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Art of the 20th Century
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Art Styles
in 20th century Art Map
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Paths to Immortality
1962-1989
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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.
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Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello (last state)
1983
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Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello
1983
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Bed and Two Bedside Tables
Ferociously Attacking a Cello
1983
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Bed, Chair and Bedside Table Ferociously Attacking a Cello
1983
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Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello (Final Stage)
1983
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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.
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Cutlet and Match - The Chinese
Crab
1983
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St. George Overpowering a
Cello
1983
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Warrior Mounted on an Elephant
Overpowering a Cello
1983
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Pieta
1983
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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.
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Topological Abduction of
Europe - Homage to Rene Thom
1983
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Topological Contortion of a
Female Figure Becoming a Violoncello
1983
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The Swallowtail
1983
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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."
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Untitled (Figures, Pieta,
Catastrophic Signs)
1983
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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.
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The Pieta of the Cello-Christ
1983
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Descent from the Cross of a
Cello-Christ
1983
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Car
1983
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Untitled - Series on
Catastrophes
1983
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Profile du Temps
1984
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The Profile of Time
1984
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Alice in Wonderland
1984
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Hommage a Terpsichord (La
Danse)
1984
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Six Designs of Playing Cards,
The Joker
1985
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see also:
Interpretation of Goya's ''Los
Caprichos''
1985
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Interpretation of Goya's ''Los
Caprichos''
1985
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Two Phoenixes in Combat -
Torero Series
1985
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"Bracceli" the Warrior with a
Corpse - Torero Series
1985
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Head of Europa - Torero
Series
1985
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Dali gives Franco the equestrian portraitof the
latter's granddaughter
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King Juan Carlos I and the Queen visiting Dali, 1981
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1989 23
January
Dali dies of heart failure in the Torre Galatea
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Dali, Marquis de Pubol, in his castle with his last painting,
"The Swallow's Tail", March 1983
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Elegy to Gala
Source of life,
Nights that never dawn;
I go to the fountain,
And suddenly before me
We beloved image appears,
Preserved deep
In my heart.
I know
That the bread of life is there;
Even with my eyes closed
I can still see -
Radiantly white
And utterly clear -
The bread of life.
I know
That there is the oven
In the flames of which
We beloved image
Of my worshipped Gala is reflected,
Above, adorned
With garlands of death.
I know
That in the womb of the Earth
Tide block of marble lies
In which the image
Of my beloved Gala slumbers.
Four elements
Of my Gala are interwoven;
Fire, water, earth and air
Tell of her,
Whom I already knew
Before I was born.
Air, air! I breathe
Day and night
With the image of my Gala before my
eyes;
In loving memory
Day and night
I breathe the air
Of my beloved Gala.
In the garden fountain
Waterfalls endlessly
Into depths that never dawn;
There I beheld every detail
Of the portrait of my Gala,
Whom I never loved enough.
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