The Life and Masterworks of Salvador Dalí. Eric Shanes

      The Dalís again visited America in December 1936, and it was on this trip that the painter received that supreme accolade of American culture, namely appearance on the cover of Time magazine. The compliment was certainly an indication of the fundamental ineffectiveness of his cultural subversion. That Christmas, Dalí sent the comedian Harpo Marx a harp strung with barbed wire which Harpo evidently appreciated. Subsequently the painter visited Hollywood to sketch out a scenario with the funnyman, a script entitled Giraffes on Horseback Salad, although this would never be made into a film.

      In the same year Dalí also began designing dresses and hats for the leading couturier to the haut monde, Elsa Schiaparelli, who had worked with Picasso and Jean Cocteau amongst others. Dalí was his usual inventive self as a designer, creating hats in the shape of upturned shoes, imitation chocolate buttons covered in bees, a handbag in the shape of a telephone and the like.

      Early in 1938 Dalí took part in the International Exhibition of Surrealism held at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in Paris, for which he concocted perhaps his most elaborate object, the Rainy Taxi, a Paris taxicab whose roof was pierced so as to admit the rain. The car contained a shop-window mannequin that was dressed in a sordid cretonne print dress decorated with Millet’s Angelus, over which two hundred live snails were free to roam. And later that year Dalí visited Sigmund Freud in London, where he made a small pen and ink drawing on blotting paper of the great Viennese psychoanalyst, a work that he later developed into some other fine portrait drawings. That autumn Dalí visited Monte Carlo to work with Coco Chanel, for whom he designed the ballet Bacchanale on behalf of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The painter called this entertainment ‘the first paranoiac ballet based on the eternal myth of love in death’, and in it he realised his intention, expressed to Lorca some years earlier, of creating a stage work around the persona and mind of the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Richard Wagner’s great patron. The ballet was choreographed by Leonide Massine and accompanied by Wagner’s music, and it transferred to New York towards the end of 1939.

      Dalí had revisited New York in February 1939 for a further exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery, and it was on this occasion that he was engaged by the Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue to design window displays, earning nationwide notoriety in the process. What the store had expected of Dalí is not known but what they got was a window revealing an astrakhan-lined bathtub filled with water and complemented by a mannequin wearing only green feathers and a red wig. Another window displayed a black satin bed supporting a mannequin resting her head on a pillow of live coals, over which stretched a canopy created out of a buffalo’s head, with a bloody pigeon stuffed in its mouth. Not surprisingly, the pedestrians who walked past this comely display began complaining as soon as it went on view early one morning and it was hastily altered by the Bonwit Teller management. When Dalí turned up to survey his work later that day he was so enraged by the unauthorised changes that he overturned the bath through a plate glass window, and for his pains found himself hauled into court by a passing policeman, charged with disorderly conduct. He received a suspended sentence, but the publicity much enhanced his reputation for eccentricity, and the ensuing Levy Gallery show was almost a sell-out, greatly boosting Dalí’s prices in the process. Clearly, scandal paid.

      Dalí stayed on in America that summer in order to create a work for the New York World’s Fair, his Dream of Venus; it was unrealised due to a disagreement with the World Fair’s management. But soon after he returned to France, World War II broke out and the painter vacated Paris. Eventually he settled in Arcachon, in the south-west of France, a locale chosen for its good restaurants. Following the fall of France in June 1940 the Dalís returned via Spain and Portugal to the United States, where they arrived on 16 August 1940 and where they sat out the rest of the war.

      Salvador Dalí’s move to America in 1940 marked a watershed in his career, for his artistic achievements before that date were far richer than they ever were after it. Until then the painter had genuinely and inventively grappled with his innermost responses to the world, and produced his greatest masterworks in the process. Moreover, his occasionally madcap antics seemed the natural offshoot of those responses, especially where a genuinely Surrealist subversion of accepted standards of ‘civilised’ behaviour was concerned. But after 1940, and especially because of the need to make money once the financial support of the Zodiac group had disappeared, Dalí the showman took over, whilst after the end of the Second World War a newfound interest in scientific, religious and historical subject-matter meant that the authenticity of Dalí’s exploration of the subconscious began to drain away, to be replaced by something far more calculated in effect. Moreover, after 1940 a new banality often entered into Dalí’s work, as his imagery was made to bear a more rationally comprehensible load and a more directly symbolic meaning. Of course there is nothing innately invalid about Dalí’s enthusiasm for scientific, religious and historical subject-matter; the painter had as much right to pursue such interests as anyone else. But the question arises as to whether those concerns led to any creative enhancement of Dalí’s imagery and its development into new areas of aesthetic experience, and for the most part the answer has to be a negative one, for too often Dalí’s later quasi-scientific, religious and historical pictures lack any innovatory aesthetic dimension and thus seem merely illustrative. And sadly, financial greed – in which Gala played a major part – would also determine much of Dalí’s artistic sense of direction after 1940, eventually making the painter into the willing accomplice to one of the largest and most prolonged acts of financial fraud ever perpetrated in the history of art.

      Once safely across the Atlantic in 1940, the Dalís at first settled with Caresse Crosby in Hampton, Virginia, where they lived for a year, virtually taking over the widow’s mansion and holding court there in the process. Later they moved westwards to settle in Monterey, south of San Francisco. In 1941 Dalí produced his first volume of autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, a work in which he greatly furthered the myths about himself as a madman who was not mad. This book was later analysed by George Orwell in one of his most brilliant essays, ‘Benefit of Clergy’ (1944), in which he took at face value the Dalínian myth but argued that ‘One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being’. He also questioned the right of an artist like Dalí to claim exemption from the normal moral constraints of mankind (hence the title of the essay).