“This was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life,” he wrote in his autobiography. Grasshoppers frightened him so much that other children threw them at him to delight in his terror.ĭalí was 16 when his mother died of cancer. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” He prided himself on being different and felt himself blessed with a delicate sensitivity. “At the age of six,” he wrote in his 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, “I wanted to be a cook.
Dreamy, imaginative, spoiled and self-centered, the young Salvador was used to getting his own way. A sister, Ana María, was born four years later. “When he says he’ll draw a swan,” she would boast, “he draws a swan, and when he says he’ll do a duck, it’s a duck.”ĭalí had an older brother, also named Salvador, who died just nine months before the future artist’s birth. According to Dalí biographer Ian Gibson, she was proud of Salvador’s childhood drawings. Although she stopped working in the family business after marriage, she would amuse her young son by molding wax figurines out of colored candles, and she encouraged his creativity. His mother, Felipa Domènech Ferres, came from a family that designed and sold decorated fans, boxes and other art objects. His authoritarian father, Salvador Dalí Cusí, was a well-paid official with the authority to draw up legal documents. Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech was born May 11, 1904, in the Catalonian town of Figueres in northeastern Spain. In addition to his paintings, the “Mass Culture” show features Dalí film projects, magazine covers, jewelry, furniture and photographs of his outlandish “Dream of Venus” pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Petersburg, Florida, and concludes its tour at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (March 5 to June 12). That is addressed in a second exhibition, “Dalí and Mass Culture,” which originated in Barcelona last year, moved on to Madrid and to the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. After all, Dalí without the antics is not Dalí. But while that makes good artistic sense, it neglects a vital aspect of the artist. Visitors can thus assess the work without being assaulted by Dalí the clown. Titled “Salvador Dalí,” the show, sponsored in Philadelphia by the financial services company Advanta, plays down the exhibitionism. The retrospective, which comes from the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, marks the climax of a worldwide celebration of Dalí that began in Spain last year on the 100th anniversary of his birth. An exhibition of more than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings, the largest assemblage of the artist’s work ever, is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through May 15. Now Americans will have a fresh opportunity to make up their own minds. I have had to work very hard to make it clear how serious he really was.” “He had a reputation that was hard to salvage. “They thought I was wasting my time,” she says. (He died in 1989 at age 84.) Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian a year ago, critic Robert Hughes dismissed Dalí’s later works as “kitschy repetition of old motifs or vulgarly pompous piety on a Cinemascope scale.” When Dawn Ades of England’s University of Essex, a leading Dalí scholar, began specializing in his work 30 years ago, her colleagues were aghast. And many art critics believe that he peaked artistically in his 20s and 30s, then gave himself over to exhibitionism and greed. “Compared to Velázquez, I am nothing,” he said in 1960, “but compared to contemporary painters, I am the most big genius of modern time.”ĭalí’s antics, however, often obscured the genius. He loved creating a sensation, not to mention controversy, and early in his career exhibited a drawing, titled Sacred Heart, that featured the words “Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother.” Publicity and money apparently mattered so much to Dalí that, twitching his waxed, upturned mustache, he endorsed a host of products for French and American television commercials. He relished courting the masses, and he was probably better known, especially in the United States, than any other 20th-century painter, including even fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso. Salvador Dalí spent much of his life promoting himself and shocking the world.
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