Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain, into a family that would shape his destiny in the most bizarre and tragic ways imaginable. His full name, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech, Marques de Dali de Pubol, was almost as elaborate as the man himself would become. From the very moment of his birth, Dali's life was haunted by death and mystery, setting the stage for what would become one of the most extraordinary and controversial artistic careers in history.

The defining trauma of Dali's existence began before he was even born. Nine months prior to Salvador's birth, his parents had lost another son, also named Salvador, who died at the tender age of two and a half years. This tragedy created a psychological foundation that would torment Dali throughout his entire life. His grief-stricken parents, unable to accept the loss of their firstborn, convinced themselves that their new baby was the reincarnation of his deceased brother. They even took young Salvador to visit his own grave, telling him that he was his brother reborn. This macabre family tradition created an identity crisis that would manifest in Dali's obsession with death, mental instability, and violent outbursts that characterized his entire existence.

Dali's childhood was marked by disturbing incidents that revealed the dark nature lurking beneath his artistic genius. At the age of five, he pushed a friend off a high suspension bridge and then sat calmly eating cherries while the unconscious boy lay injured below, waiting for adults to discover the incident. A year later, he deliberately kicked his three-year-old sister's head, treating her like a ball in what he described as a premeditated attack. These weren't mere childhood pranks but early manifestations of a deeply disturbed personality that would plague him throughout his life.

One of the most shocking incidents from his youth involved Dali finding a badly injured bat covered in ants during a dinner party. In a display of macabre fascination that foreshadowed his later artistic themes, young Salvador bit the bat's head off, demonstrating an early attraction to the grotesque and shocking that would become his trademark. His family's response to such behavior was equally bizarre, as they seemed to encourage his eccentricities rather than correct them.

The Dali family had a tradition of embellishing their past to create a more impressive mythology. Dali's father told everyone that his own father had been a doctor, when in reality he had been a corkmaker. When Dali's grandfather committed suicide by jumping from a building, the family story transformed this tragic event into a tale of accidental death from brain trauma. Following this family tradition of creative storytelling, Dali would later reinvent his own childhood in his autobiography, giving it the color, intrigue, and darkness appropriate for what he considered a genius painter.

As Dali grew older, his violent tendencies and narcissistic personality only intensified. He developed an insufferable ego that manifested in grandiose behavior from an early age. According to his own accounts, he would parade in front of poor children wearing a fur coat, announcing himself as their king. He couldn't stand rejection and threw violent tantrums on every possible occasion, making him the most insufferable child in his neighborhood. His famous quote perfectly encapsulated his self-obsession: "Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali."

Dali's artistic genius began to emerge during his teenage years, but it was always accompanied by his increasingly bizarre behavior. He developed several peculiar phobias, including an intense fear of grasshoppers and an absolute terror of exposing his feet, which seemed absurd even by his eccentric standards. His artistic training took him to Madrid, where he befriended future literary giant Federico Garcia Lorca and filmmaker Luis Bunuel, relationships that would prove crucial to his artistic development.

During his early twenties, Dali met the woman who would become both his muse and his tormentor for the rest of his life. In 1929, at age 25, he encountered Gala, whose real name was Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, the Russian wife of surrealist poet Paul Eluard. Gala was a mysterious and highly intuitive woman with an extraordinary ability to recognize artistic genius. She was also a woman with an insatiable sexual appetite and a calculating nature that would both inspire and exploit Dali's talents.

Their relationship was perhaps one of the most unconventional in art history. Dali claimed to be a virgin and completely impotent, terrified of women's anatomy, while Gala openly conducted numerous extramarital affairs throughout their relationship. Remarkably, Dali not only encouraged these affairs but seemed to derive voyeuristic pleasure from them, as he was a practitioner of candaulism. Their marriage in 1934 was followed by another ceremony in 1958, but their relationship remained chaotic despite their apparent closeness.

Gala's influence on Dali extended far beyond the romantic realm. She became his business manager, aggressively fighting for his rights with gallery owners and buyers, often using tarot cards to influence his career decisions. Dali began signing his paintings with both their names, explaining that "it is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures." However, Gala was also notoriously difficult, unable to maintain friendships due to her abhorrent behavior toward people. She was simply mean, and despite encouraging her romantic pursuits to fulfill his voyeuristic needs, Dali would later become jealous and aggressive about her affairs, particularly when she began buying her young lovers expensive gifts and houses by the seaside behind his back.

Their relationship reached its most bizarre expression in 1969 when Dali bought Gala an entire castle in Pubol, Girona. The agreement they made was extraordinary: Dali could not visit the castle without Gala's prior written permission. This arrangement resembled a form of sexual domination, with the castle serving as a kind of architectural chastity belt where Dali was the deprived, masochistic supplicant and Gala held the key to his access. As Dali wrote, everything in the castle celebrated the cult of Gala, including a round room with perfect acoustics that he decorated so that when she raised her eyes, she would always find him painted in her sky.

Dali's artistic genius was matched only by his talent for self-promotion and outrageous publicity stunts that often bordered on dangerous. In 1936, he delivered a lecture at the London International Surrealist Exhibition wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet, nearly suffocating in the process when fans mistook his desperate gestures for asphyxiation as part of the performance. He had to be rescued from the helmet, after which he exclaimed that he was demonstrating how he was "plunging deeply into the human mind."

His publicity stunts became increasingly elaborate and bizarre. He drove a Rolls Royce from Spain to France stuffed with 500 kilos of cauliflowers, appeared at a ball wearing a glass case on his chest with a brassiere inside, and once arrived at the Sorbonne for a lecture in a Rolls-Royce full of cauliflowers. To promote a book about his work, he appeared in a Manhattan bookstore lying on a bed wired to a machine that traced his brain waves and blood pressure while he autographed books, with buyers receiving both the signed book and the paper chart recording his vital signs.

Dali's relationship with animals was as eccentric as every other aspect of his life. In the 1960s, he was seldom seen without his pet ocelot named Babou, reportedly given to him by the head of state of Colombia. Always adorned with a bejeweled collar, Babou accompanied Dali everywhere, including to Manhattan restaurants where the artist would tether the wild cat to his table. When concerned diners expressed alarm about the dangerous animal, Dali would calmly assure them that Babou was simply an ordinary house cat that he had "painted over in an op art design." On one memorable occasion at a Parisian gallery, Babou relieved himself on valuable 17th-century lithographs, but Dali claimed that any connection with him could only increase their value, and the dealer actually raised the price of the lithographs by 50 percent.

Perhaps the most famous photograph of Dali shows him emerging from a Paris Metro station in 1969 with a giant anteater on a leash. While many assumed this was another exotic pet, it was actually a carefully orchestrated photo opportunity, a piece of performance art, with the anteater most likely borrowed from a zoo. The image was connected to Andre Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, who had been nicknamed "Le Tamanoir" (The Anteater) by his fellow Surrealists and had even written a poem titled "After the Giant Anteater" in 1931.

Dali's famous mustache became as much a part of his artistic persona as his paintings. He began growing it in the early 1940s and it quickly evolved into his most recognizable feature. The mustache was insured for one million dollars, and Dali was extremely protective of it, declaring that he would never shave it off even if offered a million dollars. He claimed in interviews that he originally styled it using leftovers from dinner, specifically using dates as wax, though he later used Hungarian wax Pinaud, the same product used by Marcel Proust, though Dali declared his mustache "gay, pointed, and aggressive" in contrast to Proust's "depressing and melancholic" style.

The maintenance of his mustache was almost ritualistic. He would allow it to soften and droop overnight, then spend exactly three minutes each morning carefully waxing and shaping it into its characteristic upturned points. He claimed the mustache served as a practical tool for artistic inspiration and even incorporated it into his theories about the subconscious, suggesting that the two upward-curling points represented the horns of a rhinoceros, a symbol of the subconscious mind that he believed was a powerful source of creativity.

Dali's sleeping habits were as unusual as everything else about him. He followed a strict regime of sleeping only a few hours per night, seeing sleep as a waste of time that kept him from painting. His most famous technique involved what he called exploring the hypnagogic cycle of sleep. He would sit in a chair holding a key in his hand with a metal plate placed on the floor below. As he drifted off to sleep, the key would fall and clang on the plate, waking him suddenly. This allowed him to repeatedly enter the hypnagogic state between wakefulness and sleep, experiencing vivid dreamlike visions that he would immediately capture in his work.

His collaborations with other artistic giants produced some of the most unusual projects in entertainment history. His work with Walt Disney on the animated short "Destino" began in 1946 but wasn't completed until 2003, nearly six decades later. Disney and Dali met at a dinner party at movie mogul Jack Warner's home in 1945, and despite their vastly different personalities, they found common ground in their shared surrealist sensibilities. Dali also worked with Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence in "Spellbound" in 1945, creating some of the most memorable and influential scenes in cinema history.

However, Dali's genius was tainted by numerous controversies that revealed the darker aspects of his personality. His business practices were often questionable, and he became involved in numerous art fraud scandals. He developed a notorious reputation for avoiding restaurant bills through an elaborate scheme involving his artistic talents. When dining at expensive restaurants with large groups of friends, Dali would insist on paying by check, but instead of simply signing it, he would create elaborate drawings on the back. He correctly calculated that restaurant owners would never cash checks bearing original Salvador Dali artwork, effectively getting free meals while providing the establishments with valuable art pieces.

More seriously, Dali became embroiled in massive art fraud schemes that damaged his reputation and the art market itself. During the 1980s art investment bubble, experts believe that hundreds of thousands to millions of fake Dali prints began circulating, leading to an estimated 625 million to 1 billion dollars in sales of fraudulent Dali art in the United States alone. Worldwide, fraudulent sales may have reached 3 billion dollars. The fraud was facilitated by Dali's own careless attitude toward signing blank paper, which was later used to create unauthorized prints.

Dali's political views were equally controversial and damaging to his relationships within the art world. His fascination with totalitarian regimes, particularly his obsession with Adolf Hitler, led to his expulsion from the Surrealist movement in 1934. Andre Breton and other left-wing Surrealists were horrified by Dali's incorporation of Nazi imagery into his work and his disturbing comments about racial superiority. In 1939, Breton wrote that Dali had told him "that all the present trouble in the world is racial in origin, and that the best solution, agreed on by all the white races, is to reduce all the dark races to slavery."

During the Spanish Civil War and World War II, Dali's political stance became even more problematic. Despite claiming to be apolitical, he maintained friendly relations with Francisco Franco and expressed admiration for fascist movements. In a letter to Luis Bunuel, he wrote that Spain was "destined for World Hegemony" and used the fascist slogan "Arriba Espana," demonstrating his alignment with falangist ideology.

Dali's work ethic, while productive, was often ethically questionable. There were no direct accusations of plagiarism, but the origins of many of his images remained unclear, and he frequently borrowed compositional and stylistic choices from other artists. He once jokingly confessed to Yves Tanguy's daughter that he had copied Tanguy's painting style, and the similarity between their work was indeed obvious. More disturbing was his willingness to cause harm to others for the sake of his art. The famous photograph by Philippe Halsman showing Dali surrounded by flying cats and water required 28 takes, meaning that three black cats were repeatedly thrown through the air and doused with cold water 28 times, causing significant trauma to the animals.

His cruelty extended to his treatment of people as well. Dali exhibited violent tendencies throughout his life, and his treatment of friends and family was often abusive. His narcissistic personality disorder manifested in an inability to empathize with others and a willingness to exploit anyone for his artistic or financial gain. He was known to be particularly cruel to those who couldn't fight back, including servants and assistants.

The final years of Dali's life were marked by decline and controversy. After Gala's death in 1982, he became increasingly reclusive and his mental health deteriorated. His last major public controversy involved the 2017 exhumation of his body for a paternity test, ordered by a Spanish court to determine if he was the father of a woman claiming to be his daughter. In a final surreal twist, when his body was exhumed almost three decades after his death in 1989, his famous mustache remained perfectly intact, the wax still holding it in the exact position he had worn it in life, with the points positioned like clock hands reading 10:10.

Salvador Dali died on January 23, 1989, in Figueres, the same town where he was born, bringing his extraordinary and disturbing life full circle. His legacy remains complex and controversial, as art historians and critics continue to grapple with how to present his work while acknowledging his problematic personal life and political views. He was undeniably a genius whose technical skill and imaginative vision revolutionized surrealist art, but he was also a deeply troubled individual whose cruelty, narcissism, and fascist sympathies cast a dark shadow over his artistic achievements.

The story of Salvador Dali serves as a fascinating and cautionary tale about the relationship between artistic genius and personal morality. His life demonstrates that extraordinary creative talent can coexist with deeply flawed character, and that the same obsessions and psychological disturbances that fuel artistic innovation can also lead to cruelty and exploitation. Dali's paintings continue to captivate audiences worldwide with their technical brilliance and surreal imagery, but understanding the man behind the mustache reveals a much darker and more complex figure than the eccentric showman he presented to the public.