It's a rare work of art that comes to represent
the entire movement that birthed it: Monet's Water Lillies and Impressionism, for example,
or Millai's Ophelia and the Pre-Raphaelites. In today’s case, nothing represents Surrealism
quite like the image of a melting clock, and no artist better encapsulates the feel of
Surrealism more than Salvador Dali. If you know nothing about art -- if you grew
up inside that compound from The Village and have never even seen pencil put to paper -- you
know that melting clocks probably mean things are about to get weird. One of the most referenced images in the modern
canon, inspiring jokes in everything from The Simpsons to Looney Tunes, The Persistence
of Memory is the brainchild of none other than our boy Salvador, the genre-defining
multi-media artist best known for living a life that was almost as weird as the subjects
he painted. Depending on the source, the melting clock
represents either the impermanence of time, or the melting of cheese. It's a deeply ironic image, but the greater
irony lies in the fact that, during his life, the man who would come to represent Surrealism
found himself kicked out of the movement by the very friends and colleagues who rose to
fame with him. Portrait of the Young Artist as a Portrait
Artist Born in 1904 to a middle class family, Dali
began painting early, showing a formidable command of Impressionism, and had his first
public gallery show at the age of 14. He was, by all accounts, a shy and introverted
child, who spent much of his time playing around the rocky coast of Cadaqués, in Spain. It was a favorite vacation spot for his family,
and the eventual site of his first and best-loved house. While he and his sister were close, both of
them often felt overshadowed by the ghost of their parents first child, who died at
the age of 2 shortly before Dali’s birth. He would later paint a portrait of his brother,
and often described him as “the first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute.” It’s impossible to overstate the impact
Cadaqués had on Dali’s development as an artist. The alien, rocky shores visible on so many
of his canvasses, the washed-out beaches populated by lone bathers, all of these trace back to
the days he spent wandering around the tide pools, gazing in awe and horror at the full
mystery of undersea life, amorphous jellyfish and radial sea urchins which he and his father
loved to eat. The figure of the sleeping head, referred
to as The Great Masturbator, is rumored to have been inspired by one specific fallen
boulder, arched like a kidney bean and pitted with a spongelike array of holes. One can easily envision a young Dali staring
at this rock, imagining it some fantastical monster cowering over in the fetal position. Maybe he imagined it as himself, hiding from
his father’s wrath. Even during his youth, their relationship
was rocky. His father's stringent discipline was softened
by his mother's dutiful coddling, though she died when he was only 16. He described it as "the greatest blow I had
experienced in my life." His father married his mother's sister barely
a year later, but this relationship did not seem to trouble Dali. As disagreeable as they might have been, Dali’s
father was an ardent supporter of his son’s artistic development, paying for books of
Impressionist paintings and personal tutors. He even went so far as to arrange a gallery
showing for his 17 year old son. The location was the Municipal Theater in
Figueres, which would later become the Dali Theater and Museum, the very building he would
eventually die in. If Dali ever remarked upon the irony of dying
in the place which birthed him as an artist, it was never recorded. As it would eventually be Dali’s controversial
art which drove them apart, one must wonder if his father ever regretted supporting his
creative endeavors in the first place. So much drama and strife, birthed from a single
act of support! Let this be a lesson to the fathers listening
today: Never support your children, lest they become the next Salvadore Dali. The Art of Confidence
In college, Salvador Dali studied at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. There, he made friends with artists like Luis
Buñuel and Frederico Garcia Lorca, the latter of whom held a deep and unrequited passion
for the Dali. Now, it’s easy to start from the popular
image of adult Dali as an exuberant anteater-owning weirdo and simply make it smaller to represent
youth, but he was actually quite shy in school. Among his friends he was considered to be
bad with girls, a trait which would very much resolve itself with sufficient fame. He and his friends studied the art movements
emerging in Barcelona and Paris, as well as the new and controversial theories of academics
like Freud. Dali would go on to paint some of the first
Cubist works ever produced in Madrid, starting with the geometric Cabaret Scene. Though it often takes over a thousand words
to describe a picture, it’s easy to say this one like if Keith Harring did the cover
art for a smooth jazz album sold exclusively at Starbucks. After accusing his professors of being unqualified
to judge him, he dropped out shortly before his final exams in 1926. Normally, that kind of stunt lands you in
a factory sewing belt buckles onto hats. But when you're already friends with Pablo
Picasso, all that was left for Dali to do was to grow a mustache and start blowing people’s
minds. The Secret To Good Art Is Artistry
By the time he failed to graduate, Dali had already cultivated an image of an eccentric
dandy, dressing in stockings and knee-breeches, like he was a lesser aristocrat waiting in
line at the guillotine. It's somewhat refreshing to know that art
school kids remain unchanged across history and geography, with the notable exception
that the weirdly dressed art school dropouts you know never went on to become Salvador
Dali. His secret, and in fact, the unspoken rule
across all artistic pursuits, is that you can get away with being a weird, pretentious
dork as long as your work is very, very good. In all accounts, young Dali's work is that
good. His absolute mastery of representationalism
can be seen in Basket of Bread 1926, where he managed to lend an air of stark drama to
a painting of a few slices of buttered bread. That painting is over 90 years old, and it's
still fresher than anything served at the Olive Garden. One almost gets the sense that he is mocking
his teachers and peers, showing off by putting so much effort into such a simple scene. It sounds ridiculous to say that an oil painting
of bread feels sarcastic if you look at it too long, but just try it. Look at it too long. Tell me if it doesn’t eventually feel insulting,
how accurately this bread is painted. A common criticism of modern art is that it's
deliberately weird and incomprehensible to cover for a lack of foundational skills, and
to be fair, it often is. For every actually talented eccentric, there's
twenty Piero Manzonis pooping into a can and daring you to buy it. Dali was not this. He was a popular, charismatic young fellow
who knew the breadth of his skills and pushed himself beyond what his conscious mind could
envision. Paranoia and Friends
To that end, he studied Freud heavily, seeking to unleash the full weight of his creative
forces from the shackles of formal logic. At that time, the surrealist movement was
lost in a directionless mire, preoccupied with automatic processes of creation, and
to this mix Dali added his Paranoiac-Critical method. By focusing on abstract threats to the person
in order to induce a paranoid state, Dali was able to draw up fantastical images from
the deepest recesses of his mind, delivering "hand-painted dream photographs" by filtering
the real world through that lens of absolute paranoia. In much the same way that humans see faces
in toast or wood grain, Dali could envision armies of ants, giant eggs, elephants with
impossibly stretched limbs, and bulbous protrusions of flesh held up by crutches. This period is marked by the frequently recycled
image of a child and parent on the coastline, one inspired by a childhood photo of Dali
himself. Where human figures are depicted, they are
small and face away from the viewer. Geometric shapes stack piled atop each other
in defiance of balance and gravity, early works like The First Days of Spring and Apparatus
and Hand show the clear influence of his contemporary and friend Yves Tanguy, whose art also heavily
features indecipherable objects and vague, rocky coasts. Yves was also known for eating live spiders
at parties. Earning a reputation as an artist has never
been easy. According to the niece of Yves Tanguy, Dali
once said to her "I pinched everything from your uncle Yves." Of course, being part of an artistic movement
means influencing and being influenced by others in turn. If it wasn't for his early studies of Cubism,
Dali wouldn't have been inspired to experiment with form, is he a plagiarist for borrowing
the techniques of his friend Picasso? Would Dali have been Dali had he not drawn
from the influences he did? During the debut of a film Dali wrote, Age
of Gold, the right-wing radical group League of Patriots disrupted the screening, attacked
the audience, and smashed artworks by Yves and other collaborators, decrying the film
and Surrealism in general as a poison designed to corrupt the people. The Surrealists responded to this criticism,
as all great artists do, by getting much weirder. Dali’s fascination with Freud took the forefront. As his reputation grew, he found himself liberated
to commit his illicit desires to canvass, drawing nude forms tortured beyond recognition. Sex became a curious kind of obsession, something
he could have gained very easily which yet was denied through a complex web of invisible
hangups. Maybe he hoped if he delved deep enough into
his own subconscious, he could find the source of those hangups and allow himself to pursue
his desires, rather than exorcise them upon the canvas. Thankfully for us, he didn’t! Time Keeps On Slippin’
Indulge me for a moment in a bit of postmodern analysis, for it seems irresponsible to talk about an artist
without talking about his art. As you're probably aware, it depicts a number
of soft, melting watches, draped over a variety of shapes such as a tree, sleeping figure,
and odd rectangular protrusion. The background is just a distant coastline,
complete with shadowy Cadaqués cliffs. It's easy to read the soft watches as a commentary
on the malleable nature of time, given Dali's public appreciation of Einstein's theories. Lacking rigidity and internal structure, devoured
by a thousand tiny ants, the ultimate symbol of structure and order finds itself besieged
by the forces of decay. Of course, Dali denied all that, saying instead
the image was a surrealist interpretation of runny Camembert cheese he saw at a picnic. The man loved food! He even wrote a cookbook, which has recently
been reissued. In addition to being both large and expensive,
many of the recipes are deliberately difficult to prepare and assemble. Either way, The melting clock is a motif he
would revisit decades later, during his Nuclear Mysticism phase, in The Disintegration of
The Persistence of Memory, where the previously solid shapes have been replaced with a matrix
of smaller cubes, referencing the empty space between atoms. Even the ocean in the background finds itself
peeled upwards like a pancake mid-flip. The realization that everything solid is made
up of empty space clearly held a place of prominence in Dali's mind. The trees in Disintegration are marked by
prominent gaps in their own continuity. Everything coherent has been replaced by a
grid of tiny versions of themselves, a perfect approximation of atomic representationalism. What subconscious desire was to Dali's old
work, atoms were to the Nuclear Mysticism phase. One prominent example, Galatea of the Spheres,
features a deep field of orbs which resemble, when taken as a whole, a bust of his muse
Gala. The spheres themselves seem to whirl and dance
across the canvass, recalling how hair moves in wind, or electrons spin around a nucleus. If you asked him, Dali would have denied the
existence of any messages in his work. In the Dick Cavette interview where he unleashed
an anteater on the host, he answered that the melting clock had "no meaning," that his
paintings were "hypnogogical images" drawn from the subconscious five minutes before
waking. That conflicts with the theories of Freud,
which would posit a great deal of meaning in the sometimes graphically sexual imagery
Dali used in his work, like the condom-shod loaf in Catalan Bread, complete with a lovingly
draped melting clock. Obviously, it's a phallic representation. But the point of Surrealism is that what an
object represents is not fixed, a rotting donkey can mean sexual excitement if you happen
to be a swarm of flies. When Dali once famously asked at a restaurant,
"When I order lobster, why do you not bring me a telephone?" He wasn't just being precious, he was asking
us to evaluate our assumptions about the meaning of images. What authority gets to define the significance
of a melting clock? Or a randy loaf of bread? The point of Surrealism is to bring forth
a solid dream into the waking world, and what authority assigns meaning to dreams? Dali explained that to him, the crutch symbolizes
impotence, that it supports softness which cannot stand on its own. But to someone with one leg, a crutch might
represent the difference between helplessness and agency. Is that interpretation less valid because
it disagrees with the artist? Dali & His Muse
It's in 1929 that Dali’s upward trajectory becomes undeniable, namely through meeting
his future wife, manager, and co-conspirator, Gala Diakonova. Already married to Paul Éluard, a poet and
co-founder of the Surrealist movement which gave Dali his signature flair, Gala was everything
Dali was not. Confident in her body and sexually accomplished,
a passionate affair soon arose between the two, and Gala's marriage to Paul ended shortly
thereafter. Womp womp! The nature of their physical relationship
remains an issue of discussion- for perverts. Dali was known to say that Gala was the only
woman he made proper love to throughout his entire life. Maybe a lifelong predilection with Catholicism
prevented an exploration of his natural instincts; either way, neither of them were content with
a vanilla sex life. They were both unfaithful to each other, in
an oddly inclusive sort of way. He would watch her with other lovers, pleasuring
himself. Other times, Dali would indulge in dalliances
with his models and hangers-on, by pleasuring himself. The circle of admirers they cultivated prized
ambiguity and androgyny, seeking a beauty unchained by social expectations of physiology. When it came to choosing dance partners, Gala
had her pick of the ball. Things Get Out of Hand
During the artistic process, Dali would frequently masturbate over his subjects, a habit which
would later prove problematic. Gala maintained the occasional tryst, though
both were discrete in their indiscretions. Dali joined at least one of his proteges in
a "spiritual marriage" on a mountaintop, and Gala managed an affair in her mid 70s to the
singer who played Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar. Dali, bombastic in his Catholicism, could
only have been thrilled. Dali treated controversy as just another color
on his palette. During one of his first public speeches as
part of the surrealist group, he insulted the audience and Catalonia as a whole. During a later presentation, he arrived wearing
a full diving suit, and almost suffocated. He was only freed when a companion found a
wrench outside and detached the helmet. In his defense, Dali claimed he wanted to
show he was fully submerged in the subconscious. Controversy was no stranger to his home life,
either. His parents were skeptical of his relationship
with Gala, who was 10 years older and abandoned a husband and child to be with him. While his connection to his father had never
been particularly stable, Dali found himself excised from the family after producing a
painting which was an outline of Jesus, into which were written the words "Sometimes, I
spit for fun on my mother's portrait." His father never forgave him after that. Despite living within sight of each other,
none of Dali's family ever visited the house he shared with Gala. The loss of his sister was an especially deep
wound. Image and Artist
If it's not yet clear, Dali is not a reliable authority on the subject of Dali. Being such a keen expert of self-promotion,
he used every interview as an opportunity to sell a vision of himself as the artist-genius. For example, he probably never spat on his
mother's portrait for any reason. He denied supporting Hitler even as he included
his face in major works. He never clearly denounced Fascism, and instead
described himself as a monarchist-anarchist. In his system, the king should rule absolutely,
under which the people could enjoy the freedom of absolute anarchy. Is that contradictory? Of course. It's Salvador Dali -- why would you expect
trenchant political commentary from the madman who glued a lobster to a telephone and sold
it for a million dollars? It's also exactly the sort of philosophy which
would appeal to the debauched ultra-rich, used to experiencing life as an extended orgy,
so expect a revival of Monarchist-Anarchism on Goop any day now. When the other surrealists dragged him before
a kangaroo court and accused him of fascist sympathies, he feigned illness and showed
up wearing too many sweaters. He would pause his self-defense to take his
own temperature, shed layers, don or doff socks, do whatever it took to highlight the
farcical nature of these proceedings. His politics remain a major point of contention
for both fans and detractors. Fascism would have interrupted his ability
to enjoy himself, so it’s easy to read his comments insincerely. Maybe they were proto-trolling, saying the
opposite of what his lefty friends were saying just to get attention. However, later in life, Dali would voice support
for General Francisco Franco, the brutal Spanish dictator, calling him "the only intelligent
man in politics." When he said this, Franco was busy killing
two hundred thousand of his own citizens while imprisoning five hundred thousand more. That’s not even defensible as satire. Pablo Picasso turned his back on Dali and
refused to speak of him again. The Surrealists issued a pamphlet denouncing
Dali, and he became a persona non grata in the movement. An epic troll, indeed. Things Get Weirder
Curiously enough, his most controversial act is one you're least likely to hear about. As we mentioned, Dali had unconventional sexual
practices. Being rich and famous, he had no shortage
of willing partners, with one tragically notable exception. In 1945, Dali was introduced to the model
Constance Webb by a mutual acquaintance, and he was instantly charmed. She agreed to model for him, providing inspiration
for some figures in the film Spellbound. She described him as a "perfect gentlemen"
during their sessions together, slowly coaxing her into working with less and less clothing. After their final session, however, as she
was relaxing with her arm over her eyes, he jumped upon her stomach and ejaculated upon
her breasts, which he began licking up. She quit modeling for him immediately afterwards,
only divulging the fact of her assault in interviews after the artists' death. This wasn't even his first time crossing that
kind of physical line. As a young man, a woman complimented his beautiful
feet, so he responded by trampling her and only stopped when his friends pulled him off
of her. If there was a MeToo movement in the 40s,
maybe Dali would be remembered differently. Instead, he's much more likely to be rebuked
for selling out, as if the greatest moral failing of his life were the advertising campaigns
for things like leg-ware and lollipops. He was the one who designed the current Chupa
Chups logo, and even insisted on displaying the logo at the top of the pop, to ensure
that it's correctly represented. Salvadore C.K. The question of separating the art from the
artist is ultimately one of measuring exactly how much misery we're willing to tolerate
from creators in exchange for entertainment. The justification being that this sort of
abuse is the price of genius, rather than the side effect of privilege. Or maybe we all just want to believe that
we can get good enough at something that the laws of society no longer apply. Either way, there’s no better place to be
an inscrutable genius than the United States, so off he went! After moving to America to escape the second
World War, Dali found great success in New York, but this proved insufficient to satisfy
his hunger for fame. He had his eyes set on Hollywood. Having already made a name for himself in
cinema circles with the famous eye-slitting scene from his first movie, Un Chien Andalou
(An Andalusian Dog), it was easy for Dali to meet people who could open doors for him. He was welcomed to California with open arms,
eyes, and wallets. After painting a few portraits for rich well-connected
socialites, he was introduced to Alfred Hitchcock, who enlisted Dali's help for the elaborate
dream sequences in the noir thriller Spellbound. Sadly, only two minutes out of twenty made
it into the final cut of the film, and the rest of the footage has since been lost to
time. Hitchcock sought out Dali not for the press,
but because according to him, no one could better represent the vividness of dreams. Prior to Dali, cinematic dream sequences were
misty, vague affairs where themes and motifs were hinted at from behind a layer of plausible
deniability. Sequence designing for Hollywood is quite
the step up from instigating arthouse riots in Paris, even if the final project failed
to deliver the artist's full vision. In 1976 Dali would write and direct Impressions
of Upper Mongolia, a mockumentary about the search for an enormous psychedelic mushroom. The climax of the film involves an elaborate
flyover of an impossibly colored alien landscape which, upon a slow zoom out, is revealed to
be a tarnished brass band on a pen Dali had spent a week peeing on. It is, likely through no small coincidence,
the ideal film to watch while on mushrooms. The Clock Melts Down
The end of Dali's life was marked by a tragic fleecing. Of the millions he earned in his life, precious
little remained of his estate near the end. He was investigated by the American IRS for
tax absurdities. His hands started to shake so much he was
often unable to perform the exacting strokes he based his work upon. After Gala's death, her body was smuggled
back to Pubol wrapped in a blanket in the back of a car, and interred in the castle
she spent so much of her life in. As his own health started to fail, some opportunists
in Dali's social circle seized the opportunity to pilfer whatever they could. Money went missing. A border in his childhood home walked off
with briefcases full of personal papers and sketches, claiming they were to be documented
and photographed in Paris. Of course, they were never to be seen again. Delirious, Dali would sign whatever canvases
and lithograph sheets were pressed in his hands, and the market was flooded with forged
art. To this day, rumors of newly discovered Dali
masterpieces are usually just convincing fakes drawn on a pre-signed sheet. Up to 50,000 such works may have been created,
and the bulk still remain at large. Instead of consigning the works to Spain through
his foundation in the Dali Museum, as he declared earlier, Dali signed papers ceding copyright
to a corporation owned by a long-time business partner. Even in death, Dali's life was marked by irony. His initial plan was to construct a tomb adjacent
to Gala's resting place with a hole between them, such that they could hold hands in the
afterlife. Instead, the mayor of Figueres intervened
just hours before Dali's death and claimed that the artist had charged him with moving
the final resting place to the Dali Theater and Museum, conveniently giving it a huge
tourist attraction.
