Dali House

On the eve of Salvador Dalí’s 104th birthday on Sunday, a buyer in disguise handed Sotheby’s a cheque for $802,600 this week in return for the painting above, “Portrait of Madame Schlumberger”, begun in 1963 and signed in ‘65. The auction house was expecting about half a million dollars, so many happy returns all round.

Carstairs Gallery in New York bought the oil painting when the paint was barely dry, and Sotheby’s was flogging it in the same city for an “important” private collector but didn’t say who, so it’s not clear whether his model ever actually owned the thing.

“I don’t really like it,” São Schlumberger told Women’s Wear Daily in 1987. “I was expecting a fantasy … but he did a classic.”

Of Portuguese and German descent, Madame Schlumberger and her husband, the French-American oil tycoon Pierre Schlumberger, were keen on art.

She favoured Rothko, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein, they hung out with Warhol, kept the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center happy and fed Mondrian and Calder to Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Dalí was pulled in to do her portrait two years after their wedding. São put on the same Givenchy gown for his several visits to their place on Sutton Place in Manhattan, and at the same time he made her a necklace, though perhaps not the one she’s holding in the painting. He was indeed in his neo-classicist era with the formal pose and fine details, so São, hankering for surrealism, had to make do with a dreamy background landscape. See the rest.

Pharmaceutical company Roussel-UCLAF, headquartered on the Boulevard de Invalides in Paris, has fittingly enough, Dali’s “The Alchemist” from 1962 in its collection.

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In 1967 Dali organised an “Homage to Meissonier” at the Meurice Hotel in Paris and unveiled his newest canvas “Tuna Fishing”, a tortured image rooted on L’Almadrava cove at Roses not far from Cadaques, a popular sunbathing spot but also, as documented in the painting, the scene of fishermen netting, spearing and gutting live tuna.

Dali was at once paying homage to the French classicist painter and sculptor Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-91) and lending tribute, in classic forms, to the Catalonians who struggle daily to harvest the sea. In the photo below left he stands before the Louvre’s statue of Meissonier, which had been promised to his Figueras museum. Below right he’s in his Meurice suite, with his rebuilt “Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket” in the background.

In the meantime Dali was having a lot of fun. He was starting to pop up regularly on television, mostly in America. He guested on the “Tonight Show”, bringing along a leather rhinoceros to sit on. In the ’70s he told Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” that “Dali is immortal and will not die”.

Then there were the TV commercials. Between 1967 and ‘74 he sold chocolates (”Lanvin chocolates drive me mad!” was his line) and Alka-Seltzer (spray-painting a model to illustrate her digestive distress), flogged Datsun station wagons, designed the logo for Chupa Chups lollipops and, in a bit filmed aboard a Braniff Airlines jet, told Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford, “If you got it, flaunt it.” Ford’s reply: “That’s telling ‘em, Dali baby!”

He also designed an ashtray for Air India, and was paid with a live elephant, which he donated to the Barcelona Zoo. Asked if he was perhaps getting too commercial, Dali pointed out that Leonardo da Vinci “designed the garters for the Pope’s Swiss Guards”. He did, to his credit, turn down a proposal to open a string of “Dalicatessens” across the USA.

Also in 1967, Edgar Froese, who would later that year form the rock band Tangerine Dream, was invited to perform at Dali’s “Happening Afternoons” in Port-Lligat, while ballet dancers pirouetted to the music of Debussy on enormous water-borne eggshells. For his part, Dali attempted to play Satie at the piano, waist-deep in seawater.