HELLO DALI!

After the book sale Friday we drove to Atlanta to the High Museum to see the Salvador Dali Exhibition. I first became a fan of Dali (1904-1989) when I was in the Navy stationed in New Jersey. We visited the New York City Metropolitan Museum and I was impressed with his surrealism art. I thought it was madness on canvas. My kind of art.

A week or two later we went to the Philadelphia Art Museum and saw more Dali art. The Philadelphia Art Museum, you might recall, is where Rocky Balboa ran up its steep hill punching in the air. I think that is where I saw Dali’s Cubical Crucifixion.

Later at the Chicago Art Museum I saw some more of Dali’s stuff.

Anna likes his work too.

Here we are, almost 50 years after my discovery of Salvador Dali and looking at his art and things about him, room after room, and then some more rooms.






Dali was very eccentric. He would probably be labeled insane if he wasn't successful. Many of his paintings had to do with Catholicism. He believed in a supreme being, he said how could everything in physics and organism harmonize ? But he was always unsure about religion, especially Catholicism . He is from Spain, the Catholic religion was what he most exposed to.

One painting I saw the other day suggested that since the Virgin Mary was a Virgin, maybe God’s semen came in through her ear. I’m not going there.






I think his most frequent model was his wife Gala, who was 10 years older (examble: the two paintings above). I don’t think he had a problem with her disrobing for the whole world to view her body. In both pictures she is suspended. Dali was fascinated with molecules and atoms moving around in each other in circular motion, yet they were all suspended. And the tiny little atoms, molecules, electrons, and what all else made up solid things, living and non-living.




Salvador Dali was a very vain man. The first look at his waxed mustache with two symmetrical erections would tell you that. He put many self-portraits in with his art. w When he did the METAMORPHIS OF NARCISSUS I wonder if it was a reflection of him? You know of the the story NARCISSUS?




He was also a very skilled entertainer. And I think some of his eccentric behavior was coldly calculated for the thrill of his fans. His friends and associates were high rollers show-biz and artists such as Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchock, and Andy Warhol.

I don’t think you could call him a humanist. He tried collaborating with an American photographer to have a picture taken of a duck just a split second after a firecracker exploded in his ass. The photographer said, “No way, we don’t do that in America.”

If I had known he was looking for someone to collaborate with, for a finder’s fee I would have given him my friend Jimmy Pat’s name and number.