Dali House

Dali’s “Seated Monk”, from 1925.

Sometime in the late 1970s photographer Robert Descharnes, Salvador Dali’s friend, secretary and archivist, snapped a picture of the maestro sitting with a man identified as a monk, who was evidently visiting him at his home in Port Lligat, Spain.

Though the monk’s attire didn’t seem particularly Tibetan, I got it in my head that this was supposed to be a Tibetan monk. He does at least look Asian.

The question is what was he doing there with Dali.

And the problem with trying to find out why through a Google search is that you cannot put the terms “dali” and “monk” (and certainly not “tibet”) together without coming immediately face to face with everyone in the world who misspells the title of Tibet’s religious leader, the Dalai Lama.

It’s a dirt-common mistake that even posh American newspapers make. You can’t blame Google for assuming, since there are a million webpages referring to “dali lama”, that that’s what you want to see. Tracking down the facts behind an obscure photo of Salvador Dali and a visiting monk thus becomes a mountain-climbing expedition.

In honour of the Year of the Bull-Headed, however, I tried again recently. There was a new entry I came across not long after I left base camp: a Tibetan monk who’s an artist, and has in fact been described as “the Salvador Dali of Tibetan art”.

You can imagine how confounding this was.

I had a cursory look at the 2006 article from the San Antonio Express-News about Rabkar Wangchuk, who wore cowboy boots and a flat-brim hat while spreading the word about the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in Dharamsala, India.

Wangchuk was in Texas building a stupa and explaining how to make sand mandalas. On a less traditional bent, he also made manipulated photos using images of the Dalai Lama and spiritual symbols.

At this point I gave up looking for Dali’s monk buddy. Maybe I’ll just phone Robert Descharnes in Paris.