Dali by Philippe Halsman in 1943
Dali was once saying that if you act genius you will be one. If I’m thinking about the people who were considered genius, he is the first one to cross my mind. Besides the nature of his paintings, he was a showman. He knew how to sell his creations better then nobody else. He promoted himself in such a provocative way that it was practically impossible to ignore him.
The craziest person of the “surrealism crew” was best described in the documentary called “Salvador Dali – a Soft Self Portrait”, made in 1970 by Jean-Christophe Averty and narrated in English by Orson Welles. The documentary not only tells the story of his life (in few words though), but is also doing a remake of the pictures who made him famous. It is built as a self portrait, as Dali is talking about himself using the third person and acting according to every scene and the subject of his painting. The documentary is basically a a play with surrealism, a hallucinating mise-en-scène.
“It is very normal that nobody understands Dali, because myself never understood my work. Never Dali understood the paintings of Dali, because Dali created only enigmas”, says the artist about his work. He is playing various characters during the movie, trying to remake the micro-universe of some of his paintings.
The movie also makes a better understand about the psychological directions of his work. “All my eccentricities I habitually perpetrate, are the tragic constant of my life. I want to prove I am not the dead brother but the living brother. By killing my brother I immortalize myself”, he explains. You can discover his world here:
Salvador Dali was famous for being so keen on making money. People were even making jokes about the anagram of his name, which was “avida dollars”.
Photo made by Philippe Halsman in 1954
Dali had a collaboration with Walt Disney in the ’40s, working together for a short animated movie called “Destino” Because of objections regarding its content, it was not released by that time, but in 2003.
No matter who was the person next to him, he liked to play the role of the “outrageous’ guy. Here he was next to the french singer Francoise Hardy.
Together with Coco Chanel – as it was a spontaneous photo, maybe he did not have time to use his original attitude that we saw in the previous one.
Gala was the biggest passion of Dali and the muse of most of his art work. He used to say that she saved him from insanity.
Photo: Bettmann/Corbis
Dali- 8 years old
Photo Credits: http://www.all-art.org
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