Salvador Dali Dies; Surrealist Painter Was 84

Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter, self-promoter and genuine eccentric, died Monday at a hospital in Figueras, Spain. He was 84.

Dali, an unforgettable figure with slicked-down hair, waxed mustache and gold-headed cane, had been in declining health for half a dozen years, suffering from what doctors first thought was Parkinson’s disease and ultimately diagnosed as heart trouble, as well as the near-fatal aftereffects of a fire in his home.

Cardiac Arrest, Pneumonia

“The cause of death was cardiac arrest brought on by his respiratory insufficiency and pneumonia,� his personal physician, Dr. Carles Ponsati, said Monday. Dali had been taken to the hospital five days ago for a third time since late November because of problems with his heart.

The artist’s body was taken from the hospital to Galatea Tower, an annex of the Dali theater-museum in Figueras, where he had lived since an electrical fire damaged his home in nearby Port Llegat in August, 1984. He will be buried in the museum’s inner court after funeral services Wednesday.

Dali was the last survivor of three modern Spanish painting giants, the others being Pablo Picasso, who died in 1973, and Joan Miro, who died in 1983. He had fallen from favor with art critics, who attacked him for crass commercialism, but he was nevertheless widely regarded as one of the best-known and significant artists of this century.

For decades dating from the late 1920s, the name Salvador Dali was synonymous with surrealism. He was, easily, the movement’s most successful and spectacular practitioner and, unquestionably, a unique talent.

Like other surrealists, Dali was fascinated by the unconscious and irrational world that Freud had plumbed. Dali and the rest, in the words of critic George Kent, “roamed the dream landscape with the butterfly nets of their imagination. Discarding conventional logic, they pronounced rubbish beautiful and disorder the most elegant form of organization.�

In his best work, Dali, painting in oil, attempted to make his dream world tangible by ignoring all the natural laws of time, space and gravity.

For instance, in “The Persistence of Memory� (1931), pocket watches droop like melted Jell-O yet seem real enough to tell time to the minute. Or in “Crucifixion� (1954), the figure of Jesus appears to levitate free of the cross while still nailed to it.

These and other paintings displayed that special quality of what Kent called Dali’s “haunting dreamscapes, whose diamond-sharp images and hypnotic perspectives distilled a bizarre poetry.� The finest paintings of the Spanish master, Kent said, “had a compelling trance-like quality: washed by a cold stellar light, they seemed to obey a mysterious logic that flowed from another universe.�

Comic Relief for the West

Beyond his special, unarguable talent, Dali was wonderfully, almost uniquely weird. His contributions to the general comic relief of the Western world may have been almost as significant as those to art.

Some high points:

-- On his arrival in America for the first time in the early 1930s, Dali unveiled for dockside reporters a nude painting of his companion, Gala Dimitrovna Diaharoff, with lamb chops on her shoulder. Asked about the chops, he replied: “Very simple. I love (her) and I love lamb chops. Here they are together. Perfect harmony.�

-- A few days later, giving a lecture in New York, the artist appeared in a deep-sea diving suit and helmet. “The better,� he explained, “to descend into the depths of the subconscious.�

-- In 1974, Dali, who it seemed would do just about anything if the price was right, signed on with a U.S. advertising agency for a television commercial in which he painted a leotard-clad model to illustrate how Alka-Seltzer works.

-- Later he left New York en route to Cannes, carrying a 5-foot-tall, purple Bugs Bunny doll that had been given to him as a bon voyage gift. “This is the most ugly and frightening animal in the world,� he said. “I will paint it with mayonnaise and make it an object of art.�

-- When an interviewer once came to Dali’s home on Spain’s Costa Brava, the artist waved him on to the back yard and suggested, “Let’s climb that tree where we can be comfortable.� Two upholstered armchairs were hanging in the branches.

Dali was like that--a master of the put-on who never seemed to take art as seriously as his fellow artists and many critics would have liked.

When other surrealists announced they were Communists, Dali asserted that he was a Spanish royalist. For that, surrealism’s leader, Andre Breton, pronounced him expelled from the movement.

When other artists declared the only true path to artistic greatness was through poverty and Bohemian simplicity, Dali could not resist telling everyone in sight that he was in it for money and luxury.

When modern artists said that the truth could be had through avant-garde experimentation, Dali announced that he was actually an old-fashioned painter.

Through it all, Dali insisted that he was just about the only sane one around, as in this passage from his 1976 autobiography, “The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali�:

“The clown is not I, but rather our monstrously cynical and so naively unconscious society that plays at the game of being serious, the better to hide its own madness. For I--I can never repeat it enough--am not mad.�

Critic Winthrop Sargeant said about the same thing, slightly differently: “There is nothing abnormal about Dali. He is simply antinormal! “

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali was born May 11, 1904, in Figueras, in the far northeast of Spain, near the border with France, the son of a notary.

In his crazy, cantankerous way, Dali would even argue that fact. Instead, he often said that he was born two months earlier because, he was quite certain, that was when his thinking life began--as a 7-month-old fetus.

“It was warm, it was soft, it was silent,� he claimed. “It was paradise.�

Be that as it may, his talent for drawing emerged early on and was encouraged by his parents, who gave him reproductions of classical art and his own paints and canvas.

Young Salvador was, or so the stories go, a rather strange little boy. He loved the attention that resulted when he took to flinging himself down a long flight of stairs at school, and his favorite place of refuge at home was a big tub in the laundry room, where he would sit for hours, thinking, drawing and painting.

After spending his early years in local schools, Dali was sent to an arts school in Madrid where, eccentric as always, he wore his hair long under a large black hat. “I was the first heepie ,� Dali explained later.

Arts school, really university-level work, did not sit well with Dali. In 1924, he led the protest of the appointment of an unpopular professor, was charged with inciting a student insurrection, was suspended from school for a year and briefly jailed. Dali was imprisoned twice more for short periods on charges of anti-monarchist activities and was finally permanently expelled from the university in 1926 when he refused to take an art history examination.

Not that it mattered. Dali’s ability was uncontestable and his fame rapidly grew. In November, 1925, he had his first one-man show in Barcelona.

In the early and mid-1920s, Dali painted his way through several different styles--realism, Cubism and neoclassicism and, by 1927, was dabbling on the edges of surrealism when fellow Spaniard Picasso suggested he hold an exhibit in Paris.

Dali went there and Miro, a fellow Catalan, introduced him to the surrealists, led by Breton, a poet and admirer of Freud.

Dali had found his spiritual home. He put aside his dabblings in other styles and concentrated on the surrealistic transcribing of his dreams and hallucinations. He called his technique “handmade photography of concrete irrationality� whose goals were to “systematize confusion� and “to assist in discrediting completely the world of reality.�

His work was well received by critics who praised the deep perspective of his paintings, his use of the art nouveau style and of multiple images and strange iconographical devices such as the praying mantis, ants, keys, crutches and bread. But critical success did not bring instant profit.

Instead, Dali in vain walked the streets of Paris trying to find buyers for his bizarre inventions--surrealistic devices such as fingernail-shaped looking glasses, women’s shoes with high steel springs and even a plaster head of a roaring lion with a fried egg in its mouth.

Talk of the Town

With a loan from Picasso, Dali made his first trip to the United States in 1934 with Gala, an intense woman of Russian descent who was Dali’s companion and one great love from the time they met in 1929 until her death in 1982. They were married in 1958, six years after the death of her husband, Paul Eluard, a French surrealist poet. In New York, the nude of Gala with the lamb chops quickly made him the talk of the town.

To draw still more attention to his New York exhibit, the Spaniard mounted a strange Broadway extravaganza of sorts in which a taxicab outfitted with a tank and pipes to produce artificial rain trundled down the street with a man dressed to resemble Christopher Columbus riding in the back seat and wearing a placard, “I return.�

This was heady stuff in 1933 and it drew plenty of attention, as did a minor brouhaha a bit later when Dali, upset by a department’s store placement of his paintings in a display window on 5th Avenue--Dali, not for the first time, had made a deal for good money--went flying through the window, shattering glass and bringing out the police.

Lyrical Beach Scenes

Dali returned to Spain--his reputation and the selling price of his paintings rising in his wake--and did a series of beach scenes that the critics found notable for their lyricism, as well as some works influenced by his increasing interest in German romanticism.

The popularity of surrealism was peaking in the late 1930s, and Dali’s paintings, along with the work of other surrealists, could be seen in shows in Paris, London, New York, Mexico City and Tokyo.

But with the coming of the Spanish Civil War--he avoided taking sides--Dali began to spend more time in Italy and France, and soon the influence of the Renaissance masters and l7th-Century baroque painters became evident in his paintings.

With the outbreak of World War II, Dali moved to the United States, settling for a time in Del Monte on the Monterey Peninsula. During the war years, he worked on several of the 20 books he was to write in his lifetime, was well compensated for portraits of American society women and was excommunicated from the surrealistic movement by Breton, who came to this country fleeing the German invasion of France and charged the never-quite-serious Spaniard with “vulgarization� of his art and “pro-Franco leanings.�

Undaunted, Dali proceeded on his two fronts. In terms of his paintings, he declared himself the forerunner of a new Renaissance and said his aim was “to paint eternal subjects, using the techniques of the Old Masters� but “with the psychological and physical concepts of (modern) man.�

“Now, at 45,� he wrote in 1949, “I want to paint a masterpiece and to save modern art from chaos.� Seemingly at peace with Roman Catholicism for the first time, he submitted his early work from this new period to Pope Pius XII, who, Dali reported, showed “extraordinary comprehension� of his effort.

On a more commercial front, Dali was busier than ever. He created fashions in collaboration with Chanel and Schiaparelli; he designed furniture, jewelry and china and did drawings for magazine covers and advertisements to promote perfumes and hosiery.

Dali, with Luis Bunuel, had collaborated on two surrealistic films, “Un Chien Andalou� (1929) and “L’Age d’Or� (1931), and in 1945, he helped design the dream sequences in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.� A year later, he worked on a Walt Disney cartoon project, “Destino.� Dali parlayed his genius for self-advertisement into millions of dollars--Dali’s “Ma Mere� sold for $807,000 in London in 1982--and, most critics agreed, the last two decades or so of his working life were noteworthy more for plain silliness and commercialism than real accomplishment.

Dali’s Reversible Panels

The year 1973 was a banner one for Dali at his commercial worst. Spain’s Iberia Air Lines rolled out the first of its DC-10s, which featured two Dali paintings on wall panels. The panels could be turned around and replaced by the screen for in-flight movies.

A month later, Dali was in New York for a press conference with, of all people, the surrealistic rock star of the day, Alice Cooper. The occasion was the unveiling of Dali’s holographic portrait of Cooper.

Dali in a 1985 interview scoffed at the charges of commercialism. “Liking money like I like it is nothing less than mysticism,� he said. “Money is a glory.�

Sadly, Dali’s last years were marked by failing health and blatant opportunism--more on the part of those around him than on his own.

Secretaries and agents, and their cronies, milked the old man for all he was worth, mismanaging and looting, selling copyright and reproduction rights to Dali works all over the world with much of the profit going into their own pockets.

Fake Dali lithographs were everywhere--a process encouraged by the artist’s distressing habit in the 1970s of regularly signing blank pieces of paper. Dali could and did sign more than 1,800 an hour, according to one associate. With the help of friends, Dali later managed to shake a long period of depression that followed the death of his beloved Gala and got his financial and mental houses in order.

The ailing artist suffered another setback with the 1984 fire that swept through his home near Figueras--Pubol Castle, as it was known. Dali was badly burned, leaving friends to fear for a time that the end was near for the eccentric genius. Dali’s doctors were not optimistic. But, somehow, Dali hung on to life and slowly recovered from the burns. And the doctors withdrew their earlier diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease, attributing, instead, the painter’s infirmities to a combination of advancing age and heart trouble.

“I am not going to die, so as to castigate those who envy me,� he said in a March, 1985, interview in the New York Times. He received a pacemaker in 1986.

Dali, in the interview, raised the question of the fake lithographs himself. “No one would worry if I were a mediocre painter,� he said. Dali professed not to be worried by the controversy nor the possibility that the fakes would devalue his real work. “To the contrary,� he said. “All the great painters have been falsified.�

Most would agree with Los Angeles Times art critic William Wilson that Dali’s “late art was a pathetic joke in the form of anything that would sell� and that “somewhere along the line even the technological virtuosity that helped make him famous faltered and deteriorated into a form of self-parody.�

But there is still cause to hold out hope for the opinion of critic A. Reynolds Morse, voiced more than three decades ago, that “time will prove Dali to be . . . our age’s greatest painter. . . .�

And to remember Dali’s own words in his 1976 autobiography:

“My delight in existence is on this level: to shower death with a fireworks of life.�

An appreciation of Dali by William Wilson. In Calendar.