If all the world\u2019s a stage, then one of the greatest performers to walk its boards must be Salvador Dal\u00ed. We call Dal\u00ed a Surrealist, but perhaps a better description would be performance artist, the first ever. Everything Dal\u00ed did was calculated to amaze, astonish, and amuse. Even his appearance was more costume than clothing. Take his mustache, which he grew to a remarkable length and waxed into sharp tips, or his suits, which were made of brilliantly colored velvets encrusted with golden embroidery.<\/p>\n
Was there a real man behind the mask? Maybe. Occasionally we get a glimpse of a vulnerable figure clinging for support to his domineering wife and expressing a longing for genuine spirituality. But the world loved the crazy Dal\u00ed, the man of the mustache and the embroidered waistcoats, and so that\u2019s what he gave them.<\/p>\n
The great tragedy of his life took place before his birth. In 1901, the Dal\u00ed family of Figueres, Spain, had a son named Salvador, after his father, but he died at twenty-one months. Nine months and ten days later, the family had another son, whom they also named Salvador, who survived. But the parents never really recovered from the first loss. They talked nonstop about the dead baby, convincing the new Salvador he was only second-best. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the boy developed a horrific temper and preferred to leave excrement in the hallway than to use the bathroom. School, too, was an unmitigated disaster.<\/p>\n
As a boy Dal\u00ed took drawing classes and, showing promise, had his first public exhibition at his local hometown theater in 1919. The talented young artist moved to Madrid in 1922 to enroll at the School of Fine Arts. After a few years of quarrelling with his professors, Dal\u00ed was expelled for refusing to take a final exam, claiming that none of the faculty were competent to judge him.<\/p>\n
He longed for greener pastures: Paris and the Surrealists. Surrealism was the hip new art movement that preached the nonsense of Dada, the psychoanalysis of Freud, and the politics of Marx. Dal\u00ed was particularly fascinated by its emphasis on the subconscious and wanted to use his meticulous drawing skills to create absurd and irrational images. In 1929, he boarded a train for France, but, to his dismay, instead of welcoming him as the conquering hero, the Surrealists didn\u2019t even notice he\u2019d arrived. He made only one friend, the Surrealist poet Paul \u00c9luard, whom he invited to visit him that summer in Cadaqu\u00e9s, the village on the Catalan coast where the Dal\u00ed family spent their holidays.<\/p>\n
Dal\u00ed returned to Spain in a deep depression, but not long afterward \u00c9luard arrived with his wife, Gala. Born Elena Ivanova Diakonova in Russia, Gala \u00c9luard was some ten years older than Dal\u00ed (she lied about her age); she was also dynamic, imperious, and insatiable. \u00c9luard and Gala had met as teenagers at a tuberculosis sanitarium in Switzerland, and she later crossed Europe during the chaos of World War I to marry him. After the war, \u00c9luard became a leader in the Dada movement, and Gala reveled in the role of muse and mistress, although by 1929 she was growing frustrated at her husband\u2019s limited financial prospects.<\/p>\n
FOR THE LOVE OF GALA<\/p>\n
Initially Gala dismissed Dal\u00ed (she said he looked like a professional Argentine tango dancer), but then she saw his paintings. That\u2019s when she locked onto him like a laser-guided missile. She was one of the first to realize the extent of his talent and to appreciate that talent could produce incredible wealth. Meanwhile, Dal\u00ed was so smitten with her that he paraded about with a geranium behind his ear, concocted a bizarre perfume from dung, and for some reason shaved his armpits until they bled. Their sexual tendencies seemed to be at odds; close friends described Gala as a nymphomaniac, whereas Dal\u00ed abhorred being touched and seemed to have homosexual leanings. And yet, the two functioned well together: Dal\u00ed liked watching, and Gala loved being watched. \u00c9luard accepted her defection with remarkable grace; of course, it helped that she still liked to have sex with him. In 1932, Gala and \u00c9luard divorced so that he could remarry, and two years later Dal\u00ed and Gala were wed in a civil ceremony.<\/p>\n
Henceforth Gala devoted all her energies to promoting Dal\u00ed. She became an expert bargain shopper, for the pair lived in incredible poverty, subsisting on Dal\u00ed\u2019s rare sales and a few checks from \u00c9luard. In summers they returned to Spain, staying in a tiny fisherman\u2019s hut in Port Lligat across the harbor from Cadaqu\u00e9s. Dal\u00ed completed some of his most significant works during those early summers, including The Persistence of Memory. The eerie, ominous work is straight of out Dal\u00ed\u2019s subconscious. On a dark plain, a lump of flesh that might be a face lies next to a table or block from which a barren tree thrusts. Over the face, tree, and table droop pocket watches that seem to have softened and melted into jelly. The idea for the watches came to the artist while looking at a wheel of Camembert cheese softening after dinner. After he painted the work, he asked Gala if it was an image she would remember; she replied that no one could ever forget it. And so Dal\u00ed gave the work its title, for the persistence of his own creation in the viewer\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n
The 1931 exhibition featuring The Persistence of Memory was a huge hit. Gala and Dal\u00ed became the darlings of the smart set, who adopted the artist\u2019s bizarre mode of talking (a society grande dame might say of a concert by Stravinsky, \u201cIt was beautiful, it was gluey! It was ignominious!\u201d). But not everyone appreciated Dal\u00ed\u2019s growing fame. Other Surrealists felt he had hijacked their movement. Then Dal\u00ed started making outrageous statements about, of all people, Adolf Hitler, claiming there was nothing more Surreal than the dictator. (Hitler didn\u2019t return the compliment, stating that Surrealists should be sterilized or executed.)<\/p>\n
The Communist Surrealists insisted that Dal\u00ed retract his statements, but he protested that if Surrealism was about exploring dreams and taboos without censorship, then he had every right to dream about Hitler.<\/p>\n
If Dal\u00ed dreamed of Hitler, he certainly didn\u2019t want to live under his rule. When German forces marched toward Paris at the start of World War II, he high-tailed it as far from the Nazis as possible. In August 1940, he, Gala, and an astounding amount of luggage sailed from Lisbon for New York.<\/p>\n
The couple split their time between New York and Pebble Beach, California, with U.S. magazines breathlessly following their every move. Yet, even as Hollywood celebrities and New York socialites embraced him, Dal\u00ed began to change his style. He painted Gala in a realistic, even beautiful portrait, with nary a melting watch, pork chop, or flying elephant to be seen. He painted religious themes\u2014a crucifixion, a Madonna (modeled, however improbably, by Gala), a Last Supper. Friends were baffled. Dal\u00ed, spiritual? Dal\u00ed, serious? The thought of Dal\u00ed in prayer was ridiculous.<\/p>\n
What Gala found ridiculous was the thought of Dal\u00ed pursuing anything other than his incredibly lucrative work. Long gone were the days when she scoured Paris markets for the cheapest bread; now she dined only at the finest restaurants and dressed in Chanel couture. She could always persuade Dal\u00ed to take on even the most outlandish (and well-paid) commissions. He designed the dream sequences for the Alfred Hitchcock movie Spellbound (although they were later reshot) and partnered with Walt Disney on a short animated film (although Disney later canned the project). He designed jewelry (a melted watch), furnishings (the \u201clobster phone\u201d), and furniture (a sofa modeled after Mae West\u2019s lips). His fame soared. No matter what stunt he pulled\u2014arriving at a lecture in a white Rolls Royce filled with cauliflower, entering the rhinoceros cage at a zoo with a painting of a rhinoceros\u2014reporters covered it and readers ate it up.<\/p>\n
If Dal\u00ed\u2019s greatest fans in the 1930s had been Parisian high society, in the \u201960s he was adored by hippies who flocked to Port Lligat with plentiful supplies of marijuana and LSD. Dal\u00ed labeled his entourage the Court of Miracles and fawned over what one biographer calls \u201ca fluctuating cast of dwarf hermaphrodites, cross-eyed models, twins, nymphets, and transvestites.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then the sex really got out of hand. Gala, now in her seventies, adored having access to so many fresh young men, and Dal\u00ed arranged \u201cerotic Masses,\u201d orgies in which rooms were devoted to different groupings. All this decadence was enormously expensive, and Gala, who didn\u2019t hesitate to lock Dal\u00ed in his studio when commissions came due, had to invent increasingly elaborate ways to make money. She had her husband sign hundreds of blank sheets of paper that could later be printed with \u201climited edition\u201d lithographs.<\/p>\n
Old age finally caught up with Gala and Dal\u00ed. Her skin started erupting with horrible lesions along the sutures left from her multiple facelifts. She died in June 1982 of heart failure. Dal\u00ed spent the next six years waiting to join her. He refused to eat, wept constantly, and spent his days lying alone in the dark. A bell was mounted by his bed to summon a nurse always on duty, and at night he would ring it incessantly. The annoyed nurses finally had the bell replaced with a light, and one night he pressed the button so many times it short-circuited and set his bed on fire. The staff found him crawling in a haze of smoke and flames with burns on nearly 20 percent of his body. Everyone assumed the burns would kill him, but he survived, recovering enough to give an interview to Vanity Fair in 1986. It was his last rally, though he hung on three more years, dying on January 23, 1989.<\/p>\n
What, today, can we make of Salvador Dal\u00ed? Many art historians dismiss his post\u2013World War II work as self-indulgent kitsch; some go further and deride his entire oeuvre. A recent critic described him as a \u201cpuerile pervert whose ability to generate undeserved fascination in the convoluted workings of his misanthropic mind continues to astonish.\u201d (Ow.) What no one can deny is his influence: Dal\u00ed invented the idea of life as art.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Secret Lives of Great Artists<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n Elizabeth Lunday<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If all the world\u2019s a stage, then one of the greatest performers to walk its boards must be Salvador Dal\u00ed. We call Dal\u00ed a Surrealist, but perhaps a better description would be performance artist, the first ever. 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