Salvador Dali was a path breaking artist who lives on today through his mind bending and provocative works. He has served as inspiration to scores of artists looking to learn from the outpourings of his prodigious and vast imagination. His impeccable talent and training created fantastical works in the breadth of a canvas.
Even non-artists can’t help but be shocked at the iconoclastic personality of Dali. Dali was a man so completely sure of himself that he knew that the world could not help loving and revering him. Dali’s eccentricity and showmanship is well known and documented.
After the death of his brother nine months before he was born, Dali’s parents believed that he was the re-incarnation of their dead son and the young Dali too grew up with his notion. Having an unusual flair for drawing Dali had his first exhibition at the young age of 15. His mother passed away when he was 16 and Dali has noted later in life that his mother’s death “was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.”
Dali was so sure of his talent, so very confident of his own greatness that he was expelled from the Academia de San Fernando after declaring that there was no one in the faculty competent enough to judge him.
There are innumerable accounts of Dali’s genius and artistic brilliance. Some famous examples of his eccentric behavior however are:
- Dali once inscribed one of his works at an exhibition with the quote “Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother’s portrait”
- Dali attended a ball in New York with a crystal box around his neck which contained a brassiere
- Dali and Gala (his mistress) attended a costume party dressed as the Lindbergh baby and its kidnapper
- One of Dali’s famous quotes was “The only difference between a crazy person and myself, is that the crazy person believes they are sane. I know that I’m crazy.”
- Dali had a pet anteater, which he used to leash and take out publicly for walks
