Salvador Dalí

25:10A grasshopper clings to the face, while a nude female figure who looks like Gala rises from the back of the head. Another work from this time, The Lugubrious Game, is more crowded with figures, including a man in excrement-stained underwear. It's an image that shocks its viewers, though the surrealists often aim to provoke. The same year, Dali officially joins the group and prepares for his first exhibition in Paris with work described by Breton as hallucinatory. But rather than attending the opening night in person, he elopes with his lover. Before long, Gala divorces Eloide and also leaves behind her young daughter, Cecile, for her new life with Surrealism's hottest new artist.

25:58Meanwhile, Dali's father, already unhappy about his son's relationship with a married woman, is about to be further outraged. Dali made a painting and exhibited in Paris called Sometimes I Spit With Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother, which was an anti-clerical painting, but his father took it to mean it was a slight against his deceased wife, Dolly's mother. And consequently, his father kicked him out of the house and cut him off for a number of years. Though heartbroken by the estrangement with his father and sister, the artist is confident he can forge his own path with Gala by his side.

26:35It helps that she is practical in ways that he is not, and she assumes the role of his manager, as well as appearing as a model in a huge number of his works. Gala was very much a motivator. Like, you know, is Dolly getting paid? She's the one who's really checking contracts at the beginning. If he's just making sketches at a restaurant and he leaves, she's going to go back and collect all those sketches because she doesn't want them to just kind of fall out into the market or whatever. So, you know, she's really the one who's checking this. She's a pistol and not to be reckoned by. The following summer, the couple rent a fisherman's cabin in Port Ligat, just along the coast from Cadaqués.

27:10Not long after, Dali purchases the property and gradually expands it into a labyrinthine villa overlooking the sea. The early 1930s proved to be a fruitful period, due in part to his honing of a new method. Now the idea of the Paranoiac Critical Method is not actually that unfamiliar in a lot of ways. It's really seeing images, seeing ideas in something else. And so other artists were doing that. I mean, if we take it back to Aristophanes, he talks about seeing images in clouds. So the whole act of seeing something in something else is very, very common. Surrealists like Max Ernst were already looking at wood grain or doing frittage images and seeing animals that would come out of that.

27:52Dali basically gave that a very scientific language.

27:58Inspired by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, he develops psychological techniques to induce what he calls a paranoiac state. It's not paranoia in the modern sense, but a deliberate suspension of rational thought and ordinary perception. From this approach, some of his most famous works emerge. Elephants, ants, and grasshoppers appear in desert landscapes that incorporate uncanny double imagery, and human faces or bodies are concealed within the surrounding forms. One night, when Gala is out, this method leads Dali to create his most famous painting. It is a small work depicting a dreamlike Catalonian landscape scattered with melting clock faces, one of which is crawling with ants.

28:44The story that Dali tells about the persistence of memory is very interesting. It's probably not true, but it's very interesting. It's that he was in Paris, and he just had dinner with Gala, and Galla went to a movie while he stayed home and nursed a headache. And he had been reading about Einstein's theory of relativity and the elasticity of space and time. And he was staring at this soft camembert cheese that they had just been eating after dinner. And that gooey aspect of melting cheese and the idea of elasticity of time-space came together in a very paranoiac way for Galla. And he's like, oh, well, a soft clock.

29:21And so he said by the time that she got back from the film, He had put all of those clocks into this painting. And when she came home, he covered up her eyes and took her into the studio and said, OK, what do you think? And when she opened her eyes, she said, once somebody's seen it, they'll never forget it. And so he called it the persistence of memory. This painting will have enormous ramifications for Dali. In 1932, an art dealer called Julien Levy brings it to the United States for inclusion in an early surrealist exhibition. American audiences are captivated. Two years later, having by now married Gala in a civil ceremony, the artist follows his painting over the Atlantic.

30:04Arriving in New York by Steamboat, he is an immediate hit. He strides out of his hotel on East 55th Street, announcing to the waiting crowd, Dali is here, and immediately gets to work to cement his reputation. When he is celebrated at a lavish ball thrown by New York's high society, he arrives with a glass case strapped to his chest containing a brassiere. But at another masquerade party, he and Gala take their trademark theatricality too far. Referencing the highly publicized abduction and murder of the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh, they dress as a baby and kidnapper, outraging the American press and public.

30:47Back at home, while the left-leaning surrealists are horrified by the rise of Hitler, Dali's own thoughts on the issue land him in hot water. Dali's political leanings or lack of leanings are generally the biggest problem that the surrealists have with him. There's really no evidence that Dali ever supported Hitler in a real tangible way. In 1933, Hitler just became chancellor. there's certainly something that is very interesting to Dali, and as Dali says, about Hitler's rise to power and the power that he has over the masses. That it's kind of a hysteria that he is trying to understand. Like, how did this little guy suddenly have such a sway and such a destructive sway over so many people?

31:30How is he making people act so irrationally, in fact? And because Dali is very interested in the irrational, this is something that he finds intriguing. The Surrealists will look at that and say that you need to just be taking a stance against it. You can't just explore it. You have to say, no, I'm anti-Hitler. When Dali returns from New York, the Surrealists hold a trial for him at Breton's house to see if he should remain in the organization. Dali actually saves himself from expulsion. Sometimes this is reported as being the time that Dali's kicked out of the group, but it's not true. He continues to show throughout the 1930s.

32:02But he explains that he has no real interest in Hitler. He knows that as a modern artist, Hitler would have nothing to do with his paintings. And in fact, several of Dali's paintings are presumably destroyed from the time of the Nazis because they were considered degenerate art. So Dali recognized that he's not the kind of artist that Hitler would want to support. But again, he's interested in Hitler as an idea.

32:26Of more pressing concern is the political turmoil at home. By now, the Spanish monarchy has fallen. and what is known as the Second Republic has been established in its place. The new government attempts to modernize Spain through reforms that reduce the power of the Catholic Church and introduce land redistribution. But instead of unifying the country, these changes only deepen existing divisions. Eventually, in 1936, General Francisco Franco leads a military uprising against the Republican government. What begins as a coup quickly escalates into a full scale civil war as Spain splits into two opposing camps.

33:08Dali's friends and family suffer at the hands of both sides. Dali is in a bit of a curious position because on the one hand, his good friend and significant other for a while, Federico García Lorca, is killed by the Nationalists. So there's a murderer on that side. On the other, his sister Anna Maria is captured by the republicans in cateches and is reportedly tortured under the prospect that she could have been a spy so dali's whole family has become francoites for personal reasons and so dali's kind of actually between the two he has friends and family on both sides as a spaniard in the middle of a civil war despite the turmoil in his homeland dali's career continues to flourish internationally In 1936, he delivers a lecture at the London International Surrealist Exhibition, wearing a deep-sea diving suit to symbolize his plunge into the subconscious.

34:07It's a fruitful period, seeing the collaborative production of his most famous so-called surrealist objects, including the lobster telephone with the shellfish spread over the receiver and the Mae West lips sofa, inspired by the film star, as well as joint projects with fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Yet, behind this picture of success, tensions are building. Dali's ambiguous political stance and provocative behavior alienate him further from the surrealists. In 1939, after years of disagreement, he is formally expelled from the movement. But with work, money, and acclaim pouring in from the United States, Dali continues to hog the headlines.

34:56headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

35:27Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

36:23Roll out! It's 7 in the morning on March 16, 1939. Tom Lee, display manager at Bonwit Teller, the upmarket Fifth Avenue department store, watches with a flicker of trepidation as Salvador Dali puts the finishing touches to his window displays. The great surrealist has worked through the night. Now, in the clear light of morning, Lee stands to one side as the displays take their final form.

36:58Inspired loosely by the myth of Narcissus, the youth who falls in love with his own reflection, Dali is calling these two windows day and night. In the daytime scene, an ancient mannequin with long red hair wears a negligee of green feathers. She is poised as if about to step into a fur-lined bathtub, from which wax hands rise, each holding a mirror. In night, another figure lies on a mattress of glowing coals. Dali has designed windows for the store before, but Lee suspects New York's well-to-do shoppers might not be ready for his latest display. Nevertheless, he nods plightly when the tired artist heads home for bed, his famous mustache slightly drooping.

37:44Even before the shop opens, Lee can hear a crowd gathering on Fifth Avenue, and peers out from an upstairs window to see the pavement growing thick with onlookers. Some point to their gloved hands, others stare, transfixed or horrified. As soon as Bondwood Teller opens at nine, shoppers sweep through the doors, flushed with indignation. Out on the street, the crowd continues to swell. There's nothing for it. Lee will have to telephone Dali. But when he gets through to the artist's hotel, Dali has left strict instructions not to be disturbed. Sighing, Lee heads for the displays himself. With a couple of assistants, he replaces the mannequin in day with a more decent figure in a Molineux suit.

38:32He pulls Knight out of her burning bed and stands her on the opposite side of the window. After their adjustments, the windows, though still bizarre, are not quite so indecent, and the crowd begins to fear me. But at five o 'clock that afternoon, Lee is interrupted from a meeting by a breathless shop assistant. Their guest window dresser is back from his nap. The display manager hurries to the windows to explain himself, but nothing prepares him for the speed at which the artist moves. Furious, Dahlia's already charged into the day window and seems to be wrestling with the bathtub. Whether by accident or design, the tub slips from his grasp and through the glass, the artist flying with it out into Fifth Avenue.

39:22The street erupts into chaos. Two detectives on a passing bus scramble down and push through the crowd. Seizing the red-faced Dali, they brush debris from his coat and hurry into the nearest station. As onlookers surge around the bathtub and broken glass, Lee surveys the scene. Then, sighing, he sends an assistant to fetch a broom.

39:51Charged in court with disorderly conduct, Dali receives a suspended sentence. The following month, a show of his opens at the World's Fair in New York. The central attraction, Dream of Venus, is dubbed a surrealist funhouse, where visitors can encounter an elaborate underwater set apparently populated by 17 real-life mermaids. For a short time that summer, Dali and Gala return to Port Ligat, where the artist works on paintings of Sigmund Freud and the child star Shirley Temple. He also creates a piece titled The Enigma of Hitler, in which a melting telephone hangs above a tiny photograph of the Nazi leader on an almost empty plate.

40:35Not long after, Hitler invades Poland, and the Second World War begins. Though Spain remains neutral, Dali and Gala see out much of the conflict in the United States. And though Dali watches from afar as Germany advances through Europe, his work grows increasingly dark. His painting, The Face of War, depicts a disembodied head floating against a barren landscape. Inside its mouth and eye sockets are identical, stricken faces, which in turn contain more faces, suggesting an endless cycle of suffering. In 1941, he begins work on his autobiography, entitled The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. It is by turns flamboyant and deeply unreliable, and is published the following year.

41:22Other projects at this time range widely, from a bejeweled human eye with the hands of a watch set into the iris, to costume designs for ballets. He delves into fashion design, into jewelry design. He makes some really amazing jewels. One is a little heart made of rubies that has a beating mechanism in the inside, so it looks like it's beating. So there's something slightly macabre, but certainly very creative and interesting and unique about any of the ventures that Dali goes into. Whether it's film, whether it's fashion, objects, anything, Dali does have a particular mark about him that you can recognize it as a Dali.

41:58His ability to turn his hand to anything win him accusations of greed from his old detractors among the surrealists earning him a memorable nickname André Breton creates that name of Vida Dollars for him which is an anagram of Salvador Dali and Dali ends up saying that he wears it proudly in fact he says you know I love gold, I love money I want to drown in checks, I want to drown in a diarrhea of gold I mean he's very open about the fact that he likes money and I suppose there's a sort of a romantic 19th century notion that artists shouldn't do that, that artists should be sort of suffering figures.

42:29And Dolly goes against that openly, like, why should I be poor when I could be rich? Wouldn't it be better to be rich? But not all of his grand ideas bring success. A dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's film, Spellbound, initially envisioned by the artist as a 20-minute clip, is cut to just three minutes in the final edit. More successful in the long run is Destino, an animated short film for Disney. Though shelved because of post-war financial struggles, the project, featuring melting clocks and dreamlike landscapes, is revived and completed many decades later, earning an Academy Award nomination.

43:11By now, the Second World War has come to its gruesome conclusion, in a summer of unprecedented violence. While the world reels from the United States deployment of atomic bomb in Japan, Dali becomes fascinated by the emergence of the nuclear age. For the rest of his career, he explores a fusion of Catholic iconography and scientific imagery in his work, which he calls nuclear mysticism.

43:41In 1948, Dali and Gala returned to their home in Spain, which is now under the authoritarian rule of Francisco Franco, following the nationalist victory at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Their return provokes a backlash, particularly among those who oppose Franco's repressive regime. But Dali's wealth and fame insulate him from the economic hardship that affects much of Spain. His perceived sympathy for the regime, along with his avoidance of political criticism, helps keep him out of danger. Though Dali's personal beliefs remain complex, religion exerts a growing influence on his work. Madonna of Port-Ligot from 1949 is really the first more fully formed image of his turn to religious subject matter.

44:28It looked very conservative at the time. It certainly looked very traditional. But at the same time, it was looking at new ideas of science and technology, considerations about atoms and the nuclear world. And so I think that really signals a change in Dali's work and a direction that he was going that had connections to his earlier pieces certainly looked very different. His interest in Catholicism deepening, he secures a private audience with the Pope and presents the Madonna of Porte-le-Gatte, featuring Gala as the Virgin Mary for his blessing. Dali continues to draw on ideas from contemporary science and mathematics.

45:07His long-standing fascination with perception leads him to experiment with optical effects, in holograms and photomosaic imagery. But despite his technical brilliance, he is accused of becoming overly commercial. Dali's work is often met with skepticism, even as it continues to attract popular attention. But his taste for a good stunt remains. Booked to speak at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1955, he arrives in a white Rolls Royce filled with cauliflowers. Later, as promotion for a book, he signs copies in a Manhattan store while connected to a machine that records his brainwaves and blood pressure.

45:48Each buyer of the book is gifted with a printout of the data. Back in Catalonia, he begins work on the Dali Theater and Museum in his hometown of Figueres. Now in his 60s, he still cuts a striking figure. He adopts an ocelot and walks an anteater through the streets of Paris before bringing it with him onto the Dick Cabot show. He's always realized that pushing the envelope is a way of publicizing his work. He's realized that his personality is as much of a part of his general body of work as his art is. Once television becomes popular, he's showing up on game shows. He's doing commercials for chocolates and things like this in France.

46:31I think that the time in America exposes him at first to the media, and that becomes such a way of propelling his image in various guises, not just through art exhibitions and painting, but really as almost a Renaissance man, if you will. Dali embraces mass culture and advertising. He blends surrealism with consumerism in campaigns for brands such as Lanvin, Alka-Seltzer, and Datsun, even designing the Chupa Chups lollipop logo.

47:04The money keeps rolling in, but it doesn't necessarily make for a happy home. Though the couple are increasingly spending time apart, in accordance with Dali's newfound religiosity, they confirm their marriage in a religious ceremony in Girona, Spain, almost two decades after their initial vows. The following decade, Gala sets her sights on acquiring a castle in the village of Pubol, around 40 miles from Port Ligat. Dali undertakes its renovation, transforming it into a theatrical space, complete with a mausoleum and a throne room containing a single throne reserved for his beloved wife. Gala moves in in 1971, but it becomes increasingly clear that her husband is not welcome without invitation.

47:49Now in her late 60s, Gala remains as commanding as ever, hosting orgiastic parties and surrounding herself with a succession of younger lovers. Dali, for his part, leads a separate life at Port Legat, where he is said to host sexual gatherings of his own, though his preference remains for looking rather than touching. By 1980, both the artist and his country have changed. With the dictator Franco now dead, his successor, King Juan Carlos I, begins guiding the country through a transition to democracy. But though life improves in Spain, it's a period of decline for Dali, now 76 and increasingly fragile.

48:31Things are worse for Gala, now in her 80s, who begins to develop dementia. Even so, Dali is paranoid that she will leave him, and at one point physically assaults her, breaking two of her ribs. In an attempt to calm him, Gala gives her husband large quantities of Valium and other drugs, but the sedatives almost kill him. The resulting tremors in his right hand cause him trouble every time he picks up a paintbrush. In spite of their bitter antipathy, the couple remain married until Gala's death from influenza in June 1982. Now a widower, Dali descends into a state of derangement, refusing to eat or drink, and scratching at his face in despair.

49:21In his final years, he is a demanding and verbally abusive invalid for his army of nurses. His final honor comes from King Juan Carlos I, who awards him the title of Marquis of Pupol Castle. But even Dali's final act isn't without drama. In 1984, a short circuit in the coal button by his four-poster bed causes a fire. He is rescued from the flames and lives another five years. but after a period at the Hill Health, the artist dies on January the 23rd, 1989, aged 84. He is buried in a crypt of his own design at the Dali Theater Museum in Figueres. Yet, even after his death, there is one more unexpected twist.

50:06In the 2000s, a tarot card reader and psychic called Pilar Abel files a lawsuit claiming to be his daughter. Initial DNA tests taken from traces on Dali's death mask prove inconclusive. When the artist's remains are exhumed, it is proven that Abel is not Dali's child. But the embalmer who prepared Dali's body notes with satisfaction that the artist's famous mustache remains in excellent condition. A pioneering surrealist icon, Salvador Dali revolutionized modern art through his exploration of the subconscious with his dreamlike imagery and technical precision. Though best known for his melting clocks and phantasmagorical desert landscapes, which adorn everything from student posters to jigsaw puzzles, his impact extends beyond painting into cinema, fashion, and pop culture.

51:04But in spite of his faults as a person, perhaps his greatest work was the creation of the persona of Salvador Dali himself. Dali's had a tremendously prolific resonance across popular culture. His posters are, of course, very common to find, or calendars, and things in mass culture. The big part of what Dali was doing, which seemed very controversial at the time, of making money, of being a greedy artist, of putting his images on fashion design and commercials, and putting his face on Alka-Seltzer commercials or whatever it might be. Those are all things that an artist in his own time that were just completely strange and not something a serious person would do.

51:43But I think now we have a much different view of what an artist is. I mean, an artist can be a personality, an artist can be much freer. And that kind of success isn't looked down upon today like perhaps it was before.

52:01Next time on Short History, I will bring you a short history of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. You can't get away from the fact that he was one of the most influential engineers of his generation and of the 19th century. He did things that nobody had ever done before and we are left with an amazing legacy. He was not an innovator, he was a doctor. He was very clever at picking up on new kinds of technology and running with them and doing something very different. And as a result, we're left with an amazing legacy of high-speed railways, the foundations of a maritime dynasty of ships and liners. His imprint is all over the UK and certainly on other parts of the world.

52:43And I'm sure that he would have been proud of that kind of legacy today. That's next time.

52:54You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of Right Now without waiting and without adverts by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www.noiser.com forward slash subscriptions to unlock more episodes today. Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo. bell. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor.

53:30Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Garek's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

54:04Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.