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This month’s birthday article is a little belated because I had some personal projects I had to take care of, but Salvador Dali is a May baby and his creations just make him too great to pass up, even if his birthday was back on the 11. So without further ado, I bring you a brief history of Dali and his infinite weirdness in celebration of his much belated birthday.
The Dali we all recognize was actually the third Salvador Dali in his family. His father also had the name and his parents had another son that was also named Salvador, but he died nine months before Dali was born. For this reason, Dali’s parents always believed that he was the reincarnation of his brother, a belief the artist also held throughout his life. In many of his writings, he claimed that he felt deep stress from the pressures of living as both himself and his dead brother.
Dali’s family was decidedly middle class and his mother was incredibly supportive of his work…until she died when he was only 16. The next year, he moved to the student housing at an arts school in Madrid and he immediately started to stand out through his eccentric methods of dress. The young student enjoyed wearing knee breeches with sideburns and long hair, similar to something Oscar Wilde would have worn forty years earlier.
While he made friends with a number of students at the school, he was not an ideal student and was expelled shortly before he completed his courses after he refused to be tested by anyone in the faculty, saying, “I am very sorry, but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them.”
It wasn’t long after this that his unique painting style, which seamlessly blended classic influences like Raphael with modern avant garde styles like those of Joan Miro, started to garner him quite a bit of attention in the art community. Not to be outdone by his own artwork, Dali promptly started to grow his trademark moustache, which was influenced by the seventeenth-century painter Diego Velazquez.
When Dali met his future wife, Gala, in 1929, she was already married to a prominent French poet. She soon left this artist for Dali, who was ten years her junior, but after their 1934 marriage, she continued to have many other affairs with young artists and even a rockstar in the 70s –all with Dali’s permission of course. While Dali was said to have a terrible fear of the female genitalia (part of the reason he was so accepting of her affairs was because he preferred to watch, but not partake in the activities), he was still unquestionably in love with Gala all the way up until his death. “Without Gala,” he said, “Divine Dalí would be insane.”
Dali was a prominent player in the surrealist movement, but many of the surrealists actually disliked him. This was for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest issues was the fact that surrealists did not believe that anyone should ever apologize for their art.
To some extent, Dali did agree with this sentiment and when his father demanded an apology for a painting the young artist made that bore the words “Sometimes, I spit with pleasure on my mother’s portrait.” While it seems unlikely that Dali actually even meant it about his own mother because he adored her, he still refused to tell his father he was sorry, which resulted in his being thrown out of his childhood home, written out of his father’s will and being threatened by his pop that he should never step foot in Cadaquès again.
When Dali and Gala caused a serious scandal in America, shortly after his work was introduced into the country, though, he quickly changed his tune. The incident in question involved the couple showing up to a masquerade party in New York dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper. After facing great outrage on the part of the American press, he apologized, but he only ended up facing more outrage from the surrealist group he was a member of when he returned home. Of course, they were furious about the apology, not the act.
Around this same time, the majority of surrealists began to lean to leftist politics, but Dali further incensed them by always maintaining an ambiguous position on the matters. Dali disagreed with the idea that surrealism should involve politics and at the same time that he refused to support fascism, he also refused to denounce it. Eventually he was subject to a mock trial in his surrealist group and was expelled largely for his absence of political beliefs.
His politics didn’t just bother the surrealists. Dali moved to France at the outbreak of war and only moved back after World War II ended. George Orwell denounced him for this, stating, “When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near.”
Another major problem the surrealists had with Dali was his apparent willingness to sell his soul for money. As some started referring to him in the past tense, although he was dead, others preferred the nickname “Avida Dollars,” which is more than just an anagram for his name, it also sounds the same as avide à dollar, which can be translated as “eager for dollars.”
More Surreal Than The Surreal
Dali is famous for quipping, “the only difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist,” but perhaps even that was a bit of an understatement, as he developed many of his best known works by connecting with his subconscious not through drugs, but through sleep manipulation. He claims he would sit in a chair with a metal spoon in his hand, directly above a metal pan. When he started to fall into deep sleep, he would drop the spoon, the clang of the spoon hitting the pan would wake him up. Perhaps this method is what he used to create his most enduring surrealist works, the lobster telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.
The surreal nature of his works should never be taken as a sign that Dali’s work was without meaning though. In fact, Dali was a huge fan of Freud and believed in a much deeper meaning of dreams, which is widely demonstrated in his artwork. Here are a few interesting symbolisms to look for next time you enjoy some of his artworks:
Image via Kaneda99 [Flickr]
Throughout his life, Dali painted over 1,500 works. This number is on top of the many illustrations, lithographs, theater sets, costumes, drawings, photographs, sculptures, films, holographs, and other works he helped to create. He loved to experiment with new mediums and even stepped into the world of high fashion, designing a few outfits for Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior. He also created the rainbow-colored Chupa Chups logo.
Even more amazing is the fact that his portfolio only recently expanded to include his completed Disney animation, Destino. While he started it with Walt in 1946, the pair soon found themselves out of money for the project. It was instead completed in 2003 by Roy Disney and Baker Bloodworth.
That wasn’t his only film contribution though. He also worked on the famous surreal art piece Un Chien Andalou, worked on a dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and narrated about a search for magic mushrooms in Impressions of Upper Mongolia.
Image via pecaenrique [Flickr]
As a matter of fact, Dali was one of only a few artists to actually play an active role in the museum dedicated to his works. His Theater and Museum in Figueres goes beyond showcasing his paintings, it is in its own way, another work of his. It’s hardly surprising that a self-obsessed creator like Dali would make a museum for himself, after all, he was famous for once saying, “every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí.”
He started working on the building in 1960 and he continued adding to it all the way through the mid-80’s.These days, it houses the largest collection of his works, followed by the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. The most interesting place for his work to be displayed though was the Rikers Island jail in New York. Dali donated a crucifixion drawing to the warden and it was hung in the dining room for years before officials decided to move it into the lobby so it could be kept safe. Humorously, after spending 16 years in a jail dining room, the painting wasn’t lost or damaged until it was moved to the lobby, where it was stolen in 2003. It is still missing to this day.
When Dali went on 60 Minutes in the 70’s, he told Mike Wallace that, “Dalí is immortal and will not die.” Unfortunately, like all self-proclaimed immortals, he was wrong. In 1980, his health started to fade and when Gala started dosing him with unprescribed medicine, it only made things worse as her drug cocktail damaged his nervous system.
In 1982, Gala passed away and this made Dali’s health fade away even faster as he lost his will to live. He started dehydrating himself and a few years later a fire broke out in his bedroom. Both acts may have been accidents or he may have been trying to commit suicide, no one knows for sure. After the fire though, he started living in his museum until the end of his life.
In 1989, Dali died of a heart failure, shortly after King Juan Carlos visited him on his deathbed and confessed his lifelong adoration of Dali’s works. Dali quickly sketched a drawing for the king and it turned out to be the last artwork ever done by the artist.
I love Dali, so I was really excited to write this article, but I must admit, he was a bit of a freak. There is so much information about him, particularly his crazy stunts, that I couldn’t even begin to describe them all here. So, instead I leave them to you. What are your favorite Dali tales?
Sources: Wikipedia #1, #2, Artcyclopedia, Smithsonian Magazine, BBC News, Salvador Dali Museum, and Neatorama
James Hance is a Jacksonville-based artist who paints fabulous Star Wars-themed paintings. Check him out!
I’m inspired by television and movies from my childhood. It’s funny how you watch some of those things today and wonder why you were so obsessed with them at the time. I remember the Fonz being SO much cooler than he actually was. My paintings are basically just placards screaming ‘Childhood! It was amazing! I want it forever, please!’ I paint mainly in my pajamas, watching the Muppet Show and eating cereal. I’d like to think it shows.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
John Jacobsmeyer has been one of those artists that just slips through the radar cracks (if I may use a mixed metaphor) and his recent wood-themed series is worth a look for its brilliant treatment of industrial wood. Notice how JJ puts this timber into different roles, sometimes the backdrop, sometimes the focus, always the theme.
His photo series, A Piney New World is a nice jump from this:
…which was his previous best, IMHO. And still, behold that wood paneling. (The top painting is called Painter’s Lounge. The bottom one is Bele and Lochi Tie the Knot.) Get it? Knot?
This article highlights seven interesting things you can see if you look closely at masterpieces. It includes paintings with a baby flipping off the pope, UFO’s in the sky, and the shape of a brain that surrounds God as painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
While some might dismiss this as a coincidence, experts suggest that it would be harder to explain that this was not Michelangelo’s intention. Even complex components within the brain, such as the cerebellum, optic chiasm and pituitary gland can all be found in the picture. As for that sassy green sash running down the pons/spinal column/dude-holding-God-up, it follows the path of the vertebral artery perfectly.
Along with drawing, painting, sculpting, St. Peter’s Basilica building and generally being among the universe’s top bananas, Michelangelo counted cadaver dissecting as a favorite way to pass the time. He was so mad about corpse-cutting, in fact, that a friend once presented him with a perfectly formed dead Moor as a gift.
NSFW. Link
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
You’ve probably heard all about the art of drinking coffee, but Karen Eland took that to a higher level and made an art of painting with coffee. Have a look at some of the world’s greatest masterpieces, such as Mona Lisa, or the scene from the Sistine Chapel expressed in espresso! Eland also talks about her technique and how it came about.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
A few people were lucky enough to be pan pals of a sort with Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh often added sketches or paintings to his letters, to illustrate what he wrote about. BibliOdyssey has a collection of these letter sketches, along with the letters that accompanied them. Link
If you look at his paintings, Bill Guffey may seem like the well-traveled artist. There are paintings of the landscape of Saint Martin la Plaine in France, houses in Anchorage, Alaska, and other far away places – but Bill have never set foot in any of them. Instead, he simply fired up his trusty Google Street View to find vistas to paint!
Ki Mae Heussner of ABC News Technology & Science has the story of how Google offered views of the world to a Kentucky artist:
To reach the closest Wal-Mart, Guffey said he needs at least 30 minutes in the car. But with 30 seconds on his computer, he can fly around the world with Google Street View and paint any place his cursor lands.
Not only does the mapping tool give Guffey and other users a street-level window to many places in the world, it lets them navigate 360-degree horizontal and 290-degree vertical unbroken panoramas.
"I live in a very rural area," the 45-year-old said of the Burkesville, Ky. home he shares with his wife and two daughters. "Here, I can go out and I can paint cows all day, barns all day … With Street View, I can find things I normally wouldn’t see here."
Link to ABC News article | Bill’s Gallery of Google Street View Paintings | Bill’s Blog
These incredibly lifelike paintings were created by John Pugh who calls his artwork “trick of the eye.”
The Californian-born artist said: ‘It seems almost universal that people take delight in being visually tricked.’
Can a dramatic prairie dog be fine art? If you’re looking for squirrels in underpants or zombies in romantic moonlight, then this oil painting and others like it are for you. They’re availabe at McPhee. I can’t find a general directory of these meme-themed works, but if you look at the related products section at the link, you’ll find more more like it.
Link via Nerd Approved
Artist Brian Despain is a fantastic painter with a unique subject – robots. In this video, Roq La Rue Gallery’s Kristen Anderson and Kenny Montana interview Despain about his art, his inspiration and why he’s so passionate about robots.
– via boingboing
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
Artist Liz McGrath is selling personalized painted butcher knives just in time for Valentine’s Day. There are two designs, the one shown and one with a cute little mouse on the blade. Each cleaver comes with its own box. They’re only $25 and the perfect way to tell that special someone “till death do us part.”
Link Via BoingBoing
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It may not be exactly the same as standing in front of masterpiece paintings by the Old Masters, but if you can’t make the plane trip to Madrid, Spain, it’s still pretty darn neat.
Google just launched a Google Earth feature that lets you view select paintings from The Prado Museum in astonishing details:
The Prado Museum has become the first art gallery in the world to provide access to and navigation of its collection in Google Earth. Using Google Earth, art historians, students and tourists everywhere can zoom in on and explore the finer details of the artist’s brushwork that can be easily missed at first glance.
The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (Las Tres Gracias), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (El Descendimiento) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardin de las Delicias)
Link (with a pretty nifty embedded YouTube clip for those of us who don’t have Google Earth installed) – via The Lede Blog
Jonathan Janson paints today’s interwebby people in a 17th c. Dutch sort of way. Among his works are Girl in a Red Cap, Young Man with a Cell Phone, and my favorite, Young Girl Writing an Email.
Janson’s paintings have the luminous quality that made Vermeer famous, and his website, Essential Vermeer, indicates he’s spent a lot of time studying the master. He’s learned some good lessons.
Mona Tofu by Ju Duoqi
Chinese artist Ju Duoqi, 35, specializes in a unique art medium: vegetables! (well, technically digital veggies – but who cares?). Behold her masterpiece above, the veggie Mona Lisa ("Mona Tofu") made out of rice, sea kelp, and tofu.
In The Vegetable Museum series, she revisits in a stunning way some masterpieces of the western painting. Making use of vegetables and food of China’s everyday life – tofu, cabbage, ginger, lotus roots, coriander, sweet potato… – and through digital manipulation, she presents a puzzling series of vegetable compositions representing world famous paintings like Mona Lisa, The Cene by Leonard Da Vinci, The Dream by Pablo Picasso or Marilyn Monroe by Warhol.
Here are a few more:
Napoleon on Potatoes by Ju Duoqi
Van Gogh made of Leek by Ju Duoqi
See many more at Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery: Link – via Compass WebWorks
Previously on Neatorama:
Kirk Demarais from Arkansas has created a series of lovely paintings of notable movie families as his contribution to this year’s Crazy 4 Cult art show.
Julian Beever, the chalk artist who draws 3-D illusions in city streets (previously covered at Neatorama), has been busy making some new amazing paintings.
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