Salvador Dali

 

Portrait of my Dead Brother, 1963 

Dali was given the same name as a brother who died at the age of 21 months, nine months before Salvador’s birth. He was also given his dead brother’s clothes and toys. As a child, this made Dali obsessed with proving his own existence. He would often visit the grave that bore his own name. This seemed to have an adverse effect on Dali for the duration of his life.

“Throughout the whole of my childhood and youth I lived with the perception that I was a part of my dead brother. That is, in my body and my soul, I carried the clinging carcass of this dead brother because my parents were constantly speaking about the other Salvador.”

Portrait of Paul Eluard, 1929

When Dali stole Gala’s heart, he was stealing it from this man - Paul Eluard, a French poet. Paul ran around with the Surrealists, particularly Andre Breton, for some time but could never commit to a political stance.

Dali, Gala and Paul met at the opening of “Un chien andalou” in Paris in 1929. Dali invited them to spend summer at his summer home and the couple happily accepted. Unfortunately for Paul, this trip would mark the end of his 12 year marriage with his wife.

Eluard disappeared mysteriously for some time after separating from his wife. Rumours of his death were widely circulated and finally accepted as true. After seven months he appeared and explained that he had been on a journey from Marseilles to Tahiti, Indonesia and Ceylon. The journey was later connected with the loss of his wife Gala. They were legally divorced in 1932.

Gala 1894-1982

Not much is known about the person behind the Dali’s muse and lover, whose real name was Elena Ivanova Diakonova. She was originally from Moscow and had a flair for teaching. Gala, as she liked to be called, had an eye for artistic and creative genius and was close friends with many artists and intellectuals.

At sixteen, she was placed in a hospital for tuberculosis. This is where she met Paul Eluard. 2 years later, they were both discharged from the hospital. They were married in 1917 and had one daughter.

It was in 1929 that Gala and Dali met. As a poet, Eluard had ties to the Surrealist movement; he and Gala had also attended some of their meetings. They came to the opening of “Un chien andalou” in Paris and became acquaintances of Salvador Dali. He invited them and several friends to spend the summer at his family’s home in Cadaques.

Gala never left Dali’s side after that summer. Eluard, open to he and his wife fulfilling their fantasies, denied that it was a cause for concern and the couple remained married, though not together, for years before they divorced.

Dali and Gala were married in a chapel wedding in 1958.

“I love Gala more than my mother, more than my father, more than Picasso and even more than money.”

Portrait of my Father, 1925.
Salvador had rough relationship with is father, which is evident in this painting. The biggest blow to this duo was when Dali’s mother passed in 1921. Dali loved his mother dearly and resented his father for promptly marring his deceased wife’s sister

It turns out that Alice Cooper and Dali were fans of each other’s work. Cooper became the focus of the first three-dimensional hologram ever created in 1973. Dali produced the first three dimensional hologram which was of Alice wearing a million dollars (in those times) worth of jewelry, including a tiara and necklace. Alice sat cross-legged on a rotating base, wearing the jewels and holding a statuette of the Venus De Milo as if it was a microphone. A Dali sculpture of Alice’s brain with a chocolate eclair covered in ants (a Dali trademark), was placed behind him and the hologram was taken from this set up.

The Hologram, called “First Cylindrical Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain,” can been seen at the Dali museum in Figueras, Spain and a replica can be found at the Dali museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.