By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   Salvador Dali was almost frustratingly contradictory. His so-called false memories, discussed in his Secret Life autobiography, added to his enigma, his living paradox.   When it came to music as an art form, Dali claimed it was woefully inferior to painting. The eye clearly triumphed over the ear, he believed. The transitory nature of music paled in comparison to the tangibility and permanence of painting, Dali insisted. And yet

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   Salvador Dali was surrounded by water. He lived and worked near it, swam in it, boated on it, captured it in oil paint, and drank it instead of alcohol. Today it’s all about Dali and water.   Salvador and Gala lived virtually all their lives on the shoreline of the Bay of Port Lligat in northeastern Spain. Fishermen mending nets were an everyday fixture. The sea’s bounty –

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   I once wrote that, had Salvador Dali painted nothing more than landscapes, his place in art history would still be assured. Of course, let’s be clear: Dali could have painted anything; his talent was beyond extraordinary.   Fortunately for lovers of landscape painting, Dali produced some remarkable ones – sometimes decked out in the regalia of mind-bending surrealism, on other occasions just cloaked in everyday clothes. Either way,

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   One of the fascinating, ingenious, and at times amusing aspects of the art of Salvador Dali is how he titled his works. Some titles are so lengthy, verbose, and convoluted – or just impossible to remember – that alternative titles were adopted to abridge things and liberate writers like me from the laborious task of keystroking their names. Which I’m not sure anyone ever remembers with complete accuracy.

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   One of my Dali dreams? To tour an exhibition of all of Salvador Dali’s “masterworks” in one mind-blowing exhibition!   I believe it was Salvador Dali’s leading collector (and benefactor of the Salvador Dali Museum, first in Beachwood, Ohio, then when it relocated to St. Petersburg, Florida), Reynolds Morse, who coined the term “masterwork” to describe certain Dali paintings.   His criteria were two-fold: the work had to

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   Salvador Dali specialist and friend Elliott King, Ph.D., again finds himself mentioned here, due to his recent sojourn to the land of the rising son. He has shared a little about the wealth of great Dali paintings he finally got to see in person while visiting Japan.   One little-known work is the controversial but wonderful portrait Dali painted of Ann Woodward in 1953, a woman dubiously famed as

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   Everything Salvador Dali did was calculated. Well-thought-out. Purposeful. Deliberate. Carefully crafted.   Nowhere is this more evident than in the studies (a.k.a., preparatory sketches) he made in the process of creating masterpieces. In some cases the studies are mini-masterpieces in themselves. At least I think so, and I bet others share that view. We’ll look at some here.   Dali cared about exactitude. He was a scrupulously disciplined

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   I wish blogs could somehow give readers an actual tactile sensation of how certain paintings by Salvador Dali can make a person feel. I don’t know about you, but there’s something about certain Dali’s that stir my sense of awe, wonderment, and passion more than others.   It’s hard to describe, and even more so to understand, unless you’ve felt it yourself. Even then, such works can leave

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   My friend, Dr. Ellliott King – a widely respected Salvador Dali expert – has just returned from a very special trip to Japan, and now he finally got to check off a major bucket list item: seeing in the flesh the remarkable Dali masterwork, The Battle of Tetuan.   This gigantic 1962 oil on canvas is one of Dali’s most complex and powerful images, chockablock with references to

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   Sunny-side up! Fried eggs. They were a fetishistic obsession for Salvador Dali. They seemed to turn up everywhere. And like so many things in this genius’s life, there were multiple meanings and interpretations associated with these popular breakfast items throughout his surrealist feasts on canvas.   One suggestion is that the soft, gooey, gelatinous consistency of fried eggs reminded Dali of what he claimed was his vivid memory of