Eccentric or antinormal, this is how Salvator Felipe Jacinto Dalì, better known only as Dalì, was often defined. Born in 1904 in the Spanish town of Figueras, not far from the French border. His birth has always obsessed him, to the point of saying that he was born two months before him, defining his seven-month life inside the fetus as a paradise. Maybe that's why he loved to paint eggs or oval shapes anyway, as was his living room.
The school period was not brilliant, the only subject in which he did well was art, better an art that he had taken on, namely that of entertainment. He loved to perform extreme feats, such as jumping from the stairs, seeking the acclaim of those who admired him for this sort of performance. Between one performance and another he retired to the house, where he spent hours inside the tub in the laundry room.
At the age of seven he already knew how to paint and soon began to devote himself to painting on canvas. Several years later, he enrolled in the art school of Madrid, and it is here that he stood out for his personality. Long hair, a wide-brimmed black hat and a cane with a silver knob, this is his uniform to enter class. He didn't even back down to protest against some professors, to the point that he was even taken to the "dungeon” or rather in jail until finally expelled from school.
In the period between the '20s and '30s he loved to devote himself to cubist, pointillist and impressionist painting. in 1925 he held his solo exhibition in Barcelona, the first of an endless series of exhibitions. Arrived in Paris in 1927, advised by Picasso, he exhibited canvases comparable to real "fantastic nightmares" and discovered that that way of painting could be adopted by the new artistic movement: Surrealism.
As we well know the way of thinking of the Surrealists, he wanted to prove himself as a "throw" overboard everything that represented tradition, better if equipped with a Freudian fantasy butterfly catcher. For them, disorder was pure organization, let us remember that it was they who promoted the literature of the absurd.
Surrealism combined with a manic form of exhibitionism, a perfect combination for Dalì. His paintings, decidedly surrealist, always saw a cold light, as if they came from another world, perhaps that of the unconscious.
After his time in Paris, he decided to return to Spain, where he met Helen Diakanoff Eluard, a Russian woman he liked to call Gala. It was she who brought him back to normal a little, trying to free him from his anxieties and hysteria. She also helped him write books, twenty of which Le journal d'un genie, a true best seller.
When Gala entered his studio, the artist stood up and clapped in honor "here is the bee that brings me the honey of inspiration“. Sometimes she signed her canvases with the double name Gala-Dalì, because she truly recognized an indispensable role in her life as an artist and a man.
Gala was also his manager; in the 30s due to a difficult economic period, the artist turned into an inventor and Gala went around the streets of Paris to sell bizarre projects, nails that served as a mirror, bathtubs with absurd shapes, women's shoes with high steel springs. He sure as hell didn't sell one!
Picasso helped there by paying the couple a ticket to America, as certain Surrealists seemed to be appreciated by the new world. They boarded the steamer Champlain on a third class ticket. When he arrived, he showed some journalists some of his works depicting naked Gala, with lamb cutlets behind her. Intrigued they asked what the lamb cutlets meant, Dali was immediate in his answer, "I love my wife and lamb cutlets, I find that together they are a perfect harmony".
One day he staged his arrival on Broadway, transforming a cab with a whole series of pipes that dropped artificial rain and sitting behind a facsimile Christopher Columbus with a sign "I'm back“. The cab was so placed outside the gallery that was hosting an exhibition of him, all sold out!
If his painting technique was the one dearest to the old masters, the style was exactly the opposite, where the space-gravity was completely unrealistic. A pocket watch fits the shape of the dresser top like a Camembert cheese.
Dali's story is extraordinary, he began his career penniless and ended his career as a millionaire. “Some days I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction” he said one day.
You need to know how to see Dalì's works as something unique, no comparison for a histrion traveling in a yellow and black Rolls Royce, where the value can only grow, indeed "extend over time" like his figures.
