Salvador Dalí

Who

Born in Figueres, Catalonia, on 11 May 1904, he died there on 23 January 1989 and is buried in the crypt beneath the stage of his Theatre-Museum, which opened in the town in 1974. A painter first, he also made Surrealist objects, such as the Lobster Telephone, and a great many prints.

Why they matter

He gave Surrealism its most recognisable pictures: dream images painted with an old master's finish, so that the impossible looks photographed. The Persistence of Memory (1931), the melting watches, is only 24 by 33 centimetres, and MoMA has owned it since 1934. He was also the movement's great showman, which made him famous and, in the end, made his signature the most abused in the print trade.

What to buy

Prints: buy from the museums that own the paintings. The Tate shop sells a poster of Metamorphosis of Narcissus, which hangs at Tate, and prints of the Lobster Telephone; the Art Institute of Chicago shop sells a print of its Inventions of the Monsters. Books: Taschen's Dali. The Paintings by Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret, 752 pages, is the standard survey of the paintings, by the photographer who documented and catalogued Dali's work; Taschen's Basic Art Dali is the cheap introduction.

Originals: not for the casual buyer. Paintings are museum pieces, and the prints are a minefield. It has long been alleged that he signed blank sheets of lithograph paper by the tens of thousands from 1965; Albert Field, author of The Official Catalog of the Graphic Works of Salvador Dali (1996), called the largest figures misinformation spread by fraudulent publishers. Either way the market is full of forged signatures, extended editions and restrikes sold as originals. Two tests are simple: he signed no prints after 1980, and a Dali-signed sheet of Arches or Rives paper carrying the mills' post-1980 watermark with the infinity sign is a fake. Genuine prints exist and are catalogued by Field and by Michler and Lopsinger; buy one only with a catalogue number, at auction, and treat everything else as decoration.

Notes

Glasgow bought Christ of Saint John of the Cross in 1952, through the director of its museums, Tom Honeyman, together with its copyright; a visitor attacked it in 1961 with a stone and damaged the canvas, and it went back on show after months of restoration. The banker Chester Dale gave The Sacrament of the Last Supper to the National Gallery of Art. He is in copyright, so this entry links no free image archives.

Story

On 1 July 1936, at the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, some 300 people crowded in on a stifling day to hear Dali lecture on "Authentic Paranoiac Phantoms". He arrived in a full deep-sea diving suit, with a heavy globular helmet and lead-weighted boots, holding a billiard cue and two Irish wolfhounds on a leash. The dogs belonged to his patron Edward James, who was to translate. The Evening Standard reported that when the shop that hired out the suit was told it was for a lecture, the assistant advised that the speaker should on no account go below thirty metres.

The helmet swallowed his voice. The audience, never told why he was wearing it, sat in what the Daily Mail called rapt and admiring silence, not knowing that he was overheating and could not breathe. When he demanded to be let out, his friends climbed onto the platform and wrestled with the helmet until the visor came open, prised with the billiard cue or with a spanner, depending on who tells it.

Then the lecture went on, illustrated by a magic lantern whose slides were often shown sideways or upside down. One reporter has Dali noticing, and waving it away: "N'importe!" It did not matter.

Key works

• The Persistence of Memory (1931) - MoMA, New York
• Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936) - Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) - Tate, London
• Inventions of the Monsters (1937) - Art Institute of Chicago
• Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951) - Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
• The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955) - National Gallery of Art, Washington

In museum collections

• The Persistence of Memory (1931)
  MoMA ↗
• Lobster Telephone (1936)
  Minneapolis Institute of Art ↗
• Crucifixion (1954)
  The Met ↗
• Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936)
  Philadelphia Museum of Art ↗
• Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951)
  Art UK ↗
• The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955)
  National Gallery of Art ↗
• Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1938)
  Art UK ↗
• Autumnal Cannibalism (1936)
  Art UK ↗
• Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment (1935)
  Art Institute of Chicago ↗
• Illumined Pleasures (1929)
  MoMA ↗
• The Accommodations of Desire (1929)
  The Met ↗
• Birth of liquid desires (1931)
  Guggenheim ↗

See the work

Prints

Books

See also

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