí, the
rhinoceros horn signifies divine geometry because it grows in a logarithmic
spiral. He also linked the rhinoceros to themes of chastity and to the Virgin
Mary. Dalí was also fascinated by DNA and the hypercube (a 4-dimensional cube); an unfolding of a hypercube
is featured in the painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).
Dalí's post-World War II period bore the hallmarks of
technical virtuosity and an interest in optical illusions, science, and
religion. He became an increasingly devout Catholic, while at the same time he
had been inspired by the shock of Hiroshima and the dawning of the "atomic
age". Therefore Dalí labeled this period "Nuclear Mysticism." In paintings such as "The
Madonna of Port-Lligat" (first version) (1949) and "Corpus Hypercubus"
(1954), Dalí sought to synthesize Christian iconography
with images of material disintegration inspired by nuclear physics.
"Nuclear Mysticism" included such notable pieces as "La Gare de Perpignan" (1965) and
"Hallucinogenic Toreador" (1968–70). In 1960, Dalí began work on the Dalí Theatre and Museum in his home town
of Figueres;
it was his largest single project and the main focus of his energy through
1974. He continued to make additions through the mid-1980s.[citation needed]
In 1968, Dalí filmed a television advertisement for
Lanvin chocolates, and in 1969, he designed the Chupa Chups
logo. Also in 1969, he was responsible for creating the advertising aspect of
the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest and created a
large metal sculpture that stood on the stage at the Teatro Real in Madrid.
In the television programme Dirty Dalì: A Private View
broadcast on Channel 4
on June 3, 2007, art critic Brian Sewell described his acquaintance with
Dalí in the late 1960s, which included lying down in the fetal position without
trousers in the armpit of a figure of Christ and masturbating for Dalí, who
pretended to take photos while fumbling in his own trousers.
In 1980, Dalí's health took a catastrophic turn. His
near-senile
wife, Gala, allegedly had been dosing him with a dangerous cocktail of
unprescribed medicine that damaged his nervous system, thus causing an untimely
end to his artistic capacity. At 76 years old, Dalí was a wreck, and his right hand
trembled terribly, with Parkinson-like symptoms.
In 1982, King Juan Carlos of Spain bestowed on Dalí the
title Marquis
of Púbol,
for which Dalí later repaid him by giving him a drawing (Head of Europa,
which would turn out to be Dalí's final drawing) after the king visited him on
his deathbed.
Gala died on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dalí lost
much of his will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself, possibly as a
suicide attempt, or possibly in an attempt to put himself into a state of
suspended animation as he had read that some microorganisms
could do. He moved from Figueres to the castle in
Púbol, which he had bought for Gala and was the site of her death.
In 1984, a fire broke out in his bedroom under unclear circumstances. It was possibly a
suicide attempt by Dalí, or possibly simple negligence by his staff. In any
case, Dalí was rescued and returned to Figueres, where a group of his friends,
patrons, and fellow artists saw to it that he was comfortable living in his Theater-Museum in his final years.
There have been allegations that Dalí was forced by his
guardians to sign blank canvases that would later, even after his death, be
used in forgeries and sold as originals. As a result, art dealers tend to be
wary of late works attributed to DalíIn November 1988, Dalí entered the
hospital with heart failure, and on December 5, 1988 was visited by King Juan Carlos,
who confessed that he had always been a serious devotee of Dalí.
On January 23, 1989, while his favorite record of Tristan and Isolde played, he died of heart
failure at Figueres at the age of 84, and, coming full circle, is buried in the
crypt
of his Teatro Museo
in Figueres. The location is across the street from the church of Sant Pere,
where he had his baptism, first communion, and funeral, and is three blocks
from the house where he was born.
The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation currently serves as his
official estate. The U.S. copyright representative for the Gala-Salvador Dalí
Foundation is the Artists Rights Society. In 2002, the
Society made the news when they asked Google to
remove a customized version of its logo put up to commemorate Dalí, alleging
that portions of specific artworks under their protection had been used without
permission. Google complied with the request, but denied that there was any
copyright violation.]
Symbolism
Dalí employed extensive symbolism in his work. For
instance, the hallmark "soft watches" that first appear in The
Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's
theory that time is relative and not fixed. The idea for
clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he was staring at
a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot day in August.
The elephant is also a recurring image in Dalí's works.
It first appeared in his 1944 work Dream Caused
by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.
The elephants, inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base
in Rome of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk, are
portrayed "with long, multijointed, almost invisible legs of desire along
with obelisks on their backs. Coupled with the image of their brittle legs,
these encumbrances, noted for their phallic overtones, create a sense of
phantom reality. "The elephant is a distortion in space," one
analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea of
weightlessness with structure." "I am painting pictures which make me
die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest
aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion
and I am trying to paint them honestly." —Salvador Dalí, in Dawn Ades, Dalí
and Surrealism.
The egg is another common Dalíesque image. He connects
the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and
love; it appears in The Great Masturbator and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus.
Various animals appear throughout his work as well: ants point to death, decay,
and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the human head (he saw a
snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house when he first met Sigmund Freud);
and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear.
Endeavors outside painting
The Dali Atomicus, photo by Philippe
Halsman (1948), shown before its supporting wires were removed.
Dalí was a versatile artist. Some of his more popular
works are sculptures and other objects, and he is also noted for his
contributions to theatre, fashion, and photography, among other areas.
Two of the most popular objects of the surrealist
movement were Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips Sofa, completed by Dalí in
1936 and 1937, respectively. Surrealist artist and patron Edward James
commissioned both of these pieces from Dalí; James inherited a large English
estate in West Dean, West Sussex
when he was five and was one of the foremost supporters of the surrealists in
the 1930s. "Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for
[Dalí]," according to the display caption for the Lobster Telephone
at the Tate Gallery,
"and he drew a close analogy between food and sex. The telephone was
functional, and James purchased four of them from Dalí to replace the phones in
his retreat home. One now appears at the Tate Gallery;
the second can be found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt;
the third belongs to the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at the National Gallery of Australia.
The wood and satin Mae West Lips Sofa was shaped
after the lips of actress Mae West, whom Dalí apparently found fascinating. West was
previously the subject of Dalí's 1935 painting The Face of Mae West. Mae
West Lips Sofa currently resides at the Brighton and Hove Museum in
England.
Between 1941 and 1970, Dalí created an ensemble of 39
jewels. The jewels are intricate, and some contain moving parts. The most
famous jewel, "The Royal Heart," is made of gold and is encrusted
with 46 rubies, 42 diamonds, and four emeralds and is created in such a way
that the center "beats" much like a real heart. Dalí himself
commented that "Without an audience, without the presence of spectators,
these jewels would not fulfill the function for which they came into being. The
viewer, then, is the ultimate artist." (Dalí, 1959.) The "Dalí —
Joies" ("The Jewels of Dalí") collection can be seen at the Dalí
Theater Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, where it is on permanent
exhibition.
In theatre, Dalí constructed the scenery for García
Lorca's 1927 romantic play Mariana
Pineda. For Bacchanale (1939), a ballet based on and set to the music
of Richard
Wagner's 1845 opera Tannhäuser, Dalí provided both the set
design and the libretto. Bacchanale was followed by set designs for Labyrinth
in 1941 and The Three-Cornered Hat in 1949.
Dalí became intensely interested in film when he was
young, going to the theatre most Sundays. He was part of the era where silent
films were being viewed and drawing on the medium of film became popular. He
believed there were two dimensions to the theories of film and cinema:
"things themselves"—the facts that are presented in the world of the
camera, and "photographic imagination"—the way the camera shows the
picture and how creative or imaginative it looks. Dalí was active in front of
and behind the scenes in the film world. He created pieces of artwork such as Destino,
on which he collaborated with Walt Disney. He is also credited as cocreator of Luis Buñuel's
surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, a 17-minute French art
film cowritten with Luis Buñuel that is widely remembered for its graphic
opening scene simulating the slashing of a human eyeball
with a razor.
This film is what Dalí is known for in the independent film world. Un Chien
Andalou was Dalí's way of creating his dreamlike qualities in the real
world. Images would change and scenes would switch, leading the viewer in a
completely different direction from the one they were previously viewing. The
second film he produced with Buñuel was entitled L’age d’or, and it was performed at Studio
28 in Paris in 1930. L’age d’or was "banned for years after fascist
and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink bomb and ink-throwing riot in the Paris theater
where it was shown hough negative aspects of society were being thrown into the
life of Dalí and obviously affecting the success of his artwork, it did not
hold him back from expressing his own ideas and beliefs in his art. Both of
these films, Un Chien Andalou and L’age d’or, have had a tremendous impact on
the independent surrealist film movement. "If Un Chien Andalou stands as
the supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the
unconscious, then L'Âge d'or is perhaps the most trenchant and implacable
expression of its revolutionary intent.
Dalí also worked with other famous filmmakers such as
Alfred Hitchcock. The most well-known of his film projects is probably the
dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, which heavily delves into
themes of psychoanalysis. Hitchcock needed a dreamlike quality to his movie,
which dealt with the idea that a repressed experience can directly trigger a
neurosis, and he knew that Dalí's work would help create the atmosphere he
wanted in his film. He also worked on a documentary called Chaos and
Creation, which has a lot of artistic references thrown into it to help one
see what Dalí's vision of art really is. He also worked on Disney cartoon
production Destino.
Completed in 2003 by Baker Bloodworth and Roy Disney,
it contains dreamlike images of strange figures flying and walking about. It is
based on Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez' song entitled
"Destino." When Disney hired Dalí to help produce Destino in 1946,
they were not prepared for the work they had ahead of themselves. For eight
months, they continuously animated until their efforts had to come to a stop
when they realized they were in financial trouble. They had no more money to
finish the production of the animated movie; however, it was eventually
finished and shown in various film festivals. The movie consists of Dalí's
artwork interacting with Disney's classic princesslike character animation.
Dalí completed only one other film in his lifetime, Impressions of Upper
Mongolia (1975), in which he narrated a story about an expedition in search
of giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. The imagery was based on microscopic uric
acid stains on the brass band of a ballpoint pen on which Dalí had been
urinating for several weeks.
Dalí built a repertoire in the fashion and photography
industries as well. In fashion, his cooperation with Italian fashion designer Elsa
Schiaparelli is well-known, where Dalí was hired by Schiaparelli to
produce a white dress with a lobster print. Other designs Dalí made for her
include a shoe-shaped hat and a pink belt with lips for a buckle. He was also
involved in creating textile designs and perfume bottles. With Christian
Dior in 1950, Dalí created a special "costume for the year
2045. Photographers with whom he collaborated include Man Ray,
Brassaï,
Cecil Beaton,
and Philippe Halsman.
With Man Ray and Brassaï, Dalí photographed nature; with
the others, he explored a range of obscure topics, including (with Halsman) the
Dalí Atomica series (1948)—inspired by his painting Leda Atomica—which
in one photograph depicts "a painter's easel, three cats, a bucket of
water, and Dalí himself floating in the air.
References to Dalí in the context of science are made in
terms of his fascination with the paradigm shift that accompanied the birth of quantum
mechanics in the twentieth century. Inspired by Werner
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in 1958 he wrote in
his "Anti-Matter Manifesto": "In the Surrealist period, I wanted
to create the ic
In this respect, The Disintegration of the
Persistence of Memory, which appeared in 1954, in hearkening
back to The Persistence of Memory, and in portraying that painting in
fragmentation and disintegration summarizes Dalí's acknowledgment of the new
science.
Architectural achievements include his Port Lligat house
near Cadaqués as well as the Dream of Venus surrealist pavilion at the
1939 World's Fair,
which contained within it a number of unusual sculptures and statues. His
literary works include The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí
(1942), Diary of a Genius (1952–63), and Oui: The Paranoid-Critical
Revolution (1927–33). The artist worked extensively in the graphic arts,
producing many etchings and lithographs. While his early work in printmaking is
equal in quality to his important paintings as he grew older, he would sell the
rights to images but not be involved in the print production itself. In addition,
a large number of unauthorized fakes were produced in the eighties and
nineties, thus further confusing the Dalí print market.
One of Dalí's most unorthodox artistic creations may have
been an entire person. At a French nightclub in 1965, Dalí met Amanda Lear,
a fashion model then known as Peki D'Oslo. Lear became his protégé and muse riting
about their affair in the authorized biography My Life With Dalí (1986).
Transfixed by the mannish, larger-than-life Lear, Dalí masterminded her
successful transition from modeling to the music world, advising her on
self-presentation and helping spin mysterious stories about her origin as she
took the disco-art scene by storm. According to Lear, she and Dalí were united
in a "spiritual marriage" on a deserted mountaintop. Referred to as
Dalí's "Frankenstein, some believe Lear's name is a pun on the French
"L'Amant Dalí," or Lover of Dalí. Lear took the place of an earlier
muse, Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin
Dufresne), who had left Dalí's side to join The Factory
of Andy Warhol.
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