Mediocrity is one-sided. Talent is always multifaceted. Salvador Dalí fits this aphorism better than anyone else, because in addition to being the extremely famous painter who was –creator with others of surrealism, which is a mixture of dream and reality in painting– he designed jewels with striking originality.
And a curiosity: being a great painter as he was, he was expelled from the Academy of Fine Arts.
He also collaborated in the cinema -as a choreographer- with the no less famous Spanish director, Luis Buñuel in the film “El Perro Andaluz”.
But also in the US, he worked in movies with Walt Disney and with Alfred Hitchcock, always in the choreography.
He was a sculptor and also a writer, with more than 30 books written.
And something unusual. After his 60th birthday he published his last 10 works. And in all of them there is a characteristic.
His last name Dalí is always included in the titles of his books, in a mixture of originality and – let’s say it – pedantry.
But also, the content of those books alludes to it, I would say too conceptually. Anyway…
It was never known, if that vanity or eccentricity that he did not hide at all, was authentic or had a promotional intention. Because he discussed it as a painter, but no one would dare deny him the ability to enhance his personal image.
Everything really distinguished him and made him the center of attention.
But it would be unfair to omit that regardless of these moral reservations, he was undeniably a great painter.
He was born in 1904 in Figueras, in Spanish Catalonia.
At the age of 25, a personal episode gave a definitive destiny to his life.
He spent a summer on a French beach invited by his friend the French writer Paul Eluard.
There was his wife, Gala, who was 36 years old. She was 11 years older than our man.
They fell madly in love. They would live together for more than 50 years.
The owner of the house was left without a wife and without a friend. Nice visit received!.
The painter told a journalist:
-“I love Gala more than money and that means a lot, because money has been and is a great passion for me.”
And there seems to be a lot of truth! He achieved a considerable fortune, but all his friends, artists, moved away from him. And it was logical because in the artist of any field there is always a high spirituality.
As always, life ended up showing Dalí reality.
In 1982 he was already 78 years old and his gala wife was almost 90. A short illness ended her life.
Only recently did Dalí fully understand that his enormous fortune could not reinstate him to the love of his life.
He lived another 7 years. But a deep depression accompanied him to the end.
In 3 or 4 months, his scrawny body lost 20 kg.
Dalí had been reduced to thinness, to the minimum expression.
He lived in his castle with the company of 3 servants with whom he only spoke in monosyllables. He hardly received anyone. And yet, 5 years before he died, an accidental fire caused severe burns from which he only partially recovered.
Some time later, they placed a pacemaker for his defeated heart and on January 22, 1989, pneumonia aggravated his heart failure until death.
Hated by colleagues, envied by others, ignored and even despised by critics, he drew crowds and enjoyed international fame. He was unequivocally a great painter.
And an aphorism for Salvador Dalí that perhaps defines the only way to reveal the truth of his artistic value. “The time that is an infallible jury will determine immortality or silence.” And evidently -I add- it determined immortality.-
Source: Ambito
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