Dalí [antikvár]

•-A. INTRODUCTION It is perhaps unsurprising tliat Salvador Dalí has proven to be one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century, for his finest works explore universal and timeless states of mind, and most of his pictures were painted with a mastery of traditional representation that has proven rare in our era. For many people, that control of representationalism in itself would have attracted them to Dali's work, and it has certainly served to mask any gradual lessening of quality in his art. Moreover, Dalí was also probably the greatest artistic self-publicist in a century in which (as Igor Stravinsky commented in 1970), publicity has come 'to be about all that is left of the arts', and in this respect Dalí, along with his brilliant wife and co-publicist, Gala, was in a class of his own for much of his lifetime. Yet Dali's immense popularity is also rather ironic, for his work - in its finest phase, at least - constitutes an attack on the social, sexual and cultural values of the very society that feted him. The notion that an artist should be culturally subversive has proven central to modernist art practice, and it was certainly central to Surrealism, which aimed to subvert the supposedly rational basis of society itself. In time, Dali's subversiveness softened, and by the mid-1940s André Breton, the leading spokesman for Surrealism, was perhaps justifiably dismissing the painter as a mere showman and betrayer of Surrealist intentions. But although there was a sea-change in Dali's art after about 1940, his earlier work certainly retains its ability to bewilder, shock and intrigue us, whilst also dealing inventively with the nature of reality and appearances. Similarly, Dali's behaviour as an artist after about 1940 throws light on the superficiality of the culture that sustained him, and this too seems worth touching upon, if only for what it can tell us about the man behind the myths that Salvador Dalí so ably projected about himself. Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech was born on 11 May 1904 in Figueras, a small town in the Catalan province of Gerona, northern Spain, the son of Salvador Dalí i Cusi and Felipa Domenech. Dalí senior was the public notary of Figueras and, as such, an important and widely respected local official. He was a very forceful man, and it was rumoured that he had been responsible for the death of Dali's elder brother, also named Salvador, who had been born in 1901 and who died in 1903; officially the death was caused by catarrh and gastroenterids but according to Dalí his older brother died of meningitis, possibly brought on by a blow to the head. Certainly that death left Dali's parents with an inescapable sense of anguish, and the young Dalí was always aware of the demise simply because both parents constantly projected his lost brother onto him, every day making comparisons between the two boys, dressing the younger Salvador in his dead brother's clothes, giving him the same toys to play with, and generally treating him as the reincarnation of his dead brother, rather than as a person in his own right.