By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   A European friend of mine who’s almost obsessive about posting photographs on Facebook that pertain to Cadaques, Spain, recently posted this photo of a plate of grilled sardines.   While anything served to me with a face turns my stomach, the fish in a dish immediately called to mind a Salvador Dali painting: “Telephone in a Dish with Three Grilled Sardines at the End of September” (1939, The Salvador

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   I’m in the mood to show a side of Salvador Dali best told through photographs. Today I want to talk briefly about how Dali worked. And rather than showcasing his works themselves, most of the photos punctuating today’s post show Dali at work.   I had the momentary delight and privilege of watching Dali draw a couple of quick sketches when I first met him at the St.

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   I’m not sure very many people – even card-carrying Dali aficionados – are aware that the Vatican in Rome has a Salvador Dali painting in its permanent art collection. Actually, it owns a trinity of Dali’s, each with varying degrees of religious imagery.   While much of Dali’s life and work had nothing to do with religion, a good part of it did. In the late 1940s he

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   Next month, something rather exceptional will be occurring in the endlessly exciting world of Salvador Dali. What many, including me, consider Dali’s most famous religious painting – in fact, what might be the most famous religious painting of the last century – is coming to the Dali Museum in Florida from Great Britain.   To St. Petersburg, to be precise. To One Dali Boulevard, to be even more

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   What inspired Dali?   Answer: all kinds of things. Anything. EVERYTHING!   The man possessed limitless curiosity. He could get excitedly creative over things you or I wouldn’t have given even a fleeting thought to. Or over something monumental, to which he would lend a special twist, making it uniquely his own.   We know Dali was profoundly inspired by nature – specifically the landscape around his beautiful

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   For the real Dali enthusiast, it’s always enlightening to discover new things about the artist, how he worked, what inspired him.   I think I’ve found an influence that is not commonly cited for comparison when it comes to Salvador Dali’s first Nuclear-Mystical masterwork – the large and richly nuanced “Madonna of Port Lligat” of 1950.   Scholars have typically and sensibly seen the influence in Dali’s painting

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   I think it’s fitting to ring in the New Year by re-visiting where it really all began for Salvador Dali in terms of the single painting that propelled him to ultimate fame. The one that will always remain his best-known work: “The Persistence of Memory” of 1931.   I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: I don’t think there’s any question that “The Persistence of Memory” –

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   It’s safe to say the one hope for fast-approaching 2018 that everyone would surely wish for is that peace and freedom may be as ubiquitous around our world as soft watches and tall crutches were around Dali’s surrealist world.   In homage to such a glorious goal, I invite you to take a look at a few Salvador Dali works that celebrate peace and freedom through the lens

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   If I had to name a Salvador Dali painting very few people know about; one which almost nothing has been written about; and which, in my view, is one of the most colorful, nuanced and intriguing of Dali’s oils – it would be “Nativity of a New World.” The privately owned 14-inch x 19-inch work is seldom seen on exhibition and is not commonly shown in most books

By Paul Chimera Salvador Dali Historian   Given the real reason for the season, let’s today look at Salvador Dali’s wonderful – and unusual – “The Trinity,” which was an oil study for “The Ecumenical Council,” both works created in 1960.   “The Trinity,” while a preparatory study for the much, much larger “Ecumenical Council,” in the permanent collection of the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, is itself of museum quality. Indeed, it