Art of the 20th Century



 

Art Styles in 20th century Art Map



 

Paths to Immortality  



1962-1989

 

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.
 

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.
 

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

Dali attended to his funeral arrangements himself, and in his will he passed over Catalonia, which he felt had not paid him the respect that was his due, in favour of King Juan Carlos and the Spanish state. He observed: "Crowds go to see my pictures and will go on doing so in future because their vague, inchoate instincts tell them that obvious treasures of authenticity lie hidden in my work and have never yet been seen. Non-artistic treasures that will increasingly tend to become artistic ones." He had Les Millions d'Arlequins and the Serenade by Enrico Toselli played to him; they had been taped for him at Maxim's in Paris as a reminder of the good old days. He wondered if he still had the time to write a tragedy. So as not to be surprised by death he began with the word, "Curtain".

His moustache waxed by his majordomo and his body embalmed to last at least three hundred years, clad in a tunic adorned with the crown of a marques and an embroidered border representing the double helix of DNA, the Marques de Dali de Pubol (the title conferred on him by King Juan Carlos I on 26 July 1982) lies at rest in a crypt beneath the glass dome of his museum at Figueras, amidst his pictures and objects - among them a Cadillac.