Dali House

“There are some days,” Salvador Dalí once said, “when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”

I’m not sure of the context of his sentiment, but it certainly has a fetching existential ring to it. A big hand for Salamander, for all the satisfaction he’s given me since I first encountered his work in the 1960s.

I’d long marvelled over pictures of his paintings, from all of his eras, and he kept showing up in the newspapers and magazines like Life, that wild waxed moustache and flaring eyes, doing something crazy at the side of someone even more famous than he was. Then next thing I knew he was hanging around Studio 54 and Warhol was choking back his jealousy while trying to get him into his Interview rag, although Andy was more interested in scoring a whopping great commission for painting Gala, Dalí’s wife. He never got it, but the point is that Dalí’s life just seemed to get silly.

Then he died, back in Figueras, on January 23, 1989. And now here I am building him a spirit house. Not that he needs another one, of course – he’s all over the Web.

Born in Figueras, Spain, on May 11, 1904, Dalí (pictured here with his father) studied art in Madrid and Barcelona, where he assimilated all the artistic styles of the ages and early on developing a superb technical facility. In the late 1920s he was deeply influenced by Freud’s writings about the erotic significance of subconscious imagery, and upon meeting the newly found surrealists group in Paris he set out to establish the “greater reality” of man’s subconscious over his reason. He began to induce hallucinatory states in himself using a process he called the “Paranoiac Critical”, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the best-known of all the great surrealists.

He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion, portraying them in meticulously realistic detail.
In the late 1930s, Dalí switched to a more academic style influenced by the Renaissance painter Raphael, and for his treason was expelled from the Surrealist movement.

He went on to design theatre sets, interiors of fashionable shops and jewellery, as well as exhibiting his genius for self-promotion in the United States, where he lived from 1940 to 1955.

The Paranoiac Critical method was a way of perceiving reality he defined as “irrational knowledge” based on a “delirium of interpretation”. He invited the viewer to perceive multiple images within the same configuration, in much the same way as one sees figures in the clouds.

Dalí, though not a true paranoid, was able to simulate a paranoid state, without the use of drugs, and upon his return to “normal perspective” he painted what he’d seen, terming them “hand-painted dream photographs”. The process, he said, “makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality.
“I believe that the moment is near when, by a procedure of active paranoic thought, it will be possible to systematise confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.”

In his review of Dalí’s 1942 “fictionalised” autobiography, “The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí”, George Orwell was revolted by the supposed revelations of sadism and necrophilia, but decided that “Dalí’s fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay of capitalist civilisation. [Nevertheless] what he clearly needs is diagnosis. The question is not so much what he is as why he is like that … The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations.”

These aberrations were, Orwell suggested, “partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dalí unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism … And suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real métier to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks … There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people.”