Dali House

While in New York in 1942, Dali had denounced his old friend Luis Bunuel as an atheist, a serious charge at the time, and it set in motion a chain of events that ultimately forced Bunuel to quit his post at the Museum of Modern Art, where he was in charge of making and propagating anti-Nazi films, and got him blacklisted from the American movie industry. The photo shows Dali and Bunuel on Cape Creus in the 1920s.

Many years later Bunuel was showing his son Juan Luis around Toledo, where he, Lorca and Dali used to get up to mischief during their student days. “We ended way up on this balcony,” Juan Luis recalled, “gazing at the city below. He was all teary. I asked what was the matter. He said, ‘This was where I used to come with Federico and Salvador. We would come here to vomit’.”

Of Dali’s betrayal, Juan Luis said, “What a man! I mean that in a bad sense. He blew it all! He was a bad friend… He was not a stupid man but, for 50 years, he dropped all of his friends, and went out with cretins.” In the late 1930s, he said, his father was down on his luck and wrote to Dali for a loan of $50. “I am starting work at the Museum Of Modern Art and I’ll pay you in a month.” Dali’s answer: “No, you don’t lend money to friends — and thank goodness that Franco won the war.” Luis Bunuel died in 1983.

Dali’s new style of “nuclear mysticism” was the subject of a series of lectures he gave in cities in Texas, Florida, Iowa and Missouri during 1952. Touring with him and Gala were Reynolds and Eleanor Morse of Cleveland, by now the world’s foremost collectors of his work.

The Morses were married in 1943 and treated themselves to a Dali painting, “Daddy Longlegs of the Evening — Hope!” (shown here, click for a larger image), part of a Cleveland Museum of Art retrospective. Dali refused to sell the picture without its frame.

Reynolds acceded, even though the frame cost him more than the painting, but the couple continued to buy more Dalis, until their collection quickly outgrew their home. In 1971 they opened America’s first Dali museum adjacent to their business, Injection Molders Supply, on Commerce Parkway in Beachwood, Ohio. Dali, who would have preferred to see the museum in New York — in a building with “walls that breathe and pulse imperceptibly” — was nevertheless present for the opening.

That facility in turn became so popular that by 1980 they had to find a still larger place.

A St Petersburg attorney proposed his Florida hometown, and both the city and the state helped pave the way for the Salvador Dali Museum’s opening there that same year. In 1989 King Juan Carlos of Spain presented the Morses with the Cross of the Officer of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, the highest honour possible for non-Spaniards. Reynolds died in 2002; Eleanor today chairs the board of the St Petersburg museum.

One of Dali’s more grotesque creations, “Daddy Longlegs” depicts a mutilated figure with his own head stretched over a tree limb, the spider of the title — considered a good omen in France — crawling on his face. In the chaos surrounding this glimmer of optimism is an indictment of war and a prophecy that World War II will be a hollow victory for any victor.

Dali concluded 1948 by reconciling with his father and sister (Ana Maria Dali would soon publish her book about him; Salvador Dali Cusi, pictured below with his son, died in 1950), writing and illustrating “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship”, a pastiche of a Renaissance artist’s manual, and designing the sets and costumes for a Rome production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”.

And in 1949, while still in Rome, he met Pope Pius XII. Dali had decided to abandon his atheist cynicism in favour of Catholicism. The pontiff accepted his sincerity and blessed the painting that Dali had brought for him, the first of two versions he would do of “Madonna of Port Lligat” (detail above, click for the complete image).

In a lecture the following year, Dali tried to explain “Why I was Sacrilegious”, and in 1950 published an article on “The Decadence of Modern Art”. To Ian Gibson, author of a nasty biography of the artist, it was “the most outrageous self-publicity campaign of his life”.

If it was a scam, Dali kept it up for a long time. A decade later he was back in the papal chambers, this time to meet Pope John XXIII.

Life magazine was based in a building at 19 West 31st Street in Man- hattan before its move to Rockefeller Plaza, and among its fabled photographers was Philippe Halsman (1906-79), who had a 30-year collaboration with Dali. The most famous image that emerged from their friendship was 1948’s “Dali Atomicus”, seen above, which was given a two-page spread in the magazine.

Halsman and Dali took their cue from Harold Edgerton’s “Coronet” photo of a milk droplet frozen in time and wondered if they might get away with blowing up a chicken for a split-second exposure. They settled on tossing three cats around instead. Halsman suspended an easel, stool and two paintings by Dali (one being his new “Leda Atomica”) from the ceiling while his wife held up a chair. On the count of three, assistants threw the cats and a bucket of water into the air, and on the count of four Dali jumped and Halsman snapped the picture. Six hours and 28 attempts later, Halsman was satisfied. “My assistants and I were wet, dirty and near complete exhaustion,” he wrote. “Only the cats still looked like new.”

The following year Dali was back in Halsman’s studio kicking his legs for “Pop-corn Nude”, below left, a maelstrom of flying components, including piles of popcorn and baked goods and a naked woman, and in 1951 he posed in top hat contemplating an image he himself had devised: a skull assembled from seven nude women.

Halsman, the Latvia-born lensman who was chased from his Paris studio by the Nazis and was granted an emergency US visa thanks to Albert Einstein, shot 101 covers for Life — more than anyone else — and produced iconic images of Einstein, Groucho Marx, JFK, Audrey Hepburn and Winston Churchill. He is best remembered for persuading his famous subjects to jump in the air for “one last shot”. Among those who went along with the fun were Marilyn Monroe, then-vice president Richard Nixon and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The terrific “outtakes” below from the Halsman-Dali shoot were published in the autumn 1950 issue of Photography Workshop magazine and are online here.