Dali's Book Transformation is, Well, One for the Books!

Salvador Dali's 1940 painting, "Book Transforming Itself into a Nude Woman," wrote a new chapter for me in Dali's endlessly surprising life and work. It hadn't been seen publicly for decades -- and was reproduced in no known book -- until it rather mysteriously appeared in the huge Dali Retrospective (Centenary exhibition) in 2005 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

It amazes me how a work this "finished" could somehow escape general awareness by Dali devotees, including its absence from what was essentially the catalog raisone by Robert Descharnes and Giles Neret (Dali - The Paintings, Taschen). It turns out it was purchased by a private collector while it was part of a traveling exhibition in the 1940s, and was thus sequestered from the public spotlight all those years -- until the 100th anniversary of Dali's passing.

In any event, the painting is enigmatic -- even for Dali! The human form resembles the faceless male figure in "Philosopher Illuminated by the Light of the Moon," it's been pointed out -- but both works are a departure from most of Dali's paintings, where human heads are seldom so amorphous. It has an alien look that, well, seems foreign to the iconography we've come to more typically expect in Dali's work. Its only claim to Dalinian familiarity, we might argue, is the crutch supporting the figure's right shoulder.

Two large Bible-like books are opened up, while the one in the foreground metamorphoses into a reclining woman, her buttocks curiously joined by the blade of a butter knife! It's inevitable that we see an echo here of the same basic knife cutting into human form in Dali's remarkable "Autumn Cannibalism" painting. The ink well is generally thought to symbolize Dali's father, who was a notary, although a more Freudian interpretation places the ink well and pen, symbolically, as a female breast and a phallus, respectively.

This allegorical tableau, set out on a beach-like terrain with a rather dark sky behind it and buildings in the background not instantly recognizable (unlike so many background details in others of Dali's works), has a kind of dark and foreboding aura, consistent, perhaps, with the mood of war during which this canvas was painted.

Still, it continues to put me a little off-center in my belief that I "know" Dali. Something about it seems un-Dali-like. It's probably that odd human figure, sans face. Still seems a bit too alien -- even for Dali.

Dali's Dollars!

In the 1970s, LIFE magazine published an extensive feature titled "Dali's Dollars." In it, the author ticked off a litany of activities -- mainly commercial projects -- that collectively were coalescing to make Salvador Dali a very wealthy man.

No starving artist here!

Dali set out to be a great artist -- and a wealthy one, too. He achieved both.

Now, some 22 years after his passing, the art market is wrapping its arms and wallets around everything Dali. A couple of years ago Dali's "Portrait of Paul Eluard" fetched nearly $22 million at auction. His wonderful little oil, "Enigmatic Elements in a Landscape," brought about $11 million a year or so ago -- the work going to the Teatru-Museu Dali in Figueres, Spain.

Last week, on May 2 to be exact, "Springtime Necrophilia" -- a haunting and beautiful canvas from 1936 -- came in at some $16 million.

Dali's dollars continue to make news!

A major exhibition is planned for the Pompidou Center in Paris in November, then moving on in abridged fashion to the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Word is that the virtually never-exhibited "Tuna Fishing" will be on hand for the Paris leg of that journey.

It's not all good news, however. I understand that two oils (some would say of marginal importance) failed to sell at recent auctions: "Oasis" and "New Accessories." They're both dandy oils, beautifully painted. But neither is especially significant, primarily because both were aligned with commercial objectives -- selling perfume, in the case of "Oasis," and selling women's accessories, such as shoes, scarves, belts, gloves, and broaches, in "New Accessories."

Were Dali's Iconic 'Soft Watches' a Derivative of Magritte's 'Eyes'?

Various theories and explanations have been advanced in connection with Salvador Dali's famous "soft watches" in his iconic Surrealist masterpiece of 1931, The Persistence of Memory (Museum of Modern Art, New York).

But what is never postulated is that Dali may have been directly or indirectly inspired by a Magritte painting executed five years prior to Persistence -- the Belgian surrealist's 1926 Silvered Chasm, which featured eyes essentially "melting" or folded over the edge of a plinth.

See for yourself.

Perpignan, Dali, and .....Murder?

It was nearly a dozen  years ago when, as I recall, Vanity Fair magazine broke the story of a strange serial killer saga in the small French town of Perpignan. It had a Dalinian twist, because authorities hatched a theory that, because of the grisly state in which the female bodies were found -- and due to Perpignan's train station being a well-known stopping off point for Salvador Dali, who would send his luggage on ahead when he was en route to Paris -- somehow the killer could have been "inspired" by some of Dali's more morbid, sexually- and violently-charged paintings.

To my knowledge, a Peruvian-born doctor, unemployed at the time he was apprehended, was charged, or at least suspected of being the twisted culprit. He was taken into custody, though I simply don't know how this all ultimately played out. As is dubiously typical of so many such sensational stories, neither Vanity Fair, nor any other American journalistic entity ever ran a follow-up story, to my knowledge.

We've been left, then, for all these years with no sense of closure in this sickening tale of human degradation. A tale that, perhaps unfairly, dragged a bit of Dali's reputation down with it. It seems a big stretch to draw a potential correlation between some esoteric canvases with partially violent imagery and a serial killer taking the lives of young women in the Perpignan community.

By the same token, it's understandable that any plausible lead, motivation, or clue would be pursued by authorities, eager to solve the case and take such a violent and disturbed individual out of circulation.

But to this blogger's knowledge, the case was never solved. And any even marginally feasible connection between some early surrealist pictures by the Master, Salvador Dali, and the demented mind of the Perpignan serial murderer may have been -- and probably was -- completely without merit.

Dali in his studio . . .

I'm not sure exactly what Dali is working on here -- is it an ink drawing in a sketchbook? Some kind of book dedicatory? -- but I always enjoy photographs of Dali at work.

Here he is in his studio, early 1960s, when his large Ecumenical Council was on his electronically movable easel. The self-portrait in the lower left of the huge canvas is perhaps the single most impressive self-portrait ever painted by Dali. (The Ecumenical Council is in the permanent collection of the Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, FL., and the photo, whose creator I don't know, is being used here under journalistic fair use guidelines and not for commercial use.)

'60 Minutes' More Like 59 Minutes for Lack of Dali Interview

When 60 Minutes -- CBS's iconic news magazine -- aired this past Sunday a special on the recently departed Mike Wallace, not a single mention was made of Wallace's remarkable interview with Salvador Dali.

Surely one minute of the hour-long tribute, or part of a minute, could have -- and should have -- been devoted to the veteran journalist's chat with the most famous Surrealist of them all. Indeed, a recent nationally published web story on Wallace's passing noted what the author felt were the five most memorable interviews in Wallace's long and groundbreaking career -- and one of those was Wallace's interview with Dali.

It's possible there could have been some copyright or licensing issues with that video clip. Or it's possible, and perhaps more likely, that Dali simply didn't make the cut when the show's producers decided which interviews to feature and which to omit (surely they couldn't feature them all).

But to leave Dali out is a bit like leaving the name Babe Ruth out when considering the greatest names in the sport of baseball.

60 Minutes is a terrific program. Mike Wallace was a tremendous interviewer. But the show he really helped create and make famous hit a foul ball on Sunday, in the conspicuous absence of Dali from the line-up.

Is Dali a '$10 Million' Artist...Yet?

I was recently engaged in a chat with a well-respected Dali scholar who, like me, is hoping Salvador Dali's wonderful surrealist painting, "Springtime Necrophilia," will reach the $10 million or $12 million estimates Sotheby's has been forecasting for the canvas.

But my friend said he's not sure if Dali "is a $10 million artist yet."

That hesitation, despite Dali's "Portrait of Paul Eluard" having hammered down at nearly $22 million not long ago -- the highest auction price ever for a Surrealist picture in general and a Dali in particular.

I say that if Dali is not yet a 10-million-dollar artist, he ought to be! This was a man whose creative genius was undeniable, formidable, ubiquitous. A. Reynolds Morse truly got it right when he proclaimed, many years ago, that Salvador Dali was the Leonard DaVinci of modern art. It's easy to see now just how true such a statement is.

So we'll see if my esteemed friend is right. Will "Springtime Necrophilia" fetch truly big bucks on May 2? How about "Oasis," one of three stunning paintings Dali executed for Desert Flower Perfume. The hidden imagery in this work (do you see the two lovers that are there but are not there!) is great fun.