6. GEORGE ORWELL WAS NOT A FAN, EITHER.
When the English critic and novelist reviewed Dalí’s autobiography in 1944, he did not hold back in his assessment of this painter’s character. Dalí admits to a number of amoral acts in the book without any show of remorse, including kicking his toddler sister in the head and pushing a boy off a 15-foot-tall bridge as a child. (The book is described by the Dalí Foundation as “an account full of truths, half-truths, and ‘falsehoods,’” so these events may never have happened.) Allowing that the painter was an incredibly skilled artist, Orwell was still horrified, and wasn’t afraid to call him out. “One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being,” he wrote in the essay. Orwell, who traveled to Spain to fight with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, was also repulsed by the painter’s politics (or lack thereof). “When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near,” he mocked.
7. HE WORKED WITH ALFRED HITCHCOCK …
In the 1940s, Hitchcock commissioned Dalí to help him create a dream sequence for Spellbound, his 1945 thriller starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. “I wanted Dalí because of the architectural sharpness of his work,” Hitchcock explained in one of the extensive interviews he gave to fellow filmmaker François Truffaut in 1962. Hitchcock hoped that Dalí could bring some of the vivid imagery of his work to the dream sequence the movie called for, but the director got a bit more Surrealism than he bargained for. As Hitchcock told Truffaut, “Dalí had some strange ideas; he wanted a statue to crack like a shell falling apart, with ants crawling all over it, and underneath, there would be Ingrid Bergman, covered by the ants! It just wasn’t possible.”
8. … AND WALT DISNEY.
In the wake of his work with Hitchcock, Walt Disney approached Dalí in 1945 about joining Disney Studio to work on an animated film called Destino, featuring a score by Mexican composter Armando Dominguez. Dalí had drawn up 22 oil paintings and stacks of drawings, and he and legendary Disney designer John Hench created storyboards for the film. But only eight months after they started, the project was shelved for financial reasons, with only 15 seconds of demo reel completed. (Disney and Dalí remained friends despite the hiccup.) In 1999, Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, decided to restart the production. Animators at Walt Disney Studios Paris painstakingly translated Dalí’s original storyboards to create a film faithful to his vision. The 6-minute short was released in 2003.
9. HE LOVED CAULIFLOWER.
In 1955, Dalí arrived at the Sorbonne in Paris for a lecture in a Rolls-Royce filled to the brim with what Time magazine called “a quaint profusion of fresh cauliflower”—around 1100 pounds worth, packed to the roof. He proceeded to explain to an audience of 2000 people that “Everything ends up in the cauliflower!” The painter told journalist Mike Wallace in a nearly nonsensical interview in 1958 that the point of the stunt was that he had discovered “the logarithmic curve of cauliflower.”
10. HE HAD AN INTENSE MARRIAGE.
Dalí met his future wife, Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, who went by Gala, in 1929, while she was married to Surrealist poet Paul Eluard. (Theirs was something of an open marriage, and they both regularly had affairs.) Dalí met Eluard in Paris and invited him and several other artists to visit him at his home in Cadaqués over the summer. Eluard brought Gala and their daughter Cecile there, and Gala and Dalí fell in love and became inseparable. Gala eventually divorced Eluard, and she and Dalí married in a civil ceremony in 1934, with the approval of Eluard, who remained on good terms with Gala.
Gala became Dalí’s muse, portrait model, and business manager. He even signed his paintings with both of their names, explaining in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí that “It is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures.” (Emphasis in the original.)
Dalí bought Gala a centuries-old Catalan castle in the small town of Púbol in 1969, creating a retreat for her that he would only visit if he got her written permission. "Everything celebrates the cult of Gala, even the round room, with its perfect echo that crowns the building as a whole and which is like a dome of this Galactic cathedral,” he wrote of the home in his book The Unspeakable Confessions. When Gala died in 1982, the distraught painter broke the Spanish law prohibiting the moving of corpses without official permission, putting her in the backseat of his car to drive her from their home in Port Lligat to Púbol, where she had wanted to be buried. Dalí moved there after her death to be close to her. It’s now the Gala-Dalí Castle House Museum.
