Thirty-Five Years After His Death, Salvador Dali Is Still a Phenomenon

Salvador Dali was born in 1904, twenty-two months after his brother’s death, who was also named Salvador Dali. His mother often took Dali to see his dead brother’s grave. Staring down at a tomb marker with his name engraved in stone must have had a deep effect on the young child. Throughout his life, Dali was in turn afraid of and fascinated by death. He said, “The two most important motors that make the artistic and superfine brain of Salvador Dali function are, first, libido or the sexual instinct, and, second, the anguish of death. Not a single minute of life passes without the sublime Catholic, apostolic, and Roman specter of death accompanying me even in the least important of my most subtle and capricious fantasies.”

A consummate draughtsman and painter, often painting eighteen hours a day, Dali’s work certainly exemplifies these two states of mind. He was driven to explore his subconscious, often saying he painted in the hypnogogic state, the ten to fifteen minutes before falling asleep. He believed that he then could access the images of the subconscious without a filter. And because death was so often on his mind, he often painted the symbols of death—a fly for the transience of life, ants symbolizing death and decay. This in-between state of mind he termed the Paranoiac-critical activity. After imagining his own death at two, at seven, he wanted to be Napolean, and at age ten, his life was enveloped in the horrors of WWI until its end when he was 14. His mother died two years later. This was Dali’s childhood.

He was born in Figueres, Spain in his beloved Catalonian region. Early on he became a talented illustrator, and was devoted to 15th-  to 18th-century European art, seriously studying the works of Dürer, El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. In Madrid, he collaborated with Luis Buñuel on two surrealistic anticlerical films. Both were banned in Europe for fifty years. In Paris, when he was 24, he met Picasso and Miró, and the leader of Surrealism, André Breton.

Breton found Dali’s paranoiac-critical method to be the perfect instrument of application for Surrealistic painting, poetry, cinema, fashion, sculpture, and objects—“all manner of exegesis.” Dali’s delirious images were executed in such precise, exquisite detail and color that Dali became the undisputed master of Surrealism. The vivid colors—turquoise and cobalt skies, burnt ochre cliffs, glowing flesh, crimson fabric—his rendering of the subconscious was meticulous; his sense of scale and perspective genius. He could paint a female body, a cube, Catalonian mountains, melting clocks, the shattering of a rhinoceros horn or a table, all photographically perfect. He drew constantly his entire life. A devotee of Freud, whom he met when he was 34 and Freud was 81, the founder of psychoanalysis fueled his imagery in those early years of painting.

When he first met his wife, Gala, he was 25 and she was 36. He was penniless and unknown. She masterminded Dali the showman whose paintings then sold for millions. She dressed him, choreographed his guests, parties and interviews, modeled for his paintings and organized his calendar. “She is my Beatrice,” his muse. Dali was her goldmine. They were married for fifty years, living for part of that time among surrealistic fantasy furniture and fixtures in Cadaqués, until her death at 89.

In 1941, when Dali was 37, he had his first retrospective at MoMA, with forty-three paintings and seventeen drawings. During the next two years, the exhibition traveled to eight of the largest cities in the United States, and he became famous. He painted Helena Rubenstein’s portrait, collaborated with Vogue and other fashion magazines, and designed sets and costumes for ballet and opera. When he returned to Spain, he finished 102 watercolors to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy. He was also a printmaker, filmmaker, jewelry designer and performance artist.

In 1965, the Gallery of Modern Art, NY, exhibited 366 paintings by Dali, which are now in the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. That same year, he met the model Amanda Lear, who became his muse and remained with Dali for 25 years in what she called a “spiritual marriage.” In 1980, his health deteriorated and when Gala died, he never fully recovered. His lifeline was gone, and he died in 1989, at the age of 84, in his beloved Figueres, Spain, where he was born. He is buried in a crypt, a stone chamber beneath the floor of the Dali Theatre and Museum in Figueres, walked upon by the steady stream of visitors.

He was a showman, to be sure, famous for his Catalonian accent, long swirling mustache, fancy clothes and gilded cane. More than that, he was a genius who painted ravishing beauty with superb technical skill. You can see his paintings, along with artists that have inspired Dali throughout his life, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston through December 1. One hundred years after the founding of Surrealism, “Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” at the MFA Boston celebrates a completely original mind with thirty paintings and works on paper, on loan from the Salvador Dali Museum in Florida, as well as books and prints from a private collection. His work is exhibited in small thematic groups along with pieces by Dürer, Raphael, El Greco, Vermeer and many others, showing his devotion to the European tradition of his predecessors.

Throughout his life, he drew inspiration from Piero della Francesco, Einstein, atomic particles and gravity, Freud, Christian iconography, war, holograms, optical illusions, rhinoceros and cauliflowers and hallucinations. He once said, “Oh, Salvador Dali, now you know that, if you play at being a genius, you will surely become one!”