16. HE WASN’T ABOVE COMMERCIAL WORK.
Dalí’s art doesn’t only appear in galleries and museums. He also did plenty of commercial work. (Fellow Surrealist André Breton nicknamed him “Avida Dollars,” or “eager for dollars.”) He created ads for De Beers Diamonds, S.C. Johnson & Company, Gap, and Datsun station wagons. (The Gap ad featured the tagline “Salvador Dalí wore khakis.”) Between 1938 and 1971, he created four covers for Vogue, and in 1945, one for Town & Country. In one example of his relentless self-promotion, he was even a celebrity spokesperson, shilling for brands like Alka-Seltzer and the French chocolate company Lanvin. Some of his commercial art endures today—you can still see his work in the Chupa Chups lollipop logo.
17. HE DESIGNED SWIMSUITS.
Dalí occasionally moonlighted as a fashion designer, bringing some of his signature motifs to womenswear. He collaborated with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli to create clothing inspired by his paintings, like a dress with drawer-like pockets inspired by The Anthropomorphic Cabinet, a shoe hat inspired by a photo Dalí took of Gala, and a lobster-print dress worn by Wallis Simpson in a Vogue photoshoot in 1937. (Dalí regularly put lobsters in his paintings, often using them to represent his fear of castration.)
He also designed a line of swimsuits for a clothing manufacturer in Wisconsin named Jack A. Winter. The creepy bathing suits (on video here) included a top that looked like a sandwich board and featured a giant pair of eyes, and a bikini that inexplicably came with an inflatable baseball catcher. The suits didn’t make it to market, but Dalí reportedly took the inflatables back to his home to use in his pool.
18. HE ALMOST ASPHYXIATED AT AN ART OPENING.
In 1936, Dalí had himself fitted for a deep diving suit in advance of the International Exhibition of Surrealism, a major London art show where his work would be displayed along with other renowned modern artists like Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Joan Miró, Rene Magritte, and Marcel Duchamp. Dalí planned to give a lecture in the diving suit while holding a billiard cue and two wolfhounds on leashes.
No one could hear his lecture, called “Some Authentic Paranoiac Phantoms,” through the airtight suit—which a mechanic had bolted him into before the talk—and a few minutes in, he began to suffocate. He tried to gesture that he needed help removing the helmet, but the audience took it as part of his performance and laughed. As biographer Meryle Secrest recounts in her book Salvador Dali: The Surrealist Jester, “The more he gesticulated the more they laughed and it took some time, during which Dali thought he would faint dead away, before, as [Surrealist poet] David Gascoyne explained, ‘we realized he was in some distress,’” and Gascoyne rescued him from the bolted helmet with a wrench [PDF]. (As with much of the artist’s life, there's a bit of debate over the exact details of the incident—Dalí himself said Gala and the poet Edward James saved him with a hammer, neglecting to mention Gascoyne at all.)
The incident certainly fit with the outlandish public image Dalí had cultivated. “I believe the Dalinian mythology which was already so crystallized upon my return to New York owed a great deal to the violent eccentricity of this lecture in a diving suit,” the artist later wrote in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. The event was fictionalized in Michael Chabon’s book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in which one of the characters rescues the artist from a similar predicament at a New York City cocktail party.
Being an exhibition full of Surrealists, Dalí’s stunt was hardly the oddest behavior on display that day. Painter Sheila Legge arrived at the show’s opening carrying a pork chop that quickly went bad in the June heat, and poet Dylan Thomas went around offering visitors teacups of boiled string.
19. HE PUBLISHED A COOKBOOK …
Dalí and Gala were known for throwing elaborate, bizarre dinner parties. At one, a fundraiser in Monterey, California in 1941, guests like Bob Hope and Alfred Hitchcock were asked to dress up as their own dreams. (Gala wore a unicorn’s head.) Dalí borrowed monkeys from the San Francisco zoo for the evening, and guests were served fish in satin shoes, followed by live frogs. The event was so lavish that, rather than raising money for refugee artists, as it was designed to, it actually lost money.
In 1973, Dalí released his own cookbook, Les Diners de Gala, a how-to guide to Surrealist cooking that featured some of Dalí’s favorite motifs, like snails, lobsters, and eggs. In keeping with the often sexual themes of his paintings, he also included recipes for an “aphrodisiac” course. The book was illustrated with photos of Dalí himself in front of banquets of food, his drawings, and some of his paintings, like his work Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds (1936). The rare cookbook was re-released by TASCHEN in 2016. His 1977 book about wine, The Wines of Gala, was re-released by the same publisher the next year.
20. … AND A NOVEL.
Published in 1944, Hidden Faces follows a group of aristocrats living in France before and during World War II. Dalí announced it with signature flair, saying that the “new times of intellectual responsibility” had prompted him to write “a long and boring ‘true novel.” The New York Times reviewed it under the headline “It's Boring, but Is It Art?” (A paywalled version is here.) “His sofa in the shape of lips showed more ‘intellectual responsibility’ than this,” reviewer Mark Schorer wrote in his scathing column.
Upon its re-release in 1974, other readers were more impressed. A Publishers Weekly review trumpeted that it “deals brilliantly with love and lovers, war and death, passions and perversions,” while the Observer's John Melly wrote that it is “so full of visual invention, so witty, so charged with an almost Dickensian energy that it's difficult not to accept its author's own arrogant valuation of himself as a genius.”
21. SESAME STREET SPOOFED HIM.
Instantly recognizable by his trademark mustache, Dalí inspired a mustachioed Sesame Street puppet known as Salvador Dada. The Muppets have worked in a number of Dalí spoofs over the years, including in a 2015 special called The Cookie Thief, in which a few of the Muppets see a painting called The Persistence of Cookies at the Museum of Modern Cookie.
22. HE BUILT HIS OWN MUSEUM.
In the 1960s, the mayor of Figueres, Spain—Dalí’s hometown—asked the artist to donate a piece to the city’s art museum, Museu de l'Empordà. Instead, he declared he would donate an entire museum. He began refurbishing the Figueres Municipal Theatre, which was almost entirely destroyed during the Spanish Civil War, and turned it into the Salvador Dalí Theatre-Museum. The museum, with its Dalí-designed facade decorated with sculptures of giant eggs and bread rolls, officially opened in 1974, but Dalí continued to expand it up until his death.
He also lived there during the last years of his life. After his castle in Púbol was damaged by an electrical fire, he moved into an annex of the museum, the Galatea Tower (named after Gala) in 1984, largely withdrawing from public life until his death in 1989. After he died, he was buried under the theater stage.
23. HIS WORK IS INCREDIBLY VALUABLE NOW.
In February 2018, Sotheby’s put up for auction two largely unknown Salvador Dalí paintings, rediscovered within the personal collection of an Argentinean family. The artist had originally painted them for Countess de Cuevas de Vera, an aristocrat who split her time between France—where she hob-nobbed with artists like Dalí and Picasso—and Buenos Aires. They were painted in 1931 and 1932 and were passed down through the countess’s family. “These are the kind of painting that I do my job for,” Thomas Bompard of Sotheby’s told The Guardian before the works went up for auction, saying he felt “absolutely privileged to be the one to bring these gems to the market for the first time.” The two paintings sold for a combined $8 million.
