Dali Planet #83: At the World’s Fair
Dali had a full head of steam when he roared back into New York in 1939, and a lot of people wanted to tap into the excitement surrounding him. In March the venerable department store Bonwit Teller — which at the time occupied the site of Trump Tower — arranged for him to design a window display, but it all went badly pear-shaped.
Dali rummaged through the store and selected a pair of ancient mannequins complete with long human hair. He placed one astride an astrakhan-lined bathtub, holding a mirror to evoke the myth of Narcissus, and on the floor and surrounding furniture arranged real narcissuses. Above a bed was a buffalo’s head with a bloody pig in its jaws and its hooves forming the feet of the bed. Everywhere were artificially glowing coals, even on the pillow beside the other dummy’s head, and next to the bed stood the Phantom of Sleep. (The photo here is from another occasion.)
Another account describes the scene thus: a female mannequin with a head of roses in a negligee of green feathers and a male dummy wearing his “aphrodisiac dinner jacket” festooned with glasses of creme de menthe, each with a dead fly in it. Beside them were his lobster telephone and an old-fashioned bathtub lined in lamb’s wool and with three wax hands on the rim holding mirrors.
When the display, entitled “Day and Night”, was unveiled, a crowd gathered that became so big it was impeding traffic. The Bonwit Teller management hurriedly removed some of the main features in the hope of curbing interest, but then Dali saw it. One source says he furiously shoved the bathtub through the window, another than he “calmly climbed into the window and tipped up the bathtub”, the water smashing the window and soaking the onlookers.
The following day the press took his side, praising the blow he had struck for the “independence of American art”. He received a number of offers, among them an offer to design a pavilion for the World Fair, and that night’s opening of the new Dali exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery was packed. It was the most popular art show in America, Life magazine reported, since Whistler’s “Mother” had gone on view five years earlier. Within a fortnight Dali had sold 21 paintings and pocketed more than $25,000. Only two works went unsold: “The Enigma of Hitler” and “The Endless Enigma”, both of which helped get him kicked out of the surrealist movement.
The Art Institute of Chicago has several terrific Dali paintings, among them “The Invention of the Monsters” from 1937, seen here, “Mae West (Face of Mae West Which Can Be Used as an Apartment)” from 1934, “Visions of Eternity” from 1936-37 and 1933’s “Atmospheric Chair”.
Dali and Gala joined the multitudes enjoying the mountain air at the once-ritzy Austrian ski resort of Semmering in the winter of 1937-38, just before the Anschluss — the Nazi annexation of the country. They may have stayed at the Panhans Hotel, opened in 1888, later home to the Alps’ largest covered swimming pool and Austria’s first casino, much to the pleasure of Josephine Baker and a slew of European filmmakers. World War II wiped out tourism and the hotel closed for lack of interest after a final New Year’s Eve ball in 1969, but was rebuilt in the ’70s and reopened in 1983.
The painting here is “Mountain Lake” from 1938, also known as “Beach with Telephone”. Here the phone recurs, missing its whimsical lobster handset, slung on a crutch and dotted with snails, as a reference to Chamberlain calls to Hitler to negotiate the abortive Munich Agreement. 
La Pausa is a villa below the village of Roquebrune on France’s sunny south coast that the Second Duke of Westminster built for his lover, fashion designer Coco Chanel in 1927. They split up three years later after she declined his offer of marriage with the immortal line, “There are a lot of duchesses, but only one Coco Chanel.” She stayed on here through World War II, having closed her Parisian fashion house when the Nazis came to town, though her main residence remained the Hotel Ritz in the capital.
Dali and Gala enjoyed Chanel’s company during their stay in Italy and for a while in 1938 moved in with her at the villa, which takes its name from the legend that Mary Magdalene rested in the village after crossing the Mediterranean following the Crucifixion. Here Dali painted “The Endless Enigma”, above, which has been called a triumph of his paranoiac-critical approach, melding hallucinogenic subject matter as diverse as a reclining greyhound, a sardine and a Cyclops with a face composed partially of a woman seen from the back who is mending a ship’s sail.
Churchill proofread his book “A History of the English Speaking Peoples” here and painted “The View of Menton and Italy from La Pausa”, which is among Churchill memorabilia displayed in one of the rooms.
