27 curiosities about Salvador Dalí and his most famous quotes

It doesn’t matter if you were born in the 20th or 21st century, where you come from or what your beliefs are. We all have one thing in common: at some point of our lives we’ve heard about Salvador Dalí, the surrealist artist, and maybe one of the most complete, extravagant and popular artists of which there is evidence. 

In this post I will tell you some of the curiosities of the Catalan artist’s life, as well as some of his most famous phrases that have past to history. Genious, egocentric, between sanity and madness. Judge for yourselves. 

1. The full name for Dalí was 
   Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech.
2. Salvador Dalí’s parents had a child before him, also called Salvador, who died before turning two years old, exactly nine months before the birth of the Salvador Dalí that we all know. His parents took him to his brother’s grave at five years old and told him he was his reincarnation, idea which he believed in. He told in an interview that since he was a little boy, he started to do all kinds of eccentricities to differentiate himself from the other Salvador Dalí.
   
   
3. His mother, Felipa Domènech, died in 1921 due to an uterus cancer, when he was 16 years old. This was the hardest strike in the life of the artisit. After his mother’s death, his father married his dead wife’s sister. Dalí never approved this. 
4. The extravagant mustache of the artist has its inspiration in two characters: Josep Margarit, a Catalan military whose portrait hanged in his father’s house, and Diego Velázquez, the master Andalusian painter admired by the genius from Figueres.

   

   Portrait Josep Margarit

   

   Self-portrait of Diego Velázquez in his work Las Meninas

   
   
5. After a long friendship that started as students, the famous Spanish writer Federico García Lorca fell in love of the painter. After several years of correspondence between the two of them, Dalí ended rejecting him, although there was also a great doses of flirting from him. There are still 40 letters conserved, and the rest were sold by the writer’s family or well, destroyed due to Gala’s jealousy, wife and muse of the painter. 

   

   Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca

   
   
6. In 1926 he was expelled from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid, soon after his final exams, for declaring that there was no one at the academy in condition to examine him because he knew more than them.
7. His wife, Gala Éluard Dalí, was born in Kazan, Russia, under the name of Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. Her last name, Éluard, was adopted from her first marriage with the French poet Paul Éluard, also belonging to the surrealist group. Éluard also used a nickname, since his real name was Eugène Grindel.

   

   Dalí and Gala

   
   
8. In 1929 his father kicked him off his house, after writing "Sometimes, I spit in my mother’s portrait for fun ". Besides, he was disinherited and was forbidden to ever come back to Cadaqués. During the argument, Dalí showed his father a used condom, holding his own sperm, saying him “Take it! I owe you nothing”.
9. In 1934, due to his confusing political inclinacions and other things, Dalí had started to lose prestige within the group of surrealists that he belonged to, and was submitted to the “surreal trial”; due to this trial, he was expelled from the movement. Dalí answered with a phrase that lingered in the future: “I am the surrealism”. 

   

   Members of the surrealist group.
   Up: Paul Éluard, Arp, Tanguy and Crevel.
   Down: Tzara, Breton, Dalí, Max Ernst and Man Ray.

   
   
10. In 1939, André Breton, leader of the surrealist movement, reorganizing the letters of Salvador Dalí wrote the anagram “Avida Dollars”, to critizise his passion for money. Some of the surrealists began to talk about Dalí in past tense, as if he was already dead.
11. The short film Destino, launched in 2003 by Disney, was already thought in 1945 by Dalí and Walt Disney, but had left abandoned by economical reasons, and in 1999 its production was retaken by Roy E. Disney, nephew of Walt Disney, several years after the death of both men. The short film includes 18 original seconds, and the rest follows a clear “Dalinian” style. 

    

    Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney

    
    
12. In 1947, the Italian fraile Gabriele Maria Berardi announced having practiced an exorcism to the artist in a visit to France.
13. The Catalan company Chupa Chups asked Dalí to design a new logo for the company in 1969. Besides, he suggested that the logo should be at the upper part of the caramel, so it was always visible. 

    

    Evolution of the Chupa Chups logo. The Dalinian version is the one from 1969.

    
    
14. In 1982, the King of Spain "Juan Carlos I" granted him the title of Marqués de Púbol. Dalí thanked him by giving him a painting called "Cabeza de Europa" (Head of Europe), his last painting, when the king visited him years later in his last dying days.
15. Also in 1982, after Gala’s death, Dalí tried to suicide, although he declared that his intention was to enter in a state of suspended animation, just as some bacterias do.
16. He signed his will that same year, in which the Spanish State would be the universal heir of his works.
17. In the 1960’s, Figueres' mayor invited the artist to give him one of his works of art for the local museum, but Dalí answered that he was able to gift him an entire museum and suggested the abandoned theatre as the place for the museum, the same that exposed his first two works in 1918. Dalí fully dedicated himself to the museum’s construction until 1974, although he continued until 1984 working on details.
18. In 1973 created a painting called “Hitler masturbándose” (Hitler masturbating).

    

    Salvador Dalí's "Hitler masturbándose", 1973.

    
    
19. He had an anteater as a pet and took him for a walk through the streets of Paris every now and then.

    

    Dalí walking his exotic mascot in Paris.

    
    
20. Gala’s dream was to live in a castle in Tuscany. The artist ordered the construction of a castle similar to one they once overflew in a airplane, not in Tuscany but in Púbol. That’s where Gala is buried.
21. Gala hated radiators that much that she would cover them as much as she could with furniture or embellishers. The thing she enjoyed the least of the castle in Púbol was one room with two radiators separated by a door. Gala asked his husband to draw something nice in it. Dalí painted an hyperrealistic copy of those two radiators at the door. 

    

    Radiators painted over the door of the room of the radiators.

    
    
22. His decorative element by excellence is the egg, which crowns the Figueres museum and his home-museum at Portlligat. For him an egg meant love, hope, preuterine life and even a remainder that he is a copy of his past-away brother. Inside of these elements, he would be happy. 

    

    View of his home (today a museum) in Portlligat.

    

    Dalí Museum in Figueres.

    
    
23. Before his first date with Gala, Dalí suffered an accident when he was shaving his armpits, and decided to spread some of that blood on his body, besides adding goat poop and oil. A not-so-romantic way of causing a good impression. Yet, Gala fell in love with him.
24. Dalí had a method for avoiding getting his checks collected: when he went out for lunch, after consuming the most expensive dishes that any restaurant could offer him, he would ask for the check, got one of his checks in which he wrote down the total sum and signed it, but before giving out the check, he would turn it, make a drawing at the reverse  and autograph it. Dalí knew that the owner of the restaurant would not cash the check and instead keep it, place it in a framework and expose it in the best place in the restaurant: an original Dalí painting.
25. The painter visited a center for the mentally impaired in Paris. While the director showed him each and every one of the rooms, Dalí would sneak into it, examined the patient and exclaimed “not interesting”. At the last room he saw the image of an uncombed man with exorbitant eyes. It caught his attention and under the look of that crazy man he claimed “This, this, this, this is a mad genius, you can tell right away”. The director of the psiquiatric answered: “But Mr. Dalí, here is no one else, notice that you are in front of a mirror of a closet”.
26. He died in 1989, while he heard his favorite melody, Tristan and Isolda of the composer Richard Wagner.
27. Dalí is buried in the crypt of the Figueres museum, while Gala lies in the castle of Púbol. It is said that the major of Figueres assured that Dalí had asked to rest eternally there, although it is suspicious that in the Púbol crypt there is a tomb right next to Gala’s, respecting Dali’s habit of always sleeping on the right side of her beloved.

Salvador Dalí's famous quotes:

"At six years old I wanted to be a cooker, at seven I wanted to be Napoleon. My ambition has done nothing more than grow; now I just want to be Salvador Dalí and nothing else. On the other hand, this is very hard because as I get near Salvador Dalí, he walks away from me".

"It's curious, I’m much more interested in talking, or to be in touch with the people who think the opposite as I think, than to those who think the same as me".

"Without an audience, without the presence of spectators, these jewels would not be enough for the function they were created. The spectator, therefore, is the final artist. His view, heart, mind –with a major or minor capacity for understanding the creator’s intention- gives life to the jewels".

"The only difference between a madmen and me, is that the madmen thinks he is not, while I know I am".

"There is only one difference between a madmen and me. I am not crazy".

"I’m never alone. I have the habit of always being with Salvador Dalí. Believe me, that is a permanent party".

"There are only two evil things that can happen to you in life, being Pablo Picasso or not being Salvador Dalí".

"Cannibalism is one of the most evident manifestations of tenderness".

"If I die, I won’t completely die".

"The important thing is that people talk about you, even if it is for good".

"The true painter is that whom is capable of painting extraordinary scenes in the middle of an empty desert. The true painter is that whom is capable to patiently paint a pear surrounded by the riots of history".

"A painting is a photography done by hand".

"Many people do not turn eighty because they try for too long to stay in their forties".

"You can’t expel me because I am surrealism!".

"The major misfortune of the actual youth is no longer belonging to it".

"The moral law has to have a divine origin, since before Moses’ tables it was already within the genetics’ spirals".

"It is clear that other worlds exist, for sure; but, as I’ve said many times, those other worlds are in ours, they reside in Earth and precisely in the dome’s center of the Dali’s museum, where all the new, unexpected and hallucinating world of surrealism is”.

"I think that life should be a continuous party".

"The Russian Revolution is the French Revolution arriving late because of the cold weather".

"There is no way I will go back to México. I cannot stand being in a country more surreal than my paintings".

"I declare the independence from imagination and the man’s right to his own madness".

"I am not the fool, but that monstrous, cynical and unconsciously naïve society that plays a serious role to disguise its madness".

"Not knowing the meaning of art doesn’t mean I don’t have it".

"Time is one of the few important things that we are left".

"Writing is simply what I say, and that will arrive the day it will be accepted".

"The existence of reality is the most mysterious thing, most sublime and most surreal thing that I know of".

"The least that can be demanded to a sculpture is not moving".

"Surrealism is destructive, but destroys only what considers that limits our vision".

"Instead of trying obstinately to use surrealism for subversion purposes, we must try to make solid, complete and classic surrealism, just as the pieces of museums".

"He that wants to interest others has to provoke them".

"The only thing that the world won’t ever have enough of is exaggeration".

"Its not that I am good. But others are so bad that the comparison reveals impossible".

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