Unusual pets of Salvador Dali. Shock is our way: the life and death of Salvador Dali Dreams as inspiration
Salvador Dali is a famous Spanish painter of the 20th century who painted his paintings in the style of surrealism. He brought the genre to a new level. His works of art personified boundless fantasy. As a person, Salvador was very strange.
1. Trying to swing
Dali's life and his art took place during the heyday of jazz and its rapid transformation. Not surprisingly, Salvador loved this style of music and made attempts to perform it on his own. Dali tried several times to play swing drums, but he did not do it very well, after which the artist completely abandoned this business.
You can learn how to play swing drums by clicking on the link.
2. Dreams as inspiration
In order for the muse to come to Salvador Dali, he sometimes fell asleep near the canvas with a key in his hands. Having fallen asleep in this way, the artist’s muscles relaxed and the key fell, from which Dali immediately woke up, and until the dream had time to forget, he transferred the images he dreamed of to the canvas.
3. Strange accessories and costumes
In 1934, Salvador walked around New York with a very strange accessory, namely: with a two-meter loaf of bread on his shoulder. While visiting an exhibition of surrealism in London, he wore a diving suit.
4. Fear of grasshoppers
Salvador Dali had a phobia of grasshoppers. His peers knew about this and deliberately threw insects at him. In order for his friends to be able to switch from true fears to false ones, the artist told his peers that he was afraid of paper airplanes. In fact, Dali had no such fear. With age, the great artist developed new phobias: fear of driving cars and fear of people. With the advent of Gala's wife, all Dali's fears disappeared.
5. Message to the father
Salvador Dali fell out with his father after the death of his mother. As a result, the artist did a very strange thing: he sent his father a package with his sperm, along with an envelope that said: "This is all I owe you."
6. Window dressing
In 1939, Salvador Dali first gained infamy when he was commissioned to decorate the window of one of the famous expensive shops. Dali decided that the theme would be "day and night." His creative work involved mannequins with real strands of hair cut from a corpse. There was also a bath tub, a black tub, and a buffalo skull with a bleeding dove in its mouth.
7. Collaboration with Walt Disney
From 1945 to 1946, Dali collaborated with Walt Disney on the short film Destino. At that time, it was not released and was not shown to the audience, as the picture was considered unprofitable. In 2003, this cartoon was released by Disney's nephew Roy Edward Disney. The picture won an Oscar
8. Chupa Chups packaging design
Salvador Dali was the creator of the package design for the famous Chupa Chups lollipops. He was asked about this by a friend and countryman of Enrique Bernard, the owner of a candy company. The logo, conceived and drawn by Dali in just an hour in 1969, is still used by the company to this day with minor changes.
The artist did not take money for this work, he asked to be given a box of "Chupa-Chups" every day for free. Dali could not eat such a large number of lollipops, so he did the following strange thing: when he came to the playground, he licked the candies and threw them into the sand.
9. Mustache
In 1954, photographer Philippe Halsmon published a book entitled Dali's Mustache: A Photo Interview. It depicts not only Dali's mustache, but also naked female bodies, water and baguettes.
10. Pet
Salvador Dali chose a giant anteater as his pet. He walked with him around Paris, also came with him to secular receptions, after that it became a fashionable phenomenon for them to get an anteater, the species even almost disappeared from nature. Before the anteater, Dali kept a pygmy leopard as a pet.
11. Testament
Salvador Dali bequeathed to bury himself in such a way that anyone could walk on his grave. The embalmed body of the great artist is walled up in the field of the Dali Theater Museum.
Many are well aware that Salvador Dali liked to appear in public in a fur coat with a leopard pattern and accompanied by an ocelot. The belief that Dali is necessarily associated with representatives of large felines among a wide audience has even led to the appearance of Dali Wild perfume in the perfume brand Salvador Dali. The packaging is leopard print. So how much did cats really occupy the great master, and what kind of mysterious beast is present in the photographs with the immortal Catalan?
The ocelot we see in Dali's photos was called Babu, and his real owner was John Peter Moore, nicknamed Captain - a confidant, or, in modern terminology, Dali's manager. Babu appeared at Peter's in a rather original way.
In 1960, in New York, Dali and Gala went to the movies and stumbled upon a homeless beggar with an ocelot kitten. Gala became interested in him, Dali immediately decided to buy him, offering $ 100 in his usual manner of a person who never knew how to count money. Gala was indignant: there was no such amount with her, but there were plans for the evening, in which the ocelot was not included at all. The beggar who was present during the conversation kindly agreed to wait while the couple went to the cinema.
Two hours later, the Dali couple, accompanied by a beggar, returned to the hotel, where they borrowed the required amount from the administrator on duty and made a deal. After some deliberation, Dali decided to throw the kitten into Peter's room. Without any note. Captain Moore was really very surprised when, after he went to bed, a small spotted cat jumped into his bed. They instantly became friends, and Peter decided to feed a new friend to seal the union. But, not knowing exactly what he would like, he ordered salmon, beef, cheese and milk to the room. The cat happily tried a little bit of everything and disappeared under the bed.
The next morning, Peter was already playing Dali: he pretended to be completely unperturbed, evasively answered leading questions, pretending that nothing unusual had happened to him at night.
Subsequently, Peter and his wife Catherine brought in a second ocelot named Buba, and a third, with the name of the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, was sent to them by some incredible way by mail.
Peter worked for Dali for many years, accompanied his patron on his numerous trips: this is how ocelots appeared surrounded by Dali. But his favorite cat was, of course, Babu, whom he took for walks and with whom he appeared in society.
The history of the acquisition of Babu and various others related to ocelots are told in Living Dali, written by Peter Moore. In her introduction to the book, Katherine Moore writes:
Babu means "gentleman" in Hindi. And living up to his name, Babu led the life of a true gentleman. He ate at the best restaurants, always traveled first class, and stayed in five-star hotels. He was squeezed by pretty girls, serious business people, aristocrats and even royalty. (To avoid unpleasant incidents, the ocelot's claws were trimmed.) He weighed a good twenty kilograms. After a trip to New York, where Baba was well fed and there was little room for movement, he put on a little more. Dali was very amused, and he once said to Peter: "Your ocelot looks like a swollen dust container from a vacuum cleaner."
Here it is worth talking about some of the aristocratic, truly magnificent habits of Babu: he liked to eat a fresh rose every morning and refused a flower if he found that it had faded a little. And while traveling on a liner to New York, Babu fell in love with lying on the piano while playing music: he liked to feel the vibration coming from the instrument.
The pianist who allowed Babu to climb the piano, however, had to regret his kindness, because in the end Babu did with the piano what any decent cat would do with the thing he liked ... Upon arrival in New York, another instrument had to be installed on the liner.
Babu, however, did not only lead a Sybarite lifestyle, making sea voyages and eating delicacies. Once, thanks to the ocelot, Dali received a lucrative contract. The three of them - Dali, Moore and Babu - they walked in one of the prestigious districts of eastern Manhattan. We came across a small printing house called the Center for Old Prints.
Dali wanted to come in: he expected to find the Piranesi engravings he needed there. A middle-aged, charming printer named Lucas welcomed the visitors with pleasure, but was extremely worried because of the ocelot: he had a dog. In order to avoid conflict, Baba was put on a bookcase, and Dali began to examine the engravings. Having chosen several suitable ones, Dali paid off; together with Peter, he caught Baba, who happily jumped from one bookcase to another, and said goodbye to Lucas.
The next day, the owner of the printing house, “obviously losing control of himself,” came to the hotel where Dali and Moore were staying. In his hands he carried a large bundle of engravings, exhaling the smell of urine, which Babu, apparently, the previous day had assessed as highly artistic. Damage was estimated at $4,000. “I reported this to Dali, who, as expected, replied: “This is your ocelot, Captain, and you must make amends,” writes Peter.
The check was issued promptly. A few hours later, the wife of Mr. Lucas appeared at the hotel with the same check and asked if Mr. Dali would agree to accept the check back, but allow one of his lithographs to be printed in their printing house. Dali did not force himself to be persuaded, and the "Center for Old Prints" replicated "Explosive Spring". “The result of our visit - or rather, Babu’s “visit” to the shelves of the Antique Print Center - was a profitable deal for a million dollars and a long-term cooperation with the Lucas spouses,” Peter sums up the incident.
The personality of Salvador Dali remains elusive, incomprehensible. He said that he realized himself as a genius in 1929 and since then he has never doubted this. And at the same time he claimed that he himself would not have bought any of his paintings. The life credo of the artist is best reflected in the following words: "Every morning, waking up, I feel the highest pleasure: to be Salvador Dali."
In the topic of the participation of cats in business and artistic creativity of Salvador Dali, the episode with the filthy triptych, which was presented to the Iranian Shah and subsequently successfully sold for a million dollars at a charity auction, is worthy of mention. We should also mention the gouache illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, which were drying on the carpet in the Captain's room, when the ocelot ran over them and, in addition, slightly gnawed one of the drawings. Dali reacted in his own style: “Ocelot did a great job! So much better, the ocelot added the finishing touch!”
An amusing anecdote about Dali and an ocelot is also walking around the world. One day in New York, the artist went to a restaurant to drink coffee and took with him, as expected, a friend Babu, whom he tied to a table leg as a precaution. A plump middle-aged lady walked by. Seeing a small leopard sitting peacefully with its owner, she turned somewhat pale and asked Dali in a choked voice what kind of monstrous beast was next to him.
Dali calmly replied: “Don’t worry, madam, this is an ordinary cat, which I “finished” a little. The lady looked at the animal again and breathed a sigh of relief: “Oh yes, now I see that this is just an ordinary house cat. Really, who would think of going to a restaurant with a wild predator?”
The most famous work of art, where cats in some kind of spatial surrealistic amalgam are connected with the image of the great master, is, interestingly, not a Dali painting, but a photograph of Dali Atomicus (“Atomic Dali”, in Latin), in which Dali, along with cats, is part of the composition.
The legendary, expressive and dynamic picture was taken in 1948 by the famous photographer, the founder of surrealism in photography, Philippe Halsman and, of course, demonstrates not the most humane attitude towards animals.
The difficult shooting lasted about 6 hours. Cats were thrown 28 times, Dali jumped, presumably, for several years ahead, and the painting “Atomic Leda” in the background was miraculously not flooded with water. Not a single cat, however, was hurt, but the assistants who threw the cats up, one must think, got pretty bad.
In the work of Dali himself, representatives of the cat family, although they occupy a small place, but occupy. You could say they noted. The main work on the topic is a painting with a multifaceted semantic, figurative structure and a complex title "Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate, a second before awakening."
At the center of the picture is a sequence of vivid, aggressive images subject to a paranoid evolution: a huge pomegranate spawns a red fish with monstrous teeth, which, in turn, spews out two snarling ferocious tigers. One of the primary sources of the picture, experts say, was a circus poster.
Also noteworthy is the work of Cinquenta, Tiger Real (“Fifty, Tiger Reality”, Spanish, English). Unusual abstract painting consists of 50 triangular and quadrangular elements.
The composition is based on an optical game: if viewed from a close distance, only geometric shapes will be visible. If you take one or two steps back, you can see three Chinese written inside the triangles. And, only when the observer moves away at a sufficient distance, the head of an angry royal tiger emerges from the black-orange geometric chaos.
But all the worries and troubles associated with cats lay on the shoulders of the Moore spouses. But love for animals - or love in general? - as a rule, and manifests itself precisely in the readiness to take responsibility for the fate of another. It is unlikely that in Dali's life, filled with creativity and love for Gala, there was enough space for tender feelings for fluffy four-legged ones. He never got his cat.
Igor Kaverin
Magazine "My friend cat" June 2014
The Spaniard Salvador Dali is a brilliant painter of his time, who went down in history as perhaps the most famous representative of surrealism. Who better than Dali, who created paradoxical combinations of forms on the verge of dream and reality, had to keep unusual pets that emphasized the individuality of the artist?
As a child, Dali had a bat in his room, which he loved very much. Once he discovered that the pet had died, and ants were crawling over its body. Since then, Salvador Dali has strongly disliked ants. As an adult, Salvador took care of an anteater from the Paris zoo. Once he even arranged a photo shoot with his unusual pet, walking with him through the streets of the city.
Salvador Dali walks with an anteater through the streets of Paris
Of course, Dali did not keep an anteater at home, which needed special care and living conditions, but he could well cope with the ocelot, a predatory feline mammal. This wild cat is distributed mainly in the rainforests of America, has a violent temper and certainly does not want to be petted by people.
However, according to eyewitnesses, Dali always found a common language with his rather big pet.
The painter often took his ocelot named Babow on various trips and trips to restaurants. Sometimes, when visiting one or another respectable establishment, Dali had to tell the owner of the premises that in front of them was not a wild animal, but just a large domestic cat, which he specially painted in an unusual way.
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On May 11, in the Spanish town of Figueres, Salvador Domenech Felip Jacinth Dali was born - the same great and terrible Dali, one of the first who turned outrageous into an important part of his style.
The artist loved his mother very much. She died when Dali was 17. He was very sad, but years later, at an exhibition in Paris, he presented a painting on which for some reason it was written "Sometimes I spit on a portrait of my mother."
Dali was afraid of grasshoppers all his life. As a child, peers constantly mocked him, throwing dead grasshoppers into school notebooks, into a briefcase, into clothes. Then Salvador began to pretend that he was afraid of white lumps of paper. The children immediately began to throw these lumps at him, but they forgot about the grasshoppers.
Despite the lordly manners and millions of dollars, Dali was stingy. He liked to hang out in restaurants, treating a crowd of friends and acquaintances, but it was unpleasant for him to pay the bill. Therefore, in order not to waste his hard-earned money, the cunning artist simply signed on the check, adding a couple of words. It turned out to be an art object, which the owners of the establishment accepted with delight, realizing that they would get much more for this piece of paper than for what Dali had eaten and drunk by the company.
The artist tried not to miss a single opportunity to earn money. If fans approached him in a restaurant and asked permission to sit next to him, Dali always said that it costs money: “Five thousand dollars from you or get out.” It often worked.
Best of all, his antics rolled in the States. On his first visit, Dali appeared at his own exhibition with a two-meter baguette under his arm, and arranged numerous parties in such a way that they were written about indignantly in the newspapers the next morning. At one of them, he made the guests dress up as the dead, and then arranged a round dance around the carcass of a bull, “stuffed” with vinyl records. On another occasion, Dali went out wearing a hat adorned with a rotten herring.
Dali did not like doing commissioned work and preferred, as they say, cheating. One day Art magazine asked him to write a column about Pablo Picasso. How did Dali do? He took someone else's article, corrected something, changed the names and sent it to the editor. The text was greeted with enthusiasm, and the publisher of the magazine later informed the artist that "his" work was an ideal and profound study of Picasso's work.
Dali repeated this trick again when he was ordered to write a preface to the novel by the surrealist writer Rene Crevel. Not wanting to strain, the artist bought a book of Balzac in the shop, which contained an introductory text, rewrote it completely, changing “Balzac” to “Crevel” everywhere, and oh la, the work was done.
Dali had a pet - an anteater. This anteater went down in history thanks to the famous photo in which the artist exits the subway, holding his pet on a leash.
The artist loved to shock the guests at his home, puzzling them with unexpected requests. When the famous art critic Brian Sewell first came to visit Dali, he asked him to undress, lie down in the garden under one of the statues in the fetal position and masturbate.
At the presentation of the book “Dali through the eyes of Gala”, an apparatus for taking a cardiogram was installed in the hall of the bookstore. Signing his work, the artist simultaneously underwent an examination, after which he tore the finished tape with a cardiogram into small pieces and distributed it to the fans.
Arriving at a meeting with the publisher in his office, Dali, waiting for the moment when the interlocutor went into the next office, urinated into an umbrella stand. As a result, for several days in a row, the publishing house employees suffered from an unbearable stench, until the cleaners finally realized where the stink came from.
Once, Dali invited the famous Soviet composer, the author of Saber Dance, Aram Khachaturian, to his place. The composer arrived at Dali's mansion on time, the butler led him into a luxurious hall and asked him to wait. An hour later, the music of that same “Saber Dance” sounded in the hall, the doors on one side swung open, and a completely naked owner of the house jumped out - riding a mop and with a saber in his hand. He galloped past Khachaturian, dumbfounded by such a spectacle, and disappeared through other doors. After that, the composer was informed that the meeting was over.
In the version presented by Sergei Dovlatov in Notebooks, poor Khachaturian waited for Dali for three hours. During this time, he drank a lot of wine, which was in the hall, wanted to go to the toilet, but the doors were locked, and no one answered the knock. Having washed out, burning with shame, the eminent composer began to empty his bladder into one of the vases, and then Dali jumped into the hall - with a saber, and on a real horse.
The muse and love of the artist's life, Gala, twisted her husband as she wanted. Being ten years older than Dali, she was distinguished by sexual irrepressibility until the end of her life. As a result, she forced me to buy a castle for herself, settled there separately from Dali, had fun with young guys with might and main, and her wife accepted, having previously given permission for him to visit.
Gala passed away in June 1982. Her will indicated that she should be buried in the Catalan castle of Dali. In order to take the body of his beloved out of the hospital without too much noise, the artist forced the medical staff to dress his wife, take her to the car and put her in the back seat. A nurse was located nearby - so that the body would not collapse, Dali got behind the wheel and went home. There Gala was embalmed, dressed up in her favorite Dior dress and buried in a crypt. And the inconsolable widower went to the grave every day and cried for hours.
In recent years, Dali lived in the building of his own theater-museum, where he bequeathed to bury himself. After his death, the artist's body was embalmed and immured in the floor of one of the rooms of this very museum. There it still is.
Salvador Dali is a talented artist and an eccentric person. His actions and way of life caused bewilderment among his contemporaries. It is not surprising that Dali chose unusual animals as pets.
In the 60s of the twentieth century, Salvador Dali shocked the public with his appearance on the street in the company of a giant anteater. He was the first who decided to have this animal as a pet. Before meeting the celebrity, the anteater lived in the Paris Zoo, from where the artist took him under guardianship. Dali often walked with his pet, leading him through the streets of the city on a golden leash.
Together with the anteater, Dali could appear at a social event or visit a Parisian restaurant.
According to some reports, in addition to the giant anteater, the artist had one more - smaller. Most likely, it was he who lived in Dali's house, and the large animal was kept in special conditions.
Many people know about Dali's love for anteaters. And the history of its occurrence has several versions. According to the first, Dali was inflamed with love for these animals even in childhood. Being small, the artist had a bat as a pet, to which he was strongly attached. One day he discovered that the animal had died, and ants were crawling on its body. Since that time, Dali disliked these insects and was imbued with love for those who eat them - anteaters. The second version says that the artist had warm feelings for anteaters after getting acquainted with the work of Andre Breton After the Giant Anteater.
Video: Salvador Dali and the anteater (English)
Other pets of the artist
Dali had another unusual pet - ocelot Babu. In fact, a large wild cat lived not with the artist, but in the house of his manager Peter Moore.
From the Hindi language, Babu is translated as "gentleman." And according to Moore, the ocelot fully lived up to its name: "ate at the best restaurants, always traveled first class and stayed in five-star hotels."
Sometimes, when visiting one or another respectable institution, together with the ocelot, Dali had to tell the owner of the room that in front of him was not a wild animal, but just a large domestic cat, which he specially painted in an unusual way
Dali bought an ocelot kitten from a homeless man when he was with a manager in America. At night, he threw the animal in Moore's room as a prank. However, he was not taken aback and quickly found a common language with the animal. Later, Peter got a couple more ocelots, and Dali liked to spend time in their company. But Babu remained his favorite: the artist often took him to social events, visited restaurants with him, arranged photo shoots with an unusual “domestic” cat.
Salvador Dali liked to emphasize his individuality. He was not only a brilliant artist, but also an amazing personality, distinguished even in the choice of pets.
