Dali House

Okay, the Great Salvador Dali Biography, months in the making, is now uploaded to Google Earth. You can find the post here or just start reading the Dali House version below, which not only has Google Earth images of some of the places on the tour, it’s got a few extra photos and some additional information too.

There are 185 places around the globe on the Google Earth tour and, even with several locations bundled together in single posts here, there should ultimately be almost as many entries on the blog, starting … right now.

“My life,” Salvador Dali once said to the moans of his many detractors, “is one tragical sequence of exhibitionism.” There is a lot to dislike about Dali. He was a male chauvinist, ridiculed his friends’ needs, kowtowed to fascists, was bizarrely aberrant in sexual matters, admitted to “a pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash” that ultimately almost wrecked the market for his own art, and he built a fortress of appalling megalomania around his fundamental absence of self-esteem.

How greedy was he? He told the Greek actress Melina Mercouri in 1965 that he would make anything for money. “Anything! I do not have any kind of scruple.” His and Gala’s neighbours in Port-Lligat claimed that in their later years they kept separate trunkloads of dollars, Spanish pesetas and French francs. And, when signing autographs for fans, Dali would always keep their pens!

Sal with Amanda Lear, his “little squirrel” of the ’60s, who gets her own star on the Daliwood Walk of Fame.

Was he a pervert? He said that while he was painting his first surrealist works, like “The Great Masturbator”, he thought about the women of Paris who always spurned his advances: “With my hand, before my wardrobe mirror, I accomplished the rhythmic and solitary sacrifice in which I was going to prolong as much as possible the incipient pleasure looked forward to and contained in all the feminine forms I had looked at longingly that afternoon, whose images, now commanded by the magic of my gesture, reappeared one after another by turn, coming by force to show me of themselves what I had desired in each one!

“At the end of a long, exhausting and mortal 15 minutes, having reached the limit of my strength, I wrenched out the ultimate pleasure with all the animal force of my clenched hand, a pleasure mingled as always with the bitter and burning release of my tears — this in the heart of Paris, where I sensed all about me the gleaming foam of the thighs of feminine beds. Salvador Dali lay down alone in his bed.”

There are a few more dandy anecdotes in this tour, but as to the central debate over whether he was sexually impotent, he shrugged it off: “For the artist, the libido and sexual instincts are sublimated in the artistic creation. Because of that, every great artist is a little impotent in the sexual sense.”

So no “Dali the Next Generation”, then? No. He had an “instinctive horror” of children. “The sons of extraordinary men are almost always mediocre,” he grumbled.

What the hell does “coprophagic” mean? He got a kick out of shit. The other surrealists were rather worried about this after they saw his painting “The Lugubrious Game”. “The drawers bespattered with excrement were painted with such minute and realistic complacency that the whole little surrealist group was anguished,” Dali wrote, adding that he wasn’t coprophagic at all.

But in exploring the psyche and how it develops from infancy, he often depicted human behaviour that’s normally kept private, such as masturbation and defecation.

In “The Lugubrious Game”, a phrase borrowed from Paul Eluard, a figure is slit open, which the art critic Georges Bataille saw as a rendering of castration as seen in the “male dreams of boyish, burlesque recklessness”, and “the reason for the punishment is none other than the disgusting dirt on the underpants” of another figure … true masculinity in disgrace and horror”.

What about Dali’s elephants? The elephant first trundles onto a Dali canvas in 1944’s “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening”. Gian Lorenzo Bernini used elephants to carry his Roman obelisks, complete with “long, multi-jointed, almost invisible legs of desire”, as one writer put it. There is a phallic overtone to go with “a sense of phantom reality”.

“The elephant is a distortion in space,” another analyst suggested, “its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure.”

Which came first, the elephant or the egg? The pre-natal egg symbolised love and hope as early as “The Great Masturbator” and reappeared even more prominently in “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus”.

“I started calling myself a genius to impress people, and ended up being one,” he said, and on another occasion: “When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.”

In a 1994 article for Time, the influential art critic Robert Hughes lamented that Dali had long before his death “collapsed into wretched exhibitionism” and dimissed him as “an important artist for about 10 years, starting in the late 1920s”.

But the thing is, he was a genius, and his art was often miraculous, throughout his life. Even one of his most severe critics, George Orwell, acknowledged that, “He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud.”

Dali was certainly confounding, and often deliberately so. The goal of his art, he said, was to “systematise confusion and thus help to discredit completely the world of reality”.

He created thousands of paintings, drawings and prints and dozens of sculptures, designed stage sets and costumes for the ballet and the theatre, illustrated books, made films, explored emerging technology, concocted commercial advertising and came out with clothing, jewellery and perfume. Only a handful of his creations were trite; a few were surely self-serving. The rest remain compelling, forceful, mentally provocative and even spiritually nurturing.

And he did all of this with a profound understanding of celebrity, anticipating Warhol by decades, not to mention performance art. “Dali took it as his fundamental intellectual responsibility to irritate and transgress, exuberantly and unrepentantly,” art historian Charles Stuckey wrote in Art in America.

He did so convinced that mankind had reached a dangerous precipice. “Our epoch is dying of moral skepticism and spiritual nothingness,” he lamented in his autobiography, “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali”.

“Imaginative slothfulness, entrusting itself to the mechanical, momentary and material pseudo-progress of the post-war period, has de-hierarchised the spirit. It has disarmed it, dishonoured it before death and eternity. Mechanical civilisation will be destroyed by war. The machine is doomed to crumble and rust, gutted on the battlefields, and the youthful, energetic masses that have constructed them are doomed to serve as cannon fodder.”

In the conflagration of Hiroshima, however, Dali recognised the promise of a new beginning. The atom’s division set him on a new course between the science of spinning molecules and the serenity he found in the Catholic faith of his forebears that produced some of his most timeless work.

Salvador Dali Planet #1: The Railway Station at Perpignan, France

FURTHER READING

The Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation
The Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida
A World History of Art has the Descharnes-Neret biography online, illustrated
Salvador Dali Art Gallery: top-notch collection of images with commentaries
Martynas‘ comprehensive look at the man and his art
Artsmode Network’s Salvador Dali Visions has many articles
George Bailey’s image-packed Tripod site
Photos of Dali
All the Dali prints
Decent commentaries on many Dali paintings with wallpaper links at this site, part of the online series “A World History of Art”