SALVADOR DALI, his quotes & statements on his painting art and on life with Gala; + biography facts
Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989), his quotes and art statements on painting Surrealism and his artistic life. Dali was a famous artist in Surrealism painting art, exhibiting a rather eccentric life style with his wife Gala. Dali was also a highly imaginative artist, realizing the Surreal mainly in his many pictures in oil painting technique. He joined the Surrealist artist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, where he found also his muse and future wife Gala in 1929. Dali had a strong affinity for the unusual and the grandiose; both he expressed in his painting art as well as in his personal life. Dali produced also many art-analysis’s and texts and writings on art and on his life.
* At the bottom are more life and biography facts on the life of Salvador Dali and art links for more information of the great Spanish painter artist. – the editor
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Dali: ‘Persistence of Memory’, oil painting, c. 1931 |
Salvador Dali, his artist quotes on painting art in Surrealism & his life with Gala
– Telephone, pedal washbasin, white refrigerators gleaming with Ripolin, bidet, small phonograph… …objects of authentic and pure poetry (MPC p. 11)… …The Parthenon was not built as a ruin. It was built on a new surface without patina, like out automobiles. /we will not always bear on our shoulders the weight of our father’s corpse. (1920’s; MPC p 13)
* Salvador Dali, source of his artist quotes: “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 28 (famous Surrealist painter, creating the Surreal in oil paintings and photography; Dali wrote also diary, many writings, poetry, art analysis and texts; at the bottom more links for biography / history facts)
– The more I looked at his face (St. Sebastinan’s face, fh) the more curious it seemed. That said, I seemed to have always known it and the aseptic morning light revealed its smallest details which such clarity, such purity, that I was impossible moved… …In the upper part of the heliometer was St. Sebastian’s magnifying glass… …I put my eye to the magnifying glass, product of a slow distillation, at once numerical and intuitive. Each drop of water a, a number. Each drop of blood a geometry.
* source of the quote: the poem ‘Sant Sebastia’ Salvador Dali 1927 (dedicated to the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca, fh); as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 46
– One morning with Ripolin (French painter) I painted a new-born that I then left to dry on the tennis-court. After two days I found it bristling with ants that made it move to the anaesthetized, silent rhythm of sea-urchins. However I at once realised that this newborn child was none other than the pink breast of my girlfriend, being frenetically eaten by the shining, metallic thickness of the phonograph. But it wasn’t her breast either: it was little pieces of my cigarette paper nervously grouped around the magnetic topaz of my fiancée’s ring.
* Dali, quote from: ‘Mon amie et la plague’’ (My girlfriend and the beach), 1927; as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 47-48
– One might think that through ecstasy we would have access to a world as far from reality as that of the dream. – The repugnant can become desirable, affection cruelty, the ugly beautiful, faults qualities, qualities black miseries.
* source: ‘Le phénomene de l’extase’, in ‘Minotaure’ 1933; as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 133
– We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter – the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst form it life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction.
* artist quote from: the beginning of “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali” (first publication in 1942, fh), Vision Press, London 1976, p. 2
– When I have at last become like a statue through the exacerbation of my ego which has led me to this ultimate sclerosis… …Then and only then will I at last be able to set this statue up and come out of myself into the crowd to go and see the world. No one will notice anything because they will all be looking at the statue and I will be able to go about, free at last… …It’s then that I shall realise my eternal dream: to become a newspaper reporter!
* source of his artist quote on Ego: ‘The Dali News, Dimanche 27 November’, (1960) Salvador Dali; as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 163-164
– Having reached the surface (in the Paris Metro, ed.), I remained crazed for a long time, gathering my spirits. I had the impression that I had been vomited by a monstrous anus after being tumultuously brewed by an intestine. I did not know where I was; as though spat out on to unknown land, a pointless little excrement… …And, a miracle!… …This shock was a beneficial revelation. One must at every opportunity use the subterranean paths of action and thought, erase the traces, appear suddenly and irrelevantly, endless conquer oneself, never hesitate to sodomize one’s soul so that it will be reborn purer and stronger than ever.
* his artist quote from the beginning of “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali” (first publication in 1942, fh), Vision Press, London 1976, p. 210
– The Italian metaphysical movement (initiated by the Italian painter ca. 1915De Chirico, fh) started from the spiritual reality, a consequence of the physical miracle and it aspects grouped on an immaterial plane; all this formed a new spectral reality, in order to attain maximal, almost erotic creativity in touch./ The Cubists, on the other hand, starting from this sensual-idealistic touch, found a pure, new form of spirituality./ Lorca is one of those who have reached this new form of miracle by following the paths of the greatest incredulity. He does not even belief in his own hands, unless it be to turn one-legged physiological and abstract tables. (introducing an exhibition of drawings by Lorca, fh)
* Salvador Dali’s quote, comparing De Chirico with Cubism artists: (MPC 3); as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 152
– July 1952/the 27th/This morning an exceptional defecation: two small turds in the shape of a rhinoceros horns. Such a scanty stool worries me. I would have thought the champagne, so alien to my routine, would have had a laxative effect. (DG p. 59)
– the 29th/Because of a very long fart, really a very long, and let us be frank, melodious fart, that I produced when I woke up, I was reminded of Michel de Montaigne. (DG p. 60)
– September 1952/the2nd/Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional, smotth and odourless. (DG p. 64)
* life quote on his daily daily observation and fascination of his defecation, from: “The Diary of a Genius”’, Salvador Dali, London Pan Books, 1976, 1980 p. 59 – 64
– Myself at the age of six, when I believed I was a little girl, raising with a very great care the skin of the sea in order to observe a dog sleeping in the shadow of the water.
* Salvador Dali, remembering his early life, source is: the title of an oil painting, he made in 1950
– In 1951 the two most subversive things that could happen to an ex-surrealist were: firstly, to become a mystic and secondly, to know how to draw. These two models of rigour happened to me at the same time.
* his artist quote on the important year 1951 for himself as an’ex-surrealist’ artist, from: his lecture ‘Picasso et moi’ (MPC 65); as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 136
– Let us watch this de Kooning (Willem de Kooning, a leading Abstract Expressionist painter who just made his controversial ’Women’- paintings, ed.), with his prematurely white hair making his great sleepwalker’s movements, as though he was waiting in a dream to open bays of Biscay, to explode islands like pieces of orange or Parma violets, to tear continents from a cerulean blue split by oceans of Naples yellow… …if by good or by ill fortune, in the middle of this Dionysian demiurge the image of ‘’The Eternal Feminine’ should appear… …the least that might have happened to her would be that she should emerge (from all this chaos) wearing nothing but a little make-up.
* Salvador Dali, with his critical art comment on the American abstract-expressionist painter Willem de Kooning: (MPC 75); as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 135
– And man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject. Indeed, I am dumbfounded at how little philosophical and metaphysical importance the human mind has attached to the vital subject of excrement.(1952)
* source of this quote on his exrement: “The Diary of a Genius” 1964, Salvador Dali, London Pan Books, 1976, 1980 p. 65
– Surrealism in its early period offered specific methods to bring images (in their paintings, ed.)closer to concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusive passive and receptive role of the ‘surrealist subject’, are bankrupt and are giving way to new surrealist methods for the systematic exploration of the irrational… …The new delirious images of concrete irrationality suggest their physical, real ‘possibility’; they go beyond the domain of psycho-analysable fantasies and ‘virtual’ representations… …Against the dream memory and impossible, virtual images of purely receptive states that one can only recount, the physical facts of ‘objective’ irrationality with which one can already hurt oneself.
* Salvador Dali with his art statement on new Surrealism techniques and methods, in: “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 23
– I can say without fear of falling into the slightest exaggeration that each outline of a rock, / and / of the beaches of Cadaques (where Dali spent his childhood, ed.), each of the geological anomalies of its landscape and its unique light I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance/of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of mt erotic-emotional life (written in a mixture of French and Catalan accent, fh)
* Salvador Dali’s quote on his early life and Spanish childhood years in Cadaques, Spain, from: the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Dali una vida de libro’, Bibliotheca de Catalunya, Barcelona 2004
– This book will prove that that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind. (before 1964)
* quote on his published auto-biography, in: the Prologue of “The Diary of a Genius”’, Salvador Dali, London Pan Books, 1976, 1980 p. 11
– Let us illuminate my political positions. I have always been against any affiliation… …I am the only Surrealist who always refused to be part of any organization whatsoever. I was never a Stalinist, nor fooled by any association. Illustrious members of the Falange (Spanish ultra-right wing, fh) I never got involved… …If I accepted the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic from Franco’s (Spanish fascist dictator, ed.) hands, it is because in Soviet Russia I was not awarded the Lenin Prize.
* artist quote on his political positions: “Entretiens avec Salvador Dali”, Alain Bosquet, 1966; as quoted in “The shameful life of Salvador Dali”, Ian Gibson, New York / London, Norton & Co, 1997
– It is difficult to hold the world’s interest for more than half an hour at a time… …I have been successful for twenty years, to the extent that papers publish the most incomprehensible new items of our time, sent by teletype… ….PARIS. Dali gave lecture at Sorbonne on Vermeer’s paintings ‘lacemaker’ and the rhinoceros… …NEW YORK. Dali landed in New York dressed in a golden space-suit.
* source: “The Diary of a Genius” 1966, Salvador Dali, London Pan Books, 1976, 1980 p. 171-(famous surrealist artist creating the Surreal in oil paintings and photography; Dali wrote also diary, many writings, poetry, analysis and texts on art; + links for biography facts below)
– Our contemporaries, systematically cretinized… …by imaginative fasting, by famines of paternal affection and all sorts, vainly seek to bite into the senile, triumphal sweetness of the plump, atavistic, tender, militaristic and territorial back of a Hitlerian wet-nurse. (MPC p. 53)
* source of his artist quote: ‘La Conquête de l’irrational’ 1966 Salvador Dali, in “Editions Surréalistes; as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 35
– Men who fuck easily, and can give themselves without difficulty, have only a very diminished creative potency… …Look at Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Napoleon, they all left their mark on their times, and they were more or less impotent.
* quote on creative potency: “Entretiens avec Salvador Dali”, Alain Bosquet, 1966
– The pleasure of the flesh (here: making love or masturbation, ed.)can be fulfilled only if a particular dimension is created, a kind of stereoscopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as real as reality… …I need all these suddenly present images of my past that forms the fabric of my entire life.
* his artist statement on the ‘pleasure of the flesh': “Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, André Parinaud” (1973)
– …the paint marks (in Impressionist paintings, ed.) placed apparently without order… …and which suddenly became magnificently ordered if one knew how to make the right distance… … to communicate a deep, sun-drenched image of a stream, landscape or face… …My eyes were popping out of my head.
* Dali’s quote on viewing great Impressionist paintings: “Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, André Parinaud” (1973); as quoted in the translation “The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali”, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 42
– I am capable of projecting myself into my little inner cinema… …I free myself through a secret exit from the attempts to encircle my soul.
* source of his artist quote: “Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, André Parinaud” (1973
– My supreme game is to imagine myself dead, devoured by worms. I close my eyes and, with incredible details of absolute, scatological precision, I see myself being slowly eaten and digested by an infernal swarm of large greenish maggots gorging themselves on my flesh. (p. 12)
– Death is the thing I am most afraid of, and the resurrection of the flesh, a great Spanish theme, is the one that it is hardest for me to accept, form the point of view of….life. (p. 22)
* source of his quote on death: “Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, André Parinaud” (1973)
– Shit scared them (the Surrealists, ed.). Shit and arsholes. Yet, what was more human and more needful of transcending! From that moment, I know I would keep on obsessing them with what they most dreaded. And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the (Surrealist, ed.) group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contradictions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear.
* his offensive art statement on the other Surrealist painters, from: “Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, André Parinaud” (1973); as quoted in the translation “The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali”, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 113
– Sleeping is a way of dying or at least of dying to reality, better still it is the death of reality, but reality dies in love as in dreams. The life of man is entirely occupied by the bloody osmoses of dreams and love.
* his artist quote on sleeping: “L’amour”, S. Dali; as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 126
– It is with Millet’s ‘Angelus’ that I associate all the pre-twilight and twilight memories of my childhood, regarding them as the most delirious, in other words (commonly speaking) poetic… …Most frequently, at the end of summer days, I would leave the streets of the town and go to the fields to listen to the sounds of insects and plunge into infinite reveries.
* Salvador Dali, on his early Spanish life, walking in the fields: (MTA); as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 126
– ‘Up there!’. Wonderful words! All my life has been dominated by these antagonisms: high and low. In my childhood I tried desperately to be high up.
– There was nothing left between me and the void. I must have spent several minutes lying on my stomach with my eyes closed to resist its almost invincible attraction.
– Most of my readers will have felt the sensation of suddenly falling into the void, just at the point when sleep is going to take them over completely. Waking up with a start, your heart convulsively trembling, you don’t always realise that this sensation of vertigo is a reminiscence of th expulsion of being born… …All those who throw themselves into the void have at bottom only one desire, to be reborn at any price.
* Salvador Dali, quote on his early life and meeting the Void: (VSD); as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 131-13
– Where is the real? All appearance are deceitful, the visible surface is deceptive. I look at my hand… …It is nerves, muscles, bones. Let us go deeper: it is molecules and acids. Further still: it is an impalpable waltz of electrons and neutrons. Further still:… … an immaterial nebula. Who can prove that my hand exists?
* source (VSD); as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 133-134
– Every time I lose a little sperm I’m convinced I’ve wasted it. I always feel guilty afterwards… … To start with, I’m not as impotent as all that. (in interview published in ‘Playboy’ 1976, fh)
* Salvador Dali, source of his artist quote in: ‘Playboy’ 1976
– But I very early realized, instinctively, my life formula: to get others to accept as natural the excesses of one’s personality an thus to relieve oneself of his own anxieties by creating a sort of collective participation…
* artist statement from: “Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, André Parinaud” (1973); as quoted in the translation “The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali”, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 17
– Surrounded by countless people who murmur my name and call me ‘maître’, I am about to inaugurate the exhibition of my one hundred illustrations of the Divine Comedy at the Galliera Museum.
* source: Prologue of “The Diary of a Genius”’, Salvador Dali, London Pan Books, 1976, 1980 p. 189
– The anagram ‘Avida Dollars’ was a talisman for me (and ‘Divine Dali’, so called by André Breton, fh). It rendered the rain of dollars fluid, sweet and monotonous. Someday I shall tell the whole truth about the way in which this blessed disorder of Danaë was garnered. It will be a chapter of a new book, probably my masterpiece: ‘On the Life of Salvador Dali, considered as a Work of Art’ (but never written, ed.)
* quote on a auto-biography he never wrote: Prologue of “The Diary of a Genius”’, Salvador Dali, London Pan Books, 1976, 1980 p. 35
– Popularity, even at its most mediocre, delights me… … I behave nicely with the public, out of the same concern for prudence that makes me generous in cases of epidemics or other collective calamities… …Beware, I tell myself, because you may be judged at the end of the time, if there is an end of time and a judge… … Beware of the day when no one ask you for anything anymore, be nice with the ceratinization of advertising… …Any reflection of my existence in others clams my worries about the feeble degree of reality of things, the world and myself. It’s from all these eyes, in which I see myself seen, that I take my substance… …but where is substance? If it is not in nature it can’t be in God… …In a reality that endlessly disperses before the eye, fades away between our fingers, the only really material matter, the only really substantial substance, would be God.
* source of the statement: (MPC 3); as quoted in “Dali and Me”, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 167
short biography facts and life history of the famous Spanish painter Salvador Dali
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali I Domenech was born at 8:45 on the morning of May 11, 1904 in the small agricultural town of Figueres, Spain. Figueres is located in the foothills of the Pyrenees, only sixteen miles from the French border in the principality of Catalonia. The son of a prosperous notary, Dali spent his boyhood in Figueres and at the family’s summer home in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques where his parents built his first studio. As an adult, he made his home with his wife Gala in nearby Port Ligat. Many of his paintings reflect his love of this area of Spain.
The young Dali attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Early recognition of Dali’s talent came with his first one-man show in Barcelona in 1925. He became internationally known when three of his paintings, including The Basket of Bread (now in the Museum’s collection), were shown in the third annual Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928.
The following year, Dali held his first one-man show in Paris. He also joined the surrealists, led by former Dadaist Andre Breton. That year, Dali met Gala Eluard when she visited him in Cadaques with her husband, poet Paul Eluard. Gala became Dali’s lover, muse and business manager. Gala became then Dali’s chief inspiration.
Dali soon became a leader of the Surrealist Movement. His painting, The Persistance of Memory, with the soft or melting watches is still one of the best-known surrealist works. But as the war approached, the apolitical Dali clashed with the Surrealists and was “expelled” from the surrealist group during a “trial” in 1934. He did however, exhibit works in international surrealist exhibitions throughout the decade but by 1940, Dali was moving into a new type of painting with a preoccupation with science and religion.
Dali and Gala escaped from Europe during World War II, spending 1940-48 in the United States. These were very important years for the artist. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Dali his first major retrospective exhibit in 1941. This was followed in 1942 by the publication of Dali’s autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali.
As Dali moved away from Surrealism and into his classic period, he began his series of 19 large canvases, many concerning scientific, historical or religious themes. Among the best known of these works are The Hallucinogenic Toreador, and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in the museum’s collection, and The Sacrament of the Last Supper in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
In 1974, Dali opened the Teatro Museo in Figueres, Spain. This was followed by retrospectives in Paris and London at the end of the decade. After the death of his wife, Gala in 1982, Dali’s health began to fail. It deteriorated further after he was burned in a fire in his home in Pubol in 1984. Two years later, a pace-maker was implanted. Much of this part of his life was spent in seclusion, first in Pubol and later in his apartments at Torre Galatea, adjacent to the Teatro Museo. Salvador Dali died on January 23, 1989 in Figueres from heart failure with respiratory complications.
links for more biography information and life facts of the Spanish great artist Salvador Dali
* many paintings and other art pictures by famous Spanish artist Salvador Dali , on Google
* information about life and art of the Spanish painter Salvador Dali, on Wikipedia
* Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, in English language
* the art style Surrealism, described in art quotes
* art style Surrealism described, on Wikipedia – English version
