Short History Of... - Salvador Dalí

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

With his expressive face and gravity-defying moustache, Salvador Dalí is one of the most recognisable – and influential – artists of the 20th century. Famed for his paintings of melting clocks and his lobster telephone, Dalí also cultivated a larger-than-life character for himself to play, using fashion and performance to blur the boundaries between art and reality. But alongside the deliberately provocative persona lurked a fascination with fascism and a sometimes-violent temper.   So what can we be sure of about the life of an artist who loved to self-mythologise? And how did he become the best known of the surrealists, creating images that far outlasted his own lifetime? This is a Short History Of Salvador Dalí. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Dr Elliott H King, a professor of art history at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, who has studied the life of Salvador Dalí for more than two decades. Written by Nicola Rayner | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Matt Peaty | Sound design by Mirianna Pitman-Latham and George Tapp | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact check: Sean Coleman Unlock the next two episodes of Short History Of… right now by subscribing to Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network, including Real Survival Stories and Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. Just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed, or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to get started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When WestJet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. It is July 1st, 1936.

At the International Surrealist Exhibition held in a great, building in London's Mayfair district, an excited crowd fizzles beneath the gallery lights. They're waiting for the famed artist Salvador Dali to make his entrance for his lecture. One of the organizers, the poet's David Gascoe, heads over to the double doors to check what's happening. With Dali, you can never be sure what to expect. The corridor is still empty, but then he hears something strange. It's footsteps, but the tread is too slow. Too heavy.

Then a figure turns the corner and comes towards him, and even without making out his face, Gascoigne knows it can only be the artist himself. Clad in a full, deep-sea diving suit, with a vast metal helmet enclosing his head, Dali creaks as he moves. In one hand, he carries a billiard cube. In the other, he holds the lead for two aristocratic-looking bortsoi dogs, with long coats and narrow faces. After nodding to Gasco and he enters the ballroom. There is a moment of hush as those assembled turn to him,

then a murmur of applause ripples through the crowd. Taking to the stage, the guest of honour begins his lecture, though his voice is muffled from inside the helmet. At first, the audience leans forward indulgently, but it's almost impossible to make out what is being said. And even if they could hear him, much of the audience would miss it, since the artist is speaking in French.

Even the illustrations are confusing. Dali's lecture is accompanied by slides, but for reasons best known to himself, he has chosen to display them upside down. But soon, that's the least of the organiser's concerns. Midway through, the speaker's gestures become erratic. The artist begins to stagger around, clutching at his helmet. The audience starts to laugh,

relieved things of livened up of it. But as Dali gesticulates with increasing urgency, Gascoigne realizes this isn't part of the performance. It looks as if he's suffocating. A harried-looking assistant appears by the organizer's side with the news that the key to the helmet was given to the artist's wife, Gala, for safekeeping. They scan the gallery, but she is nowhere to be seen. By now, a makeshift rescue party has started to try to prize off Dali's helmet without the key.

without the key. Gascoigne dashes to the gallery's entrance and asks the doorman if he's seen Gala. Learning that she's just now headed out to a nearby cafe, Gascoigne hurries out into the street. He soon finds Gala at a table on the pavement, calmly sipping her coffee. He anxiously explains the situation

and the all-important key is produced from her elegant purse. Back in the gallery, there is still chaos. But though weakened, Dali is still alive. Gascoigne pushes through the crowd, slips the key into the helmet, and at last pulls it free. The artist gasps for air. His eyes wild, his famous moustache askew. The organizer exhales. Then, and as if it was all part of the performance, the lecture hall fills with applause.

With his expressive face and gravity-defying mustache, Salvador Dali is one of the most recognizable and influential artists of of the 20th century. Famed for his paintings of melting clocks, his lobster telephone, and the red lips of his so-called May West sofa, he rose to fame as a leading figure in surrealism. Throughout his long and varied career, Dali also cultivated a larger-than-life character for himself to play, using fashion and performance to blur the boundaries between art and reality.

But alongside the deliberately provocative persona lurked a fascination of fascism, and a sometimes violent temper. So what can we be sure of about the life of an artist who loved to self-mythologize? How did he become the best known of the surrealists, creating images that far outlasted his own lifetime? And was he really a fan of Adolf Hitler? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of Salvador Dahl. On May 11, 1904, in Figueres, a town in Catalonia, northeast Spain,

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalé and Dominic makes the first of his many dramatic entrances. Baring the name of an older brother who died nine months earlier, Salvador grows up haunted by the loss of the sibling he never met. His childhood and early adolescence are spent in Catalonia, a region that has its own language, Catalan, as well as a strong independent identity. When he is four, young Salvador is joined by a little sister, Anna Maria. By this time he is already a little spoiled, with occasional outbursts of violence towards other children, including his younger sibling. His artistic mother, Philippa, is indulgent of her son, but his father is stricter.

Dr. Elliot H. King, a professor of art history at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, has studied the life of Salvador Dali for more than two decades. Dali certainly had a very tempentuous relationship with his father. His father was the town notary. He was a sort of middle-class businessman, kind of a no-nonsense sort of personality, very anti-clerical, very Catalan federalist, and really didn't want his son going into anything much except becoming a notary like himself. When Dali is six, his father enrolls him at the Hispanic French School of the Immaculate Conception, where he learns French, the language he later uses as an artist. While term times are spent inland, in Figuaries, the family spend their holidays at their

summer house in the nearby coastal village of Cadacres. The region becomes a lifelong source of inspiration, but it's also where he now meets the painter Ramon Picot. Picot, a friend of Picasso, teaches Salvador about Impressionism, a style developed by painters such as Claude Monet. Salvador's earliest forays into art are heavily influenced by the movement, with its focus on rapid brushwork, capturing the changing light, color, and atmosphere of open-air scenes. His earliest paintings are when he was around 10, 12 years old. But they don't show that sort of mastery, like somebody may like Picasso. But he enjoyed painting. He was passionate about it. He would paint the area around his home, the cliffs along the Mediterranean. And his father thought it was a fine pastime, I suppose,

but it certainly wasn't something that he wanted to be a career. His mother was much more supportive. Once he's 12, Salvador starts his secondary education at Figueres Instituto, where he is taught by a charismatic drawing teacher called Juan Nunez Fernandez, who is also the director of the municipal drawing school. Soon, Salvador is enrolled there too for evening classes. Nunez teaches his talented pupil about great artists such as the Dutch painters Rembrandt and Vermeer, as well as the man he considers to be the greatest of Spanish masters, Diego Velasquez. The intensive training pays off. By the time Salvador is 15, his father is more convinced by his talents and organizes an exhibition of his charcoal drawings at the family home. But conscious that his

teenage son is becoming interested in the fairer sex, the older man leaves out a book of photographs as a warning, showing bodies disfigured by venereal disease. It leaves the youth with a lifelong fear of sex and a preoccupation with voyeurism and oninism. His commitment to art remains a constant, and in 1918 he has his first public exhibition. But not long after, when he is just 16, his beloved mother dies of uterine cancer, a loss he later describes as a loss he later describes as a the greatest blow of his life. The following year, his father remarries his mother's younger sister, Catalina. A change Salvador seems to accept relatively calmly.

But the change in circumstances, as well as encouragement from Nunez and Picot, contribute to changing his father's mind about his son's future. Although Adali's father didn't want him to necessarily become an artist when he was finally convinced that this was something perhaps he couldn't help, his insistence was, well, he can do this if he goes to the best art school in the country, which would have been the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid. And so his father allowed it if he would get a really proper art education. And this is a large part of what sent him off to Madrid

to get this very traditional artistic academic education. At the age of 17, Salvador packs his bags to move from Catalonia to the bustle of Spain's capital. In Madrid, far from home and his father's stern gaze, Dali soon gains a reputation for both his talent and his flamboyant sense of style. Dali was really from the outskirts. He was from the coast.

He was from far off in Catalonia, not even Barcelona. He was far off in the sticks, if you will. And so when he comes to Madrid, he really sort of has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, I think, and he wants to prove himself. And he's very eccentric. He presents himself as a really grand artist, really from the start. He wears a big floppy hat.

He wears a cape. He has a walking stick. And there's sort of a sense of this is what an eccentric artist looks like. And so I think that even as early as going to art school, that a little bit of his performative personality starts to shine through of how do I distinguish myself amongst everybody else?

I can paint, but what else can I do? How are people going to notice me? And how can I cultivate this persona that actually becomes a little bit of the persona that he keeps for the rest of his life? This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows.

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You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at dejerdin.com slash business coverage. The young artist makes friends, too, with Louis Bunuel, who will become known as a pioneering filmmaker. He also grows particularly close to Federico Gassier-Lorca, later celebrated as one of Spain's most important poets.

It becomes a passionate relationship, though the artist's fear of physical intimacy persists. Many of those in his wider friendship circle share his interest in the experimental and boundary-pushing work of the avant-garde. But while in Madrid, Dali also spends as much time as he can studying the masters. When Dali was a student, there were really sort of two tracks to his work, I would say. On the one hand, he was very influenced by Velazquez.

He was interested in the Spanish master. He was going to the Prado and seeing the Zerberan works. There's a very traditional academic sense to pieces like this basket of bread, for example, that have a very dark background, highly naturalistic appearance, almost a religious tone, if you will. He loves technique. That's very important to him. At the same time, while he's in art school, he also begins experimenting. So he can't help but be influenced by Picasso.

Dali was intrigued with those newer kinds of styles. So there were really two different parts of his work that, again, continue to manifest really throughout something that's very experimental and something that's actually very traditional. As well as developing a keen interest in the relatively new style of cubism, which breaks subjects into geometric shapes, Dali also becomes aware of surrealism. The movement's leader, Andre Breton, champions the power of the subconscious in the creation of artistic work and calls for what he sees as a liberation from rational constraints. It is perhaps not a philosophy that blends well

with the rigor of traditional academic life. Despite the promise he shows as a student, Dali's time at the academy ends abruptly. Dali always did have this tendency to provoke. And the story that he tells is that he was expelled from the academy, specifically because of a test, an examination, where his professors were examining him on Raphael, and he refused to sit for it, saying that he knew more about Raphael than his professors did.

And I've sometimes given this in his example to my example. my own students not to do this because it doesn't go well. And in fact, indeed, Dali was extolled from the academy. After a brief stay back in Catalonia and the shores of Cadacès, he continues his artistic development in Paris, where he also meets one of his heroes. The first time he goes to Paris, this is his story. It could be true. It could be false. But I love the story anyway. First time he goes to Paris, he goes to Picasso's studio and tells him, I've come to see you before going to the Louvre. and Picasso said, well, that was probably a good idea. By the late 1920s, Dali has developed the traits that define his lifelong work,

a fascination with classical masters such as Velazquez and Raphael, combined with a keen interest in avant-garde styles. He also hones his flair for self-presentation, adopting the Velazquez-inspired pointy mustache that becomes an enduring trademark. At around this time, one of Dali's friends from the academy, Louis Bonuel, approaches him with an idea to make a film. The resulting work features dreamlike scenes that include grand pianos with dead cattle being dragged across a sitting room, and most famously, a woman's eyeball being sliced by a razor.

Called an chion Andaloo, or an Andalusian dog, it will shift the course of Dali's life. They've decided to make a film that overtly doesn't make sense, and it's supposed to defy every convention of film. So anything as they're writing the script that they think follows too closely or makes too much logical order, they exclude that. They're trying to make something that's very confusing, very strange. And consequently, the cuts don't really make sense. The timeline doesn't really make sense. The title doesn't make sense because there's no dog in the film,

despite the title. And so it's really something that they think is going to be very provocative. When the film premieres in Paris, Dali and Buneuel are prepared for complaints. But almost to their disappointment, it is well received, particularly by the surrealists. On Dali's invitation, a group of them head to Cadacques that summer. The party includes Bonuel, the artist René Magritte, and the French poet Paul Elouard, and his beautiful wife.

Known simply as Gala, the Russian-born 34-year-old, is a powerful figure in the surrealist circle. Charismatic and unconventional, for a time she lives with her husband and the surrealist artist Max Ernst in a menager-toire. Dali, 10 years younger, is immediately captivated and breaks into hysterical laugh whenever gala is near. For a time, however, the object of his affection remains unimpressed, prompting him to reinvent himself with an unusual makeover. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. At Desjardin Insurance, we know that when you own a nail salon, everything needs to be perfect from tip to toe. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Dejardin.com slash business coverage.

It is August 1929 in the village of Cadacres. 25-year-old Salvador Dali wakes up just before dawn in his family's summer home in an anxious state. Beyond the window, the village is stirring. Just outside on the beach, an early morning. fisherman is heading out to make the first catch of the day. The splash of oars is accompanied by the light tinkle of a flock as a shepherd takes his sheep out to pasture. The artist makes his way from his bed to his easel on the other side of the room. Usually he enjoys these quiet hours, but today he is restless, preoccupied with the rendezvous he's arranged with a beautiful Gala Eload in a few hours.

He needs to make himself unforgettable in some way, irresistible. But how? Dali gets to his feet and starts to pace. As he is thinking, he puts on a pair of earrings belonging to his sister, who often models for it. He admies himself briefly in the mirror before discarding the idea and trying a pearl necklace instead. The image pleases him, but not enough. He needs something more primal. Abandoning the idea of painting altogether, he puts on one of his finest silk shirts and starts to cut it short until it hangs above his navel.

Next, he starts tearing it to expose his chest and shoulders, and finally he cuts away the collar completely. Still, dissatisfied, he turns his attention to his armpits, which he tries shaving. But that's not quite right. Perhaps he needs to make them blue. Improvising, he applies a blue-colored laundry powder, but the product mixes with his sweat and causes bright streaks to run down his side. Irritated, Dali wipes it away, leaving his scorn. skin raw, reddened, and smeared with blood from the shaving. He cocks his head as he takes it in, the idea blooming, red. The colour of passion will work better.

Cutting himself again, he smears blood over his knees, then darts outside to fetch a geranium to match the colour. The flower looks perfect behind his ear, but still the final picture is missing something, the right scent. For Gala, he'll need more than color. The sharp scent of the sheep outside still lingers in the air. If only he could replicate that odour. Lighting a small alcohol burner, which he uses for his etchings,

he sets about dissolving some fish glue into water. As he waits for the water to boil, he runs out to the back of the house where several sacks of goat manure have been delivered. Back in the studio, he throws a handful of the dung into the glue solution, as well as a touch of aspic oil. Aspic oil. Now the concoction is smelling as potent as a ram. With the mixture applied at last, everything is complete.

As the Bell Tower strikes eleven, Dali approaches the window and sees Gala waiting on the beach. But faced with her presence, at the final moment he has a change of heart. Perhaps he has gone too far. Hastily, he washes away what he can of the paste and removes most of his accessories, leaving only the pearl necklace and half the geranium. With a final glimpse in the mirror, he gives his reflection a small nod of approval. He is as ready as he'll ever be. Whether or not it's the lingering whiff of goat's manure that seals the deal, a spark ignites

between Gala and Dali. Communicating in French, the two quickly fall in love, and after Gala returns to Paris, Dali withdraws into his studio. He works obsessively on a painting of his lover's husband. But it is far from a traditional portrait, with a skeletal hand floating and a lion's head bursting out of the subject's temple. Having now met the woman who will become his lifelong muse, Dali's artistic style shifts decisively towards surrealism.

In his painting, the great masturbator, a huge head resembling the artist can be seen in profile, nose pressed against the ground. A grasshopper clings to the face, while a nude female figure who looks at the look at the face. looks like Gala rises from the back of their head. Another work from this time, the lugubrious game, is more crowded with figures, including a man in excrement-stained underwear. It's an image that shocks its viewers, that the surrealists often aim to provoke. The same year, Dali officially joins the group and prepares for his first exhibition in Paris

with work described by Breton as hallucinatory. But rather than attending the opening night in person, he elopes with his lover. Before long, Gala divorces Eload and also leaves behind her young daughter, Cecile, for her new life with surrealism's hottest new artist. Meanwhile, Dali's father, already unhappy about his son's relationship with a married woman, is about to be further outraged. Dali made a painting and exhibited in Paris called Sometimes I Spit With Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother, which was an anti-clerical painting, but his father's a father.

took it to mean it was a slight against his deceased wife, Dali's mother. And consequently, his father kicked him out of the house and he cut him off for a number of years. Though heartbroken by the estrangement with his father and sister, the artist is confident he can forge his own path with Gala by his side. It helps that she is practical in ways that he is not, and she assumes the role of his manager, as well as appearing as a model in a huge number of his works. Gala was very much a motivator and like, you know, is Dolly getting paid?

She's the one who's really checking contracts at the beginning. If he's just making sketches at a restaurant and he leaves, she's going to go back and collect all those sketches because she doesn't want them to just kind of fall out into the market or whatever. So, you know, she's really the one who's checking this. She's a pistol and not to be reckoned. The following summer, the couple rent a fisherman's cabin in Port Ligat, just along the coast from Cadacès.

Not long after, Dali purchases the property and gradually expands it into a labyrinthine villa overlooking the sea. The early 1930s proved to be a fruitful period, due in part to his honing of a new method. Now, the idea of the paranoiac critical method is not actually that unfamiliar in a lot of ways. It's really seeing images, seeing ideas in something else. And so other artists were doing that, I mean, if we take it back to Aristophanes, he talks about seeing images in clouds.

So the whole act of seeing something in something else is very, very very clear. common. Surrealists like Max Ernst were already looking at wood grain or doing frittage images and seeing animals that would come out of that. Dali basically gave that a very scientific language. Inspired by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, he develops psychological techniques to induce what he calls a paranoic state. It's not paranoia in the modern sense, but a deliberate suspension of rational thought and ordinary perception. From this approach, some of his most famous works emerge. Elephants, ants, and grasshoppers appear in desert landscapes that incorporate uncanny double imagery, and human faces or bodies are concealed within the surrounding forms.

One night, when gala is out, this method leads Dali to create his most famous painting. It is a small work depicting a dreamlike Catalonian landscape scattered with melting clock faces, one of which is crawling with ants. The story that Dali tells about the persistence of memory is very interesting. It's probably not true, but it's very interesting. It's that he was in Paris, and he just had dinner with Gala. And Gala went to a movie while he stayed home and nursed a headache. And he had been reading about Einstein's theory of relativity and the elasticity of space and time,

and he was staring at this soft camembered cheese that they had just been eating after dinner. And that gooey aspect of melting cheese and the thing. idea of elasticity of time space came together in a very paranoiac way for Daly and he like, oh, well, a soft clock. And so he said by the time that she got back from the film, he had put all of those clocks into this painting. And when she came home, he covered up her eyes and took her into the studio and said, okay, what do you think? And when she opened her eyes, she said, once somebody's seen it, they'll never forget it. And so he called it the persistence of memory. This painting will have enormous ramifications for Dali. In 1932, an

art dealer called Julian Levy brings it to the United States for inclusion in an early surrealist exhibition. American audiences are captivated. Two years later, having by now married gala in a civil ceremony, the artist follows his painting over the Atlantic. Arriving in New York by Steamboat, he is an immediate hit. He strides out of his hotel on East 55th Street, announcing to the waiting crowd, Dali is here and immediately gets to work to cement his reputation. When he is celebrated at a lavish ball thrown by New York's high society, he arrived with a glass case strapped to his chest containing a brassiere. But at another masquerade party, he and gala take their trademark theatricality too far. Referencing the highly publicized abduction and murder of the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh,

they dress as a baby and kidnapper, outraging the American press and public. Back at home, while the left-leaning surrealists are horrified by the rise of Hitler, Dali's own thoughts on the issue land him in hot water. Dali's political leanings or lack of leanings are generally the biggest problem that the surrealists have with him. There's really no evidence that Dali ever supported Hitler in a real tangible way. In 1933, Hitler just became chancellor. There's certainly something that is very interesting to Dali, and as Dali says, about Hitler's rise to power and the power that he has over the masses,

that it's kind of an hysteria, that he's trying to understand. How did this little guy suddenly have such a sway and such a destructive sway over so many people? How is he making people act so irrationally, in fact? And because Dali is very interested in the irrational, this is something that he finds intriguing. The surrealists will look at that and say,

you need to just be taking a stance against it. You can't just explore it. You have to say, no, I'm anti-Hitler. When Dali returns from New York, the surrealists hold a trial for him at Breton's house to see if he should remain in the organization. Dali actually saves himself from expulsion. Sometimes this is reported as being the time that Dali's kicked out of the group, but it's not true. He continues to show throughout the 1930s. But he explains that he has no real interest in Hitler.

He knows that as a modern artist, Hitler would have nothing to do with his paintings. And in fact, several of Dali's paintings are presumably destroyed from the time with the Nazis, because they're were considered degenerate art. So does he recognize that he's not the kind of artist that Hitler would want to support? But again, he's interested in Hitler as an idea. Of more pressing concern is the political turmoil at home. By now, the Spanish monarchy has fallen, and what is known as the Second Republic has been established in its place.

The new government attempts to modernize Spain through reforms that reduce the power of the Catholic Church and introduce land redistribution. But instead of unifying the country, these changes only deepen existing divisions. Eventually, in 1936, General Francisco Franco leads a military uprising against the Republican government. What begins as a coup quickly escalates into a full-scale civil war,

as Spain splits into two opposing camps. Dali's friends and family suffer at the hands of both sides. Dali is in a bit of a curious position because, on the one hand, His good friend and a significant other for a while, Federico Garcia-Lorca, is killed by the Nationalist. So there's a murder on that side. On the other, his sister Anna Maria is captured by the Republicans in Catechese

and is reportedly tortured under the prospect that she could have been a spy. So Dali's whole family has become Franco-Wayets for personal reasons. And so Dali's kind of actually between the two. He has friends and family on both sides as a Spaniard in the middle of a civil war. Despite the turmoil in his homeland, Dali's career continues to flourish internationally. In 1936, he delivers a lecture of the London International Surrealist exhibition wearing a deep-sea diving suit to symbolize his plunge into the subconscious. It's a fruitful period, seeing the collaborative production of his most famous so-called surrealist objects, including the lobster telephone with the shellfish spread over the receiver and the May West Lips sofa. inspired by the film star, as well as joint projects with fashion designer Elsa Scaparelli.

Yet behind this picture of success, tensions are building. Dali's ambiguous political stance and provocative behavior alienate him further from the surrealists. In 1939, after years of disagreement, he is formally expelled from the movement. But with work, money and acclaim pouring in from the United States, Dali continues to hog the headlines. This August on the Noiser Podcast Network, Jane Austen Stories returns. This time Dame Julie Andrews will be reading another beloved classic, Emma. Step into the village of Highbury, home to the handsome and clever Emma Woodhouse. Witness the delicate art of matchmaking, where appearances can deceive,

and true affections are not always easily guessed. On short history of, we're herring around the world with the groundbreaking journalist Nellie Bly and grappling with the surreal with Salvador Dali. On real survival stories, we're in the shark-filled waters off the coast of Florida and trundling down the Birdsville track deep in the Australian bush. And in Sherlock Holmes short stories,

Holmes investigates the disappearance of a missing star rugby player in The Adventure of the Missing Three Quarter. Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus. It's 7 in the morning on March 16th, 1939. Tom Lee, display manager at Bonwit Teller, the upmarket Fifth Avenue Department Store, watches with a flicker of trepidation, as Salvador Dali puts the finishing touches to his window displays. The great surrealist has worked through the night. Now, in the clear light of morning, Lee stands to one side as the displays take their final form.

Inspired loosely by the myth of Narcissus, the youth who falls in love with his own reflection, Dali is calling these two windows day and night. In the daytime scene, an ancient mannequin with long red hair wears a negligee of green feathers. She is poised as if about to step into a fur-lined bathtub, from which wax hands rise, each holding a mirror. In night, another figure lies on a mattress of glowing coals. Dali has designed windows for the store before, but Lee suspects New York's well-to-do-do-shoulders. shoppers might not be ready for his latest display. Nevertheless, he nods politely when the tired artist heads home for bed, his famous moustache slightly drooping. Even before the shop opens,

Lee can hear a crowd gathering on Fifth Avenue and peers out from an upstairs window to see the pavement growing thick with onlooks. Some point to their gloved hands, others stare transfixed or horrified. As soon as Bonwet teller opens at nine, shoppers sweep through the door. flushed with indignation. Out on the street, the crowd continues to swell. There's nothing for it. Lee will have to telephone Dali. But when he gets through to the artist's hotel,

Dali has left strict instructions not to be disturbed. Sying, Lee heads for the displays himself. With a couple of assistants, he replaces the mannequin in day with a more decent figure in a Molineer suit. He pulls night out of her burning bed and stands her on the opposite side of the window. After their adjustments, the windows, though still bizarre, are not quite so indecent, and the crowd begins to fear me. But at 5 o'clock that afternoon, Lee is interrupted from a meeting by a breathless shop assistant.

Their guest window dresser is back from his nap. The display manager hurries to the windows to explain himself, but nothing prepares him for the speed at which the artist moves. Furious, Dahlia's already charged into the day. day window and seems to be wrestling with the bathtub. Whether by accident or design, the tub slips from his grasp and through the glass, the artist flying with it out into Fifth Avenue. The street erupts into chaos. Two detectives on a passing bus scramble down and push through the crowd.

Seizing the red-faced dali, they brush debris from his coat and hurry into the nearest station. his onlookers surge around the bathtub and broken glass, Lee surveys the scene. Then, sighing, he sends an assistant to fetch a broom. Charged in court with disorderly conduct, Dali receives a suspended sentence. The following month, a show of his opens at the World's Fair in New York. The central attraction, Dream of Venus, is dubbed a surrealist funhouse, where visitors can encounter an elaborate underwater set, apparently populated by 17. real-life mermaids. For a short time that summer, Dali and Gala returned to Port Ligat,

where the artist works on paintings of Sigmund Freud and the child star Shirley Temple. He also creates a piece titled The Enigma of Hitler, in which a melting telephone hangs above a tiny photograph of the Nazi leader on an almost empty plate. Not long after, Hitler invades Poland, and the Second World War begins. Though Spain remains neutral, Dali and Gala see out much of the conflict. in the United States. And though Dali watches from afar as Germany advances through Europe, his work grows increasingly dark. His painting, the face of war, depicts a disembodied head floating against a barren landscape. Inside its mouth and eye sockets are identical, stricken faces,

which in turn contain more faces, suggesting an endless cycle of suffering. In 1941, he begins work on his autobiography entitled The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. It is by turns flamboyant and deeply unreliable and is published the following year. Other projects at this time range widely from a bejeweled human eye with the hands of a watch set into the iris to costume designs for ballets. He delves into fashion design, the jewelry design. It makes some really amazing jewels. One is the little heart made of rubies that has a beating mechanism in the inside so it looks like it's beating. So there's something slightly macabre,

but certainly very creative and interesting and unique about any of the ventures that Dolly goes into. Whether it's film, whether it's fashion, objects, anything, Dali does have a particular mark about him that you can recognize it as a Dalai. His ability to turn his hand to anything win him accusations of greed from his old detractors among the surrealists,

earning him a memorable nickname. Andre Bretholm creates that name of Vida Dollars for him which is an anagram of Salvador Dali. And Dali ends up saying that he wears it proudly, in fact. He says, you know, I love gold. I love money. I want to drown in checks. I want to drown in a diarrhea of gold.

I mean, he's very open about the fact that he likes money. And I suppose there's a sort of a romantic 19th century notion that artists shouldn't do that, that artists should be sort of suffering figures. And Dali goes against that openly. Like, why should I be poor when I could be rich? Wouldn't it be better to be rich? But not all of his grand ideas bring success. A dream sequence for a dream sequence for.

Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound, initially envisioned by the artist as a 20-minute clip, is cut to just three minutes in the final edit. More successful in the long run is Destino, an animated short film for Disney. Though shelved because of post-war financial struggles, the project featuring melting clocks and dreamlike landscapes, is revived and completed many decades later, earning an Academy Award nomination. By now, the Second World War has come to its gruesome. conclusion in a summer of unprecedented violence. While the world reels from the United States deployment of the atomic bomb in Japan, Dali becomes fascinated by the emergence of the nuclear age.

For the rest of his career, he explores a fusion of Catholic iconography and scientific imagery in his work, which he calls nuclear mysticism. In 1948, Dali and Gala returned to their home in Spain, which is now under the authoritarian rule of Francisco Franco, following the nationalist victory at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Their return provokes a backlash, particularly among those who oppose Franco's repressive regime. But Dali's wealth and fame insulate him from the economic hardship that affects much of Spain. His perceived sympathy for the regime, along with his avoidance of political criticism, helps keep him out of danger.

Though Dali's personal beliefs remain complex, religion exerts a growing influence on his work. Madonna Port-Lagot from 1949 is really the first more fully formed image of his turn to religious subject matter. It looked very conservative at the time. It certainly looked very traditional, but at the same time, it was looking at new ideas of science and technology, considerations about atoms in the nuclear world. And so I think that really signals a change in Dali's work and a direction that he was going that had connections to his earlier pieces certainly looked very different. His interest in Catholicism deepening, he secures a private audience with the Pope and presents the Madonna of Port Legat,

featuring Gala as the Virgin Mary for his blessing. Dali continues to draw on ideas from contemporary science and mathematics. His long-standing fascination with perception leads him to experiment with optical effects, in holograms and photomosaic imagery. But despite his technical brilliance, he is accused of becoming overly commercial. Dali's work is often met with skepticism, even as it continues to attract popular attention. But his taste for a good stunt remains. Booked to speak at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1955, he arrives in a white Rolls-Royce filled with cauliflower.

Later, as promotion for a book, he signs copies in a Manhattan store while connected to a machine that records his brainwaves and blood pressure. Each buyer of the book is gifted with a printout of the data. Back in Catalonia, he begins work on the Dali theater and museum in his hometown of Figueres. Now in his 60s, he still cuts a striking figure. He adopts an ocelot and walks an anteater through the streets of Paris, before bringing it with him onto the Dick Cabot show. He's always realized that pushing the envelope is a way of publicizing his work. He's realized that his personality,

is as much of a part of his general body of work as his artist. Once television becomes popular, he's showing up on game shows, he's doing commercials for chocolates and things like this in France. I think that the time in America exposes him at first to the media, and that becomes such a way of propelling his image in various guises, not just through art exhibitions and painting, but really as almost a Renaissance man, if you will. Dali embraces mass culture and advertising.

He blends surrealism with consumerism in campaigns for brands such as Lanvin, Alka-Seltza and Datsun, even designing the Chuppa Chupp's lollipop logo. The money keeps rolling in, but it doesn't necessarily make for a happy home. Though the couple are increasingly spending time apart, in accordance with Dali's newfound religiosity, they confirm their marriage in a religious ceremony in Girona, Spain, almost two decades after their initial vows. The following decade, Gala sets her sights on acquiring a castle in the village of Poubol, around 40 miles from Port Legat.

Dali undertakes its renovation, transforming it into a theatrical space, complete with a mausoleum and a throne room containing a single throne reserved for his beloved wife. Gala moves in in 1971, but it becomes increasingly clear that our husband is not welcome without invitation. Now in her late 60s, Gala remains as commanding as ever, hosting orgiastic parties and surrounding herself with a succession of younger lovers. Dali, for his part, leads a separate life at Port Legat, where he is said to host sexual gatherings of his own, though his preference remains for looking rather than touching. By 1980, both the artist and his country have changed.

With the dictator Franco now dead, his successor, King Juan Carlos. the first begins guiding the country through a transition to democracy. But though life improves in Spain, it's a period of decline for Dali, now 76 and increasingly fragile. Things are worse for Gala, now in her 80s who begins to develop dementia. Even so, Dali is paranoid that she will leave him and at one point physically assaults her, breaking two of her ribs. In an attempt to calm him, Gala gives her husband large quantities of Valium and other drugs, but the sedatives almost kill him. The resulting tremors in his right hand cause him trouble every time he picks up a paintbrush.

In spite of their bitter antipathy, the couple remain married until Galas' death from influenza in June 1982. Now a widower, Dali descends into a state of derangement, refusing to eat or drink and scratching at his face in despair. In his final years, he is a demanding and verbally abusive invalid for his army of nurses. His final honor comes from King Juan Carlos I, who awards him the title of Marquis of Poubal Castle. But even Dali's final act isn't without drama. In 1984, a short circuit in the call button by his four-post to bed causes a fire. He is rescued from the flames and lives another five years, but after a period at the ill health,

the artist dies on January the 23rd, 1989, aged 84. He is buried in a crypt of his own design at the Dali Theatre Museum in Figueres. Yet even after his death, there is one more unexpected twist. In the 2000s, a tarot card reader and psychic called Pilar Abel files a lawsuit claiming to be his daughter. Initial DNA tests taken from traces on Dali's death mask prove inconclusive. When the artist's remains are exhumed, it is proven that Babel is not Dali's child.

But the embalmer who prepared Dali's body notes with satisfaction that the artist's famous moustache remains in excellent condition. A pioneering surrealist icon, Salvador Dali revolutionized modern art through his exploration of the subconscious with his dreamlike imagery and technical precision. Though best known for his melting clocks and phantasmagorical desert landscapes, which which adorn everything from student posters to jigsaw puzzles, his impact extends beyond painting into cinema, fashion, and pop culture. But in spite of his faults as a person, perhaps his greatest work was the creation of the

persona of Salvador Dali himself. Dali's had a tremendously prolific resonance across popular culture. His posters are of course very common to find, or calendars and things in mass culture. The big part of what Dali was doing, which was seen very, very controversial at the time of making money, of being a greedy artist, of putting his images on fashion design and commercials, and putting his face on Alka-Seltzer commercials or whatever it might be. Those are all things that an artist in his own time were just completely strange and not something

a serious person would do. But I think now we have a much different view of what an artist is. I mean, an artist can be a personality, an artist can be much freer. And that kind of success isn't looked down upon today like perhaps it was before. Next time on Short History, I will bring you a short history of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. You can't get away from the fact that he was one of the most influential engineers of his generation and of the 19th century. He did things that nobody had ever done before, and we are left with an amazing legacy. He was not an innovator, he was an adopter, he was very clever at picking up on new kinds of technology,

and running with them and doing something very different. a result, we're left with an amazing legacy of high-speed railways, the foundations of a maritime dynasty of ships and liners. His imprint is all over the UK and certainly on other parts of the world. And I'm sure that he would have been proud of that kind of legacy today. That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of right now, without waiting and without adverts, by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www.noiser.com forward slash subscriptions to unlock more episodes today. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync,

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