salvador dalí

This is Salvador Dalí starring in a French commercial for Lanvin chocolate in 1968. "Je suis fou du chocolat Lanvin!" Rather than seducing the audience with the brand, the approach here is instead to assault the viewer with a short but memorable pop/surrealist film.  Once you put Dalí in the frame it ceases to be about the product anyway. Angular, violent and staccato I cannot imagine this commercial appealing to French children -- there is something of the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang about Dalí's appearance. Like Warhol he was an eccentric  celebrity whose artistic repertoire was expansive: films, photography, sculpture, fashion and television. An eccentric he was: in his early life Dalí was disinherited by his family when he refused to recant the inscription of a drawing he exhibited in Paris of The Sacred Heart of Jesus with the words:  

"Sometimes I spit for fun on my mother's portrait!"

Quite. He later claimed that he gave his father a condom filled with his own sperm and said, "Take that. I owe you nothing anymore!"

Although highly respected as a painter he was intensely disliked by some people for his attention-seeking egoism. Notably George Orwell who criticised Dalí for fleeing Spain at the outset of the Civil War, dismayed at his shifting political allegiance from communist and anarchist to that of franquista. But Orwell's socialism gave us nothing but dystopia,  hessian that irritated incessantly and a colour spectrum that precluded anything beyond a state symphony of grise. Communism could never have suited Dalí: he was too unharnessed, luxuriant and original in his appetites. It is said that an increasingly devout and catholic Dalí sent Franco telegrams in congratulation  on the signing of death warrants for imprisoned Republican fighters who had killed thousands of priests and nuns. The clergy was construed as essential allies to the Church, the Establishment and El Caudillo and the anti-monarchists wanted to purge Spain of its clericalism. Whether these were  fan letters or the manifestation of a dark and surrealist whimsicality is difficult to know.

Conversely, Dalí continued to praise the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca -- who was openly homosexual -- when the latter's works were banned by the dictator's Falangist regime prior to his assassination in 1936 and not rescinded until many years later.
Lorca was also touched by a certain eccentricity according to the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges who recounted a meeting with the former in Buenos Aires at which he was left unimpressed. Apparently, Lorca repeatedly communicated his concern to Borges that a dominant figure in American life for him symbolised that culture's tragedy, if not downfall. And the figure ? Mickey Mouse. A visionary in early 20th century Spanish literature  and theatre, Lorca was obsessed and perturbed by Mickey Mouse.
That isn't surrealism, it's prophecy: Disneyfication.

Dalí was a genius, an enigma and an ungovernable octopus of contradictions who represents a nightmare to any biographer wishing to separate fiction from non-fiction. I do not think that Dalí was either capable -- nor interested -- in making such a pedestrian distinction in life. His realm was not simply fantasy, but the fantastical.

Certainly, he has shocked many people and even my eyebrows were raised at learning that during the late 1960s Dalí had an association with Brian Sewell.

Brian Sewell is a British art critic known for his conservatism, controversiality and outright rejection of political correctness. He once quoted that "only men are capable of aesthetic greatness" -- claiming that in women the desire to bear children transplants the desire to create exceptional art. More compelling are his adenoids coupled with a diction that makes The Queen sound like a Cockney flower girl. In his documentary, Dirty Dalí, Sewell states that he had a sexual affair with the painter that lasted over four summers. The "mutual confessional" as he puts it -- which is a quasi-religious, homophobic metaphor for sex -- consisted of Sewell laying on the ground, in a foetal position under the armpit of a figure of Christ, masturbating for the Master. Well, what's the point of being an artist if you can't construct and design your own pornography ? Surely, it's one of the few perks. What surprised me was not that Dalí excited himself while taking photographs of this improbable, Renaissance tableau but rather that he should stand over Brian Sewell while executing it. Referring to Dalí's continuing disappointment that Lorca was unable to penetrate him during the 1920s Sewell states:

"I observed that as some arseholes are tight enough to make emptying the bowels almost impossible, proper medical remedies have been devised and the following year took him the very instrument -- gift-wrapped as it were -- from John Bell & Croyden in Wigmore Street. An anal dilator. Dalí chuckled over it."

This is why I like Brian Sewell. He might be acerbic and anti-populist in his appraisal of conceptual and post-modernist art but he is never less than unpretentious and searingly truthful within the frame of his own viewpoint.
One of Dalí's greatest and perhaps truest pronouncements is this:

"All great people who realise sensational achievements are impotent."

I can recommend a visit to the Salvador Dalí museum and theatre in Figueres, which is a short trip north of Barcelona.  It exhibits the artist's largest collection of works including sculpture, three-dimensional collages, mechanical devices and custom-made furniture. Dalí is buried in a crypt in the basement of the building.