Days of Dalí

In a visual chronicle of one of art history’s most extravagant personas, we delve into the secret life of Salvador Dalí.

-  Ann Marie McQueen

There is a photo of the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, taken by his friend, photographer and biographer Robert Descharnes, that will stop any pop culture lover in their tracks. At the end of a boistrous-looking meal, Dalí is looking at his wife and muse Gala, who is gazing back at him. Andy Warhol is in the right corner, clutching his own camera and staring off into the distance. The only person looking anywhere near Descharnes’ lens, appearing entirely out-of-place but grinning happily, is the long-haired, heavy metal American performance artist Alice Cooper. Dalí was so taken with the outrageous rocker that he created his own imagined version of his brain in sculpture, complete with a disintegrating chocolate éclair and crawling ants. As the story goes, the painter who referred to himself in the third person, said “this is Dalí’s version of Alice Cooper’s brain,” to which Cooper responded, “wow, I never thought I’d ever get this.”

That seventies scene is one of 50 photographs to appear at Salvador Dalí: The Memories exhibition in Dubai. Looking at it, one can only wonder if Dalí would have been bored or inspired by some of the more out-of-the-box artists of today, and if he might have dined with and created art for nonconforming performers like Marilyn Manson, Daniel Glover (Childish Gambino) or Cardi B.

Paul Chimera, a Salvador Dalí historian for the Salvador Dalí Society in California, was launched into a lifelong obsession after being shown Dalí’s 1936 painting Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) during an art appreciation class in college.