In a visual chronicle of one of art history’s most extravagant personas, we examine Salvador Dalí.
There is a photo of the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, taken by his friend, photographer and biographer Robert Descharnes, that will stop any pop culture lover in their tracks.
At the end of a boistrous-looking meal, Dalí is looking at his wife and muse Gala, who is gazing back at him. Andy Warhol is in the right corner, clutching his own camera and staring off into the distance.
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The only person looking anywhere near Descharnes’ lens, appearing entirely out-of-place but grinning happily, is the long-haired, heavy metal American performance artist Alice Cooper.
Dalí was so taken with the outrageous rocker that he created his own imagined version of his brain in sculpture, complete with a disintegrating chocolate éclair and crawling ants.
As the story goes, the painter who referred to himself in the third person, said “this is Dalí’s version of Alice Cooper’s brain,” to which Cooper responded, “wow, I never thought I’d ever get this.”
That seventies scene is one of 50 photographs to appear at Salvador Dalí: The Memories exhibition in Dubai. Looking at it, one can only wonder if Dalí would have been bored or inspired by some of the more out-of-the-box artists of today, and if he might have dined with and created art for non-conforming performers like Marilyn Manson, Daniel Glover (Childish Gambino) or Cardi B.
Paul Chimera, a Salvador Dalí historian for the Salvador Dalí Society in California, was launched into a lifelong obsession after being shown Dalí’s 1936 painting Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) during an art appreciation class in college.
“I often wonder what would Dalí be like and what would he be doing, if he were still living in this day and age,” says Chimera. “He always synthesised and drew upon current things going on in science and society and pop culture, so I wonder what he would do to kind of draw those things into his art today.”
The show, which pulls from private collections and was guest-curated by Nicolas Descharnes, Robert’s son, also features 100 lithographs, a 360-degree virtual reality experience and a rare showing of Dalí’s 1954 oil painting Shower of Jasmine. Dalí loved jasmine, which is the symbol of purity, and used to wear the flowers behind his ears or stuck to the end of his signature long and pointy moustache.
The painting is significant because aside from his more obvious fertile, twisted imagination, it shows his “renaissance-like mastery of oil painting”, explains Chimera.
Although many saw Dalí only for his melting watches, flaming giraffes and other “phantasmagoric” imagery, he did quite a few pieces in the style and manner of A Shower of Jasmine, says the historian.
“It’s just a very calm painting of these jasmine flowers, very nicely painted, quite realistic… it was a period that he called his ‘nuclear mysticism’, basically a melding of science, mysticism and religion,” says Chimera.
While the show – organised by the Dubai-based art and culture company Alpha Soul – officially introduces Dalí to the region, his influence has often been felt. Last year, for instance, the creative platform Inked Dubai held Plaisirs Suprêmes, a pop-up five-course dinner at Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue based on Dalí’s 1973 cookbook Les Dîners de Gala, while The ODD Piece in Dubai sells designs inspired by Dalí’s paintings including a Cajones lamp and a Leda armchair.
The Salvador Dalí Society is at work on a catalogue of all of Dalí’s lithographs, etchings and engravings, for which a team of experts will examine each one for authenticity.
“A lot of people fake Dalí because he was so popular,” says Chimera. “Dalí was so impractical in a way, he wasn’t this artist who was studious and dutiful about what’s been documented.”
It is in Dalí’s lithographs that he produced some of his most “Dalían” work. The artist used anything and everything to make an impression, from the tentacles of a dead octopus to a bomb filled with nails – that he detonated – to ink-filled bullets fired from an old-fashioned rifle.
“Dalí had this need to be different,” says Chimera. “And you know what? He sure succeeded.”
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Dalí was at the forefront of an avant-garde movement that some say emerged as a way to process the horrors of the First World War through art. It often featured dream-like, even hallucinogenic imagery plumbed from the artist’s subconscious and foisted onto the rational world.
Among the most well-known practitioners: Joan Miró, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst. As Dalí himself put it: “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
Those deeply rooted notions of defying convention and conformity in favor of daring stabs at greatness are hallmarks of the movement and Dalí’s life. Surrealism continues to inform everything from design to music to fashion in a disruptor-driven world, with elements that can be seen in everything from Lady Gaga’s meat dress to Elon Musk’s Space X Falcon Heavy launch.
A performance artist before such a term existed, Dalí took great delight in being eccentric, in how his flamboyant personality and appearance could – and did – overshadow the deep truth and talent of his work. Although he died in 1989 at the age of 84, one can imagine he might delight in the Instagram and Twitter era, at the brash merger of Kardashian-style exhibitionism, self-promotion and conspicuous consumption with the family’s undeniable knack for business, or Donald Trump’s obsession with media attention, no matter the flavor.
“He joked ‘let them speak of Dalí, even if they speak well of him’,” says Chimera. “He enjoyed playing the role of being the clown in that way. One of the people he really admired was Charlie Chaplin. There was nothing wrong with being a great painter and an amusing man, a clown.”
Salvador Dalí: The Memories runs until April 22 at the Dubai International Financial Centre Conference Hall.
Words: Ann Marie McQueen
Images: Supplied
