Thousands of books have been written about Salvador Dali, many films have been shot, but it is not necessary to watch, read and listen to all this - there are his pictures. The genius Spaniard proved by his own example that a whole universe lives in every person and immortalized himself in canvases that will be in the center of attention of all mankind for more than one century. Dali has long been not just an artist, but something like a global cultural meme. How do you like the opportunity to feel like a reporter for a yellow newspaper and delve into the dirty linen of a genius? …
Grandfather's suicide
In 1886, Gal Josep Salvador, Dali's paternal grandfather, took his own life. The grandfather of the great artist suffered from depression and persecution mania, and in order to annoy everyone who "follows" him, he decided to leave this mortal world.
Once he went to the balcony of his apartment on the third floor and began to shout that he had been robbed and tried to kill. The arriving police were able to convince the unfortunate man not to jump from the balcony, but as it turned out, only for a while - six days later, Gal still threw himself from the balcony upside down and died suddenly.
The Dali family, for obvious reasons, tried to avoid widespread publicity, so the suicide was hushed up. In the conclusion about the death there was not a word about suicide, only a note that Gal died "from a traumatic brain injury", so the suicide was buried according to the Catholic rite. For a long time, relatives hid from Gal's grandchildren the truth about the death of his grandfather, but the artist eventually learned about this unpleasant story.
Masturbation addiction
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As a teenager, Salvador Dali loved, so to speak, to measure penises with classmates, and he called his "small, pathetic and soft."
The early erotic experiences of the future genius did not end with these harmless pranks: somehow a pornographic novel fell into his hands and most of all he was struck by the episode where the main character boasted that "he can make a woman squeak like a watermelon."
The young man was so impressed by the power of the artistic image that, remembering this, he reproached himself for his inability to do the same with women.
In his autobiography "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali" (original - "The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali"), the artist admits: "For a long time it seemed to me that I was impotent." Probably, to overcome this oppressive feeling, Dali, like many boys of his age, engaged in masturbation, to which he was so addicted that throughout the life of a genius, masturbation was for him the main, and sometimes even the only way of sexual satisfaction.
At that time, it was believed that masturbation can lead a person to insanity, homosexuality and impotence, so that the artist was constantly in fear, but could not help himself.
Dali associated sex with rot
One of the complexes of the genius arose through the fault of his father, who once (on purpose or not) left a book on the piano, which was full of colorful photographs of male and female genitals disfigured by gangrene and other diseases.
Having studied the pictures that fascinated and at the same time terrified him, Dali Jr. for a long time lost interest in contacts with the opposite sex, and sex, as he later admitted, began to be associated with decay, decay and decay.
Of course, the artist's attitude to sex is noticeably reflected in his canvases: fears and motives of destruction and decay (most often depicted in the form of ants) are found in almost every work.
For example, in "The Great Masturbator", one of his most significant paintings, there is a human face looking downward, from which a woman "grows", most likely written off from the wife and muse of Dali Gala. A locust sits on his face (the genius felt an inexplicable horror of this insect), on the belly of which ants crawl - a symbol of decay.
The woman's mouth is pressed against the groin of the man standing next to him, which hints at oral sex, while the cuts bleed on the man's legs, indicating the artist's fear of castration, which he experienced as a child.
Love is evil
In his youth, one of Dali's closest friends was the famous Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. It was rumored that Lorca even tried to seduce the artist, but Dali himself denied this.
Many contemporaries of the great Spaniards said that for Lorca the love union of the painter and Elena Dyakonova, later known as Gala Dali, was an unpleasant surprise - allegedly the poet was convinced that the genius of surrealism could be happy only with him. I must say, despite all the gossip, there is no exact information about the nature of the relationship between the two outstanding men.
Many researchers of the artist's life agree that before meeting Gala, Dali remained a virgin, and although Gala was married to someone else at that time, had an extensive collection of lovers, in the end was ten years older than him, the artist was fascinated by this woman. Art critic John Richardson wrote about her:
“One of the nastiest wives a modern successful artist could choose. It is enough to get to know her to start hating her."
At one of the first meetings of the artist with Gala, he asked what she wanted from him. This, no doubt, an outstanding woman replied: “I want you to kill me” - after this Dali immediately fell in love with her, finally and irrevocably.
Dali's father could not stand his son's passion, mistakenly believing that she uses drugs and forces the artist to sell them. The genius insisted on continuing the relationship, as a result of which he was left without his father's inheritance and went to Paris to his beloved, but before that, in protest, he shaved his head baldly and “buried” his hair on the beach.
Genius voyeur
It is believed that Salvador Dali received sexual gratification by watching others make love or masturbate. The genius Spaniard even spied on his own wife when she was taking a bath, confessed to the "exciting experience of a voyeur" and called one of his paintings "Voyeur".
Contemporaries whispered that the artist arranges orgies every week at his home, but if this is true, most likely, he himself did not take part in them, being content with the role of a spectator.
One way or another, Dali's antics shocked and annoyed even the depraved bohemia - art critic Brian Sewell, describing his acquaintance with the artist, said that Dali asked him to take off his pants and masturbate, lying in the fetal position under the statue of Jesus Christ in the painter's garden. According to Sewell, Dali made similar strange requests to many of his guests.
Singer Cher recalls that one day she and her husband Sonny went to visit the artist, and he looked as if he had just participated in an orgy. When Cher began to twirl the beautifully painted rubber rod, which interested her, the genius solemnly informed her that it was a vibrator.
George Orwell: "He is sick and his paintings are disgusting"
In 1944, the famous writer dedicated an essay to the artist entitled "The Privilege of Spiritual Shepherds: Notes on Salvador Dali", in which he expressed the opinion that the artist's talent makes people consider him impeccable and perfect.
Orwell wrote: “Come back to Shakespeare's land tomorrow and find out that his favorite pastime in his free time is raping little girls in train cars, we shouldn't tell him to continue like this just because he is able to write another“King Lear. " You need the ability to keep both facts in your head at the same time: the one that Dali is a good draftsman, and the one that he is a disgusting person."
The writer also notes the pronounced necrophilia and coprophagia (craving for excrement) present in Dali's paintings. One of the most famous works of this kind is considered to be "The Dark Game", written in 1929 - at the bottom of the masterpiece is depicted a man stained with feces. Similar details are present in the artist's later works.
In his essay, Orwell concludes that "people [like Dali] are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has some flaws." We can say that the writer himself confessed to his unjustified idealism: after all, the human world has never been and will never be perfect, and Dali's impeccable canvases are one of the clearest evidences of this.
Hidden faces
Salvador Dali wrote his only novel in 1943, when he and his wife were in the United States. Among other things, in the literary work that came out from the hands of the painter, there are descriptions of the antics of eccentric aristocrats in the fire and blood-drenched Old World, while the artist himself called the novel "an epitaph of pre-war Europe."
If the artist's autobiography can be considered a fantasy disguised as truth, then Hidden Faces is rather a truth pretending to be fiction. In the sensational book at the time, there is such an episode - Adolf Hitler who won the war in his residence "Eagle's Nest" is trying to brighten up his loneliness with priceless masterpieces of art from all over the world spread around him, Wagner's music is playing, and the Fuhrer makes half-delusional speeches about the Jews and Jesus Christ.
In general, reviews of the novel were favorable, although the literary columnist for The Times criticized the novel's whimsical style, excessive adjectives, and confused plot. At the same time, for example, a critic from the magazine "The Spectator" wrote about Dali's literary experience: "This is a psychotic mess, but I liked it."
Beats, then … genius?
1980 was a turning point for the elderly Dali - the artist was paralyzed and, being unable to hold a brush in his hands, he stopped writing.
For a genius, this was akin to torture - he had not been balanced before, but now he began to break down with or without, besides, he was greatly annoyed by the behavior of Gala, who spent the money received from the sale of paintings by her genius husband on young fans and lovers, gave them themselves masterpieces, and also often disappeared from home for several days.
The artist began to beat his wife, so much so that once he broke two of her ribs. To calm her husband down, Gala gave him Valium and other sedatives, and once gave Dali a large dose of a stimulant, which caused irreparable damage to the genius's psyche.
Friends of the painter organized the so-called "Rescue Committee" and assigned him to the clinic, but by that time the great artist was a pitiful sight - a thin, shaking old man, constantly in fear that Gala would leave him for the sake of actor Geoffrey Fenholt, the leading actor in Broadway staging of the rock opera "Jesus Christ Superstar".
Instead of skeletons in the closet - wife's corpse in the car
On June 10, 1982, Gala left the artist, but not for another man - the 87-year-old muse of the genius died in a hospital in Barcelona. According to her will, Dali was going to bury his beloved in his castle Pubol in Catalonia, but for this, her body had to be taken out without legal red tape and without attracting unnecessary attention from the press and the public.
The artist found a way out, eerie, but witty - he ordered Gala to be dressed, "put" the corpse in the back seat of her Cadillac, and a nurse was stationed nearby, supporting the body.
The deceased was taken to Pubol, embalmed and dressed in her favorite red Dior dress, and then buried in the crypt of the castle. The inconsolable husband spent several nights kneeling in front of the grave and exhausted with horror - their relationship with Gala was difficult, but the artist could not imagine how he would live without her.
Dali lived in the castle almost until his death, he sobbed for hours and told that he saw various animals - he began to hallucinate.
Infernal invalid
A little over two years after the death of his wife, Dali again experienced a real nightmare - on August 30, the bed in which the 80-year-old artist slept caught fire. The cause of the fire was a short circuit in the wiring of the castle, presumably caused by the old man constantly fiddling with the bell button to call the servant attached to his pajamas.
When the nurse came running to the noise of the fire, she found the paralyzed genius lying at the door in a semi-faint state and immediately rushed to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, although he tried to fight back and called her "bitch" and "killer". The genius survived, but received second-degree burns.
After the fire, Dali became completely unbearable, although he had not previously been distinguished by an easy character. A publicist from Vanity Fair noted that the artist had become a "disabled person from hell": he deliberately stained bedding, scratched the faces of nurses and refused to eat or take medicine.
After recovering, Salvador Dali moved to the neighboring town of Figueres, his theater-museum, where he died on January 23, 1989. The Great Artist once said that he hopes to be resurrected, so he wants his body to be frozen after death, but instead, according to his will, he was embalmed and walled up in the floor of one of the rooms of the theater-museum, where it is located to this day.