MOSCOW, May 11, Zhanna Staritsyna. Today is the 120th anniversary of the birth of one of the most unusual and famous artists of the twentieth century. About how Salvador Dali made the whole world talk about himself, turning his name into a successful brand, in the material .
Hype and experiments
“This man once said: “The only difference between me and a crazy person is that I’m not crazy.” Let’s check it out. Meet Salvador Dali,” says the host of the popular show. After these words, the artist with a small anteater on a leash enters the studio with a cheerful step. Dali has absolutely no idea how to handle a pet – he throws it on the lap of a woman sitting next to him, and then, with a wild Spanish accent, begins to answer questions.
This is not the first appearance of Dali with animals – he once left the subway with a large anteater, and he was also often seen with an ocelot named Babu. The artist also behaved tensely with him, holding him by the neck so that he wouldn’t inadvertently bite him. However, what can’t you do for the sake of hype, because art is not only paintings, but also himself. Accent, clothing, the shape of the mustache, personal life, any appearance in public – all this is a performance where Dali plays the main role and himself sits in the front row. The main principle of life is that people should talk about it a lot. To criticize or flatter does not matter.
Salvador Dali took on all projects where he could experiment: he starred in a chocolate commercial, developed a logo for Chupa Chups and Eurovision, was interested in perfumes, came up with a phone in the shape of a lobster and a sofa in the shape of lips. He collaborated with Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and choreographer Leonid Myasin. The artist even gave lectures extravagantly: once he dressed up in a diving suit and got stuck in it so much that he had to be rescued.
Russian Muse
Dali's works were so expensive that the founder of surrealism, Andre Breton, made an anagram of Avida Dollars from his name – “greedy for dollars.” In response to the joke, Salvador painted the painting “The Apotheosis of the Dollar.” However, financial issues were mostly decided by his Russian wife, emigrant Elena Dyakonova, nicknamed Gala. They said that it was she who was doing business while Dali was creating, and she did it in the most unsightly manner – she didn’t so much bargain as she made scandals and threatened customers.
The artist did not care; he was so fascinated by Gala that he was ready to break off relations with his family. And endure the endless antics of his beloved, no less sophisticated than his own. When Dali bought her the Gothic castle of Pubol, she forbade him to visit her without written permission. But she freely took lovers there: a measured family life did not interest her. Having met Dali, she left her 11-year-old daughter Cecile in the care of her husband, the poet Paul Eluard. Children weighed her down and distracted her from her bohemian life.
Salvador and Gala loved to invent legends about themselves, often contradicting each other. For a long time, the woman’s origins remained a mystery – Dali’s muse could not have had an ordinary childhood. In fact, she was born in Kazan in the family of a lawyer, went to Switzerland to be treated for tuberculosis – and ended up staying in Europe. Salvador also loved to fantasize about his childhood and the origins of his “abnormality.” Until one day his sister wrote in her memoirs that he was a completely calm and ordinary person who at some point “put on Dali’s mask.”
Philosophical creativity
In contrast to the external buffoonery, the artist’s inner world is depressingly calm – he expresses it in his paintings. His mature paintings are deserted and cold surreal spaces with many metamorphoses. Here a fish flies out of a pomegranate, and tigers fly out of its mouth. But here are elephants wandering on spider legs with historical buildings on their backs. In the works it is easy to recognize each image separately, be it a horse, a woman, a watch or a giraffe, but together they form something inexplicable. Like a dream that you try to remember, but it always slips out of your memory.
Surrealism is not Dali's discovery. Attempts to escape reality interested many artists. Metaphysical subjects were explored, in particular, by the Italian Giorgio de Chirico – his desert spaces are also full of understatement and symbols. Later, writer Andre Breton created a whole manifesto of surrealism, the essence of which is to free the mind from the rational. To do this, one could resort to hypnosis, psychoanalysis, and dreams.
Early career Salvador seriously studied the artistic craft – techniques and styles from antiquity to cubism. I admired Raphael's work, tried to paint in the spirit of impressionism and realism, worked with volumes, perspective and color. And then he chose surrealism, not according to Breton’s rules—Dali hated rules—but at his own discretion. 
He complemented complex, philosophical, and sometimes dramatically frightening paintings with his extravagant image and behavior. Because I understood: in order to attract interest in art in the modern world, it is not enough to be a good artist – you must be able to present yourself and sell yourself. He mastered this skill to perfection: even critics were always looking forward to his next trick, picture or appearance in a show. During his lifetime, Dali managed to turn his own name into a brand, becoming one of the highest paid and extravagant stars of the 20th century.
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