Dali House

A silver horn mimics a horse in Dali’s 1936 oil on wood “A Trombone and a Sofa Fashioned Out of Saliva”, or is that horse supposed to be a sofa, and is the trombone not more like a tuba?

The image resolution and my knowledge of wind instruments are unfortunately poor, but the ruined hull of a boat at the lower right is intriguing, as are the visages in the clouds. The smaller one reminds for all the world of JMW Turner’s “Sea Monster” (detail below).

The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation has “Saliva” at the moment, though it’s attributed to the collection of noted connoisseur Eugene Thaw of New Mexico, ever since a Sotheby’s auction in 1997. Jason Kaufman has an interesting 1994 interview with Thaw on his website.

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.

At the outset of World War II in 1939 Dali and Gala moved to Arcachon, a popular resort in southern France with a beach and a climate favoured by ailing Europeans. The Dalis did not stay long. He may have sympathised to some extent with the fascists, but he was constantly fleeing their advance. George Orwell criticised Dali for “scuttling off like rat as soon as France is in danger … When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near.”

In 2003 on the website Counterpunch.org, Vicente Navarro of Johns Hopkins University charged Dali with “active and belligerent support for Spain’s fascist regime” and claimed he had to leave his home in Port-Lligat “because the local people wanted to lynch him”.

That doubtless had more to do with a letter that Dali sent to the Spanish dictator Franco when it was announced that compensation would be paid to anyone who’d lost their olive trees in a particularly bad winter. The olives of Cadaques were fine, Dali pointed out, thus ruining any chance of payment to his neighbours.

Musician Costas Ferris asked Dali in the early 1970s about Franco’s Spain. “He didn’t say anything against the Spanish left-wing revolutionaries, but he said that the Communist Party was a mafia, and he hated mafias.”

It’s generally acknowledged, though, that Dali wished to remain apolitical. But on his return to Spain, Franco was waiting to greet him as a friend, as we shall see. Above is a detail from Dali’s “The Invisible Man” from 1929.