

















Art of the 20th Century





















Paths to Immortality







1962-1989







Dali and Gala as newly-weds in their Paris flat, 1929 The great catastrophe that was impending in Dali's own life happened on 10 June 1982, when Gala died, leaving him alone. Dali tried to commit suicide by dehydrating. How serious was the attempt? He was convinced that dehydration and return to a pupal state would assure him of immortality. He had once read that the inventor of the microscope had seen minute, seemingly dead creatures through the lens of his invention - creatures that were in a state of extreme dehydration and which could be restored to life with a drop of water. Dali concluded (or at least liked the idea) that it was possible to live on beyond the point of dehydration. What he had not foreseen, though, was that, having consumed nothing for so long, it became impossible for him to swallow anything at all. From then till his dying day, he was fed liquid nutriments through a tube up his nose. In his Ten Recipes for Immortality, Dali had written of "immortality vouchsafed by dehydration and temporary return to a pupal stage", as the discovery of collemboles, a species of micro-organisms, showed in 1967. These are a living fossil group that have been in existence since the Devonian (a geological system dating back approximately four hundred million years). The truth is that Dali was not concerned about his body. All that mattered was the immortality of the "garden of his mind". Dali also attempted an auto-da-fe, ringing and ringing the push-button bell that summoned his nurses to his bedside, until eventually the wiring short-circuited and set fire to his bed and nightshirt. Luckily Robert Descharnes was close to hand and saved Dali's life.



Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello (last state)

1983







Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello

1983







Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello

1983







Bed, Chair and Bedside Table Ferociously Attacking a Cello

1983







Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello (Final Stage)

1983







Dali and Gala by the street sign "Rue Salvador Dali", 1961 Another side effect was that Dali lost his voice. He would become impatient and fly into a temper if nobody could understand what he was saying. His retinue, including his confidant Descharnes, needed great patience to decode the scarcely audible murmurs that passed his lips. Their patience was particularly important when it came to business, since Dali still ran the multi-national concern that was Salvador Dali himself. He had established a company, Demart Pro Arte, with Robert Descharnes as president, to protect his work and personal rights, to combat fakes worldwide, and to make new deals. Thus he presided over the creation of a perfume that bore his name; from New York to Tokyo, it was marketed in flacons in Surrealist shapes — a nose, a mouth, or (in the case of the men's product) a testicle. Business was brisk. After all, are not testicles the receptacle of the angels? Until the end he gave whatever instructions were necessary for the realization of projects that mattered to him. One of them was the casting of statues, such as a monumental Newton for a Plaza Dali in Madrid; a big Venus with drawers (originally for the retrospective which Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret organized for the Seibu Museum in Tokyo in 1964); and a "rhinocerotic lace-maker" and a "rhinocerotic sunflower" dating back to the filming of L'histoireprodigieuse de la dentelliere et du rhinoceros in the 1950s. He met representatives of the Minami Group (Japan) to discuss the architectural details of his third museum, the Gala-Dali Museum in Tokyo.





Cutlet and Match - The Chinese Crab

1983







St. George Overpowering a Cello

1983







Warrior Mounted on an Elephant Overpowering a Cello

1983







Pieta

1983





Was Dali mad? Or senile? A number of Catalonian intellectuals tried hard to claim as much, and wrote an open letter to the Catalonian prime minister, Jordi Pujol, accusing those who were close to Dali of exerting a bad influence on the master. They also criticized the management of his business concerns and of the Gala-Dali theatre museum, and suggested that Dali was no longer capable of making his own decisions. Dali was incensed. He summoned Pujol to the Torre Galatea and told him with a smile: "I should like to give one of my most beautiful paintings, Continuum of the Four Buttocks, or, Birth of a Goddess, to the province of Catalonia." Who would question the sanity of a man who had just made a gift of a painting estimated at half a million dollars? The Catalonian intellectuals had been wasting their time.





Topological Abduction of Europe - Homage to Rene Thom

1983







Topological Contortion of a Female Figure Becoming a Violoncello

1983







The Swallowtail

1983





In fact, Dali was still delighting in life, and constantly quoted Ovid's Morte carent animae (Souls forgo death). So much still remained to be done if he was to perfect his work and be assured of immortality. In addition to his rescuer Robert Descharnes, the only one who did not grow rich at Dali's expense and who conscientiously protected his work and person, the immediate retinue included the painter Antonio Pichot, his pupil from the artistic family that had helped him become a painter; his secretary Maria Teresa, who read the newspapers to him; and Arturo, who had been in his service since 1948 and acted as Dali's valet, chauffeur, male nurse, and looked after the master's properties - a car workshop in Cadaques, a sheep ranch converted into a hotel, the Coral de Gala, the famous house in Port Lligat with its outbuildings, and Pubol castle, which housed his collection. Dali followed scientific research more attentively than ever. He was fascinated by desoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which contains the coded genetic secrets of the species. Was not a DNA molecule a guarantee of immortality? Dali told Descharnes that it was the most royal of cells: "Every half of a shoot is exactly linked to its matching half, just as Gala was linked to me [...] It all opens and closes and interlinks with amazing precision. Heredity depends on a sovereign mechanism, and life is the product of the absolute rule of desoxyribonucleic acid."



Untitled (Figures, Pieta, Catastrophic Signs)

1983