Dalí. Victoria Charles

Diakonoff of her real name, and called “Gradiva” by Dalí), a Russian born woman and widow of French poet Paul Eluard. She stayed by Dalí’s side until her death in 1982 and acted as his muse, model and manager.

      1967 – Dalí bought the half-ruined Chateau Púbol for Gala.

      1974 – The seventy-year-old Dalí opened his “Teatro-Museo”

      1976 – Enrique Sabater took over Dalí’s general affairs management and quickly succeeded in becoming a multi-millionaire at Dalí’s expense.

      1979 – The Georges-Pompidou Centre in Paris devoted an extensive retrospective to Dalí.

      1980’s – Dalí became ill with Parkinson’s Disease

      1982 – The Morses acquired over four hundred of his works, and amongst these approximately ninety paintings. They built a museum in St Petersburg, Florida for their collection in 1982.

      1983 – He painted his last picture: The Swallow’s Tail

      1989 – January 23, death of Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí.

      1994 – Exhibition on Dalí’s formative years.

* * *

      At the age of 37, Salvador Dalí wrote his autobiography. Titled The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the Spanish painter portrays his childhood, his student days in Madrid, and the early years of his fame in Paris up to his leaving to go to the USA in 1940. The exactness of his descriptions are doubtful in more than one place. Dates are very often incorrect, and many childhood experiences fit too perfectly into the story of his life.

      Dutch Interior (Copy after Manuel Benedito)

      1914

      Oil on canvas, 16 × 20 cm

      Joaquín Vila Moner Collection, Figueras

      The image that Dalí created of himself in 1942, and further developed in the years up to his death in 1989, shows an eccentric person, most at ease when placed in posed settings. Despite this tendency, Dalí often revealed intimate details of his life in front of the camera. This act of self-disclosure, as Dalí explains in his autobiography, is a form of vivisection, a laying bare of the living body carried out in the name of pure narcissism.

      Portrait of Lucia

      1918

      Oil on canvas, 43.5 × 33 cm

      Private collection

      The more Dalí showed himself in public, the more he concealed himself. His masks became ever larger and ever more magnificent: he referred to himself as “genius” and “god-like”. Whoever the person behind the Dalí image really was remains a mystery.

      Dalí’s memories appear to begin two months before his birth on May 11th, 1904.

      Self-Portrait in the Studio

      c. 1919

      Oil on canvas, 27 × 21 cm

      Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg (Florida)

      Recalling this period, he describes the “intra-uterine paradise” defined by “colors of Hell, that are red, orange, yellow and bluish, the color of flames, of fire; above all it was warm, still, soft, symmetrical, doubled and sticky.” His most striking memory of birth, of his expulsion from paradise into the bright, cold world, consists of two eggs in the form of mirrors floating in mid-air, the whites of which are phosphorising: “These eggs of fire finally merged together with a very soft amorphous white paste, characterized by their extreme elasticity. Technical objects were to become my biggest enemy later on, and as for watches, they had to be soft or not at all.”

      Port of Cadaqués at Night

      1919

      Oil on canvas, 18.7 × 24.2 cm

      Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg (Florida)

      Dalí’s life is overshadowed by the death of his brother. On August 1st, 1903, the first-born child of the family, scarcely two years old, died from gastroenteritis. The child Salvador sees himself as nothing more than a substitute for the dead brother: “Throughout the whole of my childhood and youth I lived with the perception that I was a part of my dead brother. That is, in my body and my soul, I carried the clinging carcass of this dead brother because my parents were constantly speaking about the other Salvador.” Out of fear that the second-born child could also sicken and die, Salvador was particularly cosseted and spoiled. He was surrounded by a cocoon of female attention, not just spun by his mother Felipa Doménech Ferrés, but also later by his grandmother Maria Ana Ferrés and his aunt Catalina.

      Portrait of José M. Torres

      c. 1920

      Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 39.5 cm

      Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona

      Portrait of the Cellist Ricardo Pichot

      1920

      Oil on canvas, 61.5 × 49 cm

      Private collection, Cadaqués

      Dalí reported that his mother continually admonished him to wear a scarf when he went outdoors. If he got sick, he enjoyed being allowed to remain in bed. Dalí’s sister Ana Maria, four years younger, writes in her book, Salvador Dalí visto por su hermana (Salvador Dalí, Seen through the Eyes of His Sister), that their mother only rarely let Salvador out of her sight and frequently kept watch at his bedside at night, for when he suddenly awoke, startled out of sleep, to find himself alone, he would start a terrible fuss.

      Portrait of Hortensia, Peasant Woman from Cadaqués

      1920

      Oil on canvas, 35 × 26 cm

      Private collection

      Salvador enjoyed the company of the women and especially that of the eldest, his grandmother and Lucia (his nurse). He had very little contact with children of his own age. He often played alone. He would disguise himself as a king and observe himself in the mirror: “With my crown, a cape thrown over my shoulders, and otherwise completely naked. Then I pressed my genitals back between my thighs, in order to look as much like a girl as possible. Even then I admired three things: weakness, age and luxury.”

      Self-Portrait with the Neck of Raphael

      1920–1921

      Oil on canvas, 41.5 × 53 cm

      Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Figueras

      Dalí’s mother loved him unreservedly, even lionized him. With his father, Dalí enjoyed a different type of relationship. Salvador Dalí y Cusi was a notary in the Catalan market-town of Figueras, near the Spanish-French border. An anti-Catholic free thinker, he decided not to send his son Salvador to a church school, as would have befitted his social status, but to a state school.

      Landscape near Cadaqués

      1920–1921

      Oil on canvas, 31 × 34 cm

      Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Figueras

      Only when Salvador