Dali House

The National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh have 1936’s “The Signal of Anguish” in their dada and surrealism collection at the Dean Gallery, along with “Exploding Raphaelesque Head” from 1951, “Oiseau” from 1928 and “Untitled (Composition with Soda Syphon)” from 1937.

The Dean, one of three facilities in the city, was originally an orphan’s hospital, ultimately converted into a gallery in 1999.

“The Madonna of Port Lligat” from 1950 hangs at the Fukuoka Art Museum.

Dalí found religion and went extremely large with it in this work, all the components floating like the elements of an atom and zeroing in on the nucleus of the infant Jesus (Juan Figueras, a Cadaqués lad, was the model) and the bread of the Eucharist hovering at his centre, the very core of the universe, “a tabernacle”, Dalí called it. Gala becomes the Virgin and, off to the right, a string of angels.

Joining the surrealistic “sacraments” on the altar that are also found in the 1949 “Madonna of Port Lligat” is a rhinoceros, a beast in whose horn Dalí believed lay the essential shape of nature.

There are several more dramatic oils by Dalí in Japan today, including the “‘Geodesic’ Portrait of Gala” from 1936, which is at the Yokohama Museum of Art.

Below left is the expressionistic “Palladio’s Thalia Corridor” from 1937, which hangs in the Mie Prefectural Art Museum in Tso (a version from ‘38 is at West Dean College in England). “Venus and Sailor (Homage to Salvat-Papasseit)”, below right, from 1925 at and can be seen at the Ikeda Museum of 20th-century Art in Shizuoka.

The Deux Magots cafe in Paris’ Montparnasse district was a favoured meeting spot for the surrealists, so it may have been there where they held a mock trial to consider Dali’s crimes against the movement in 1934. He was, after a brief reprieve, expelled from the group.

The members had taken offence at Dali’s “The Enigma of William Tell”, an unflattering portrait of Lenin, shown above, as well as his commercial flair, Andre Breton famously twisting his name into the anagram “Avida Dollars”. Breton called him a self-confessed racist who supported the fascists in Spain, Italy and Germany.

Breton had seen Dali’s arrival in Paris six years earlier as just what the surrealists needed. They were by then already running dry of ideas. But Breton and Aragon saw themselves as sophisticates in charge of a motley amalgam of foreign buffoons, including the original “Andalucian dogs”, Dali and Luis Bunuel. Dali in particular oozed warped pathologies, and his surrealism, it’s been noted, “was dangerously total”.

Dali, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret wrote in their biography, “enjoyed pomp and ritual, so he actually preferred monarchies to totalitarian regimes; the political Left was too drab and prosaic. To the surrealists he confessed, ‘Very rich people have always impressed me; very poor people, like the fishermen of Port Lligat, have likewise impressed me; average people, not at all.’ He regretted that the surrealists were attracting ‘a whole fauna of misfit and unwashed petty bourgeois’.”

As to the Fuhrer, they quoted him further: “Whenever I started to paint the leather strap that crossed from his belt to his shoulder, the softness of that Hitler flesh packed under his military tunic transported me into a sustaining and Wagnerian ecstasy that set my heart pounding, an extremely rare state of excitement that I did not even experience during the act of love.

“On the one hand,” Dali said another time with a completely straight face, “I had society, politely astonished that I was going somewhere that they could not go, and on the other hand, the surrealists. I was always off to where the rest couldn’t go. Snobbery consists in going to places that others are excluded from — which produces a feeling of inferiority in the others. In all human relations there is a way of achieving complete mastery of a situation. That was my policy where surrealism was concerned.”

At right is the cartoonish “Hitler Masturbating”. Dali challenged Breton to convene the group for an emergency meeting “at which the mystique of Hitler shall be debated”. Dali showed up with a thermometer in his mouth, claiming he felt ill.

While Breton reeled off his accusations, Dali kept checking his temperature. When it was his turn, he began to remove his clothing piece by piece, while reciting a prepared speech in which he explained that his obsession with Hitler was at heart apolitical, and that he could not be a Nazi “because if Hitler were ever to conquer Europe, he would do away with hysterics of my kind, as had already happened in Germany”.

On yet another occasion he admitted that he saw Hitler as a masochist determined to start a war and lose it in heroic style.

From Dali’s point of view, the surrealists’ leftist politics was dull and doomed. “Marxism is shit, the last of Christian shit,” he declared, and to be sure, communism served only to handcuff their imagination. Dali once made an armchair studded with glass vials containing milk — Aragon pointed out that there were too many starving children in the world to justify such a waste.

By the time Dali moved into the apartment at 7 rue Becquerel that Paul Eluard had leased for Gala — with a view of the Montmartre windmills that would have thrilled Cervantes — his father was furious over the affair and banished him from the family homes permanently. (Papa could not have been happy, either, about his son’s scrawling the words “Sometimes I Spit on the Portrait of My Mother” on a lithograph of the Sacred Heart he’d found and then putting it in a show.) Dali responded to his father’s wrath by painting “Accommodations of Desire”, seen above: The angry lion is his father, the vulva made of ants is Dali’s fear of impotence.

Gala and Eluard divorced in 1932 and she married Dali two years later in a civil ceremony in Paris, a church service waiting another 26 years — until after Eluard died.
Art critic Robert Hughes described Gala as a “very nasty and very extravagant harpy”, but Dali was completely dependent on her, saying he would go insane if she ever left him. On another occasion he said that, other than himself, only she was capable of “moderating and exalting my divine madness”. She was his “Angel of Equilibrium”.

“She is the rarest being to see,” he said, “the superstar who cannot in any case be compared with La Callas or Greta Garbo, because one may see them often, whereas Gala is an invisible being, the anti-exhibitionist par excellence.”

Dali’s long-time secretary Peter Moore pointed out that Salvador’s relationship with Gala got off to a start that was as rocky as Cap Creus, even if her husband Paul Eluard didn’t seem to mind (he and Dali remained friends).

The Dalis are seen here in a photo by Robert Descharnes with a collection of Faberge eggs they received as a wedding gift in 1958.

Not only did Dali’s father go berserk at the thought of him being in love with an older, married, Russian non-Catholic, his sister denounced Gala to the Guardia Civil as a whore. Dali, Moore claimed, never spoke to Anna again, although they did reconcile in the end, as we shall see.

Gala was, in Moore’s estimation, the reason Dali became greedy. He had to keep making lots of money to keep her happy, whereas Dali had little idea of its value. She once gave him $100 because he was taking a taxi from their hotel to another, and when he got there he phoned Gala to say he had no money for the return trip. Evidently he’d looked at the taxi meter, which said “1.00 dollar”, and read it as 100. Pictured here is “Portrait of Gala” from about 1977.

Meanwhile, Moore continued, Dali had to make up his mind about another woman in his life: a Dior model known as Nanita. Once, when Dali heard that Nanita was seriously ill, he went to Cadaques’ main church and prayed for three hours, proof enough, said Moore, that he never really forsook his religion.