Dali House

In 1955 Dali, fresh from another lecture in Paris for which he showed up in a Rolls Royce filled to the brim with cauliflowers, was home in Port-Lligat one night when a reporter from Time phoned to get his reaction to a bit of critique.

Prominent theologian Paul Tillich had told the magazine that Dali’s new painting “The Sacrament of the Last Supper”, just acquired by the National Gallery in Washington, was “junk”.

The overseas phone connection was poor. “I was not drunk!” Dali insisted. He did indeed offer a completely sober description of the picture as an “arithmetic and philosophical cosmogony based on the paranoiac sublimity of the number 12 … the maximum of luminous and Pythagorian instantaneousness, based on the celestial communion of the number 12: 12 hours of the day, 12 months of the year, the 12 pentagons of the dodecahedron, 12 signs of the zodiac around the sun, the 12 apostles around Christ … the pentagon contains microcosmic man: Christ”.

In the event, “Last Supper” was a box-office hit at the National Gallery. In terms of visitor popularity, it pushed the perennial favourite, Renoir’s “Girl with a Watering Can”, into the mud. It was, Dali boasted years later, “the best seller of all modern paintings. There are more postcard reproductions of it than any da Vinci or Raphael. My strategy worked: At a certain point I decided to do paintings that would be more popular than anything else in the world. My performance was marvellous. I would even go so far as to say that painting is a thousand times better than all of Picasso’s works put together. That one single painting!”