“Je suis fou du chocolat Lanvin!”—so claims Salvador Dali in this TV ad starring the surrealist master who was dubbed “Avida Dollars” by Andre Breton for his seemingly insatiable lust for money.
Salvador Dali hosts a Surrealist party as a fund raiser for displaced European artists, at the Bali Room, Hotel Del Monte, California, in 1941. However you celebrate the arrival of the New Year, have a fabulous time, and a wonderful 2012.
With thanks to Duggie Fields
Leonor Fini is one of the few women to be closely associated with the Surrealist Group, although Fini herself did not see her self as a Surrealist at all and rejected membership. Still she remained a fellow traveler of the Surrealists throughout her career, although in many ways her work—a sensuous celebration of female sexuality—tweaks the misogynistic and homophobic tendencies of movement, especially its founder Andre Breton (who was all for lesbianism). Her work has been represented in nearly every major Surrealist exhibition.
Much is made of the artist’s good looks and upfront sexuality. Fini was famously photographed naked—and clean shaven—floating in a pool by Henri Cartier-Bresson. (This photograph sold for over $300,000 in 2007). Fiercely bohemian, she also lived in not one, but two menage-a-trois relationships. When she died her obituaries were as much about famous men she’d slept with as her own career, but Fini kowtowed to no man, she lived life completely on her own terms, a feminist long before the term existed.
Hurry, Hurry, Hurry, My Dolls Are Waiting (1975)
It has been said of Fini, that she was a “female Dali” and in many ways this is true. The narcissistic artist was an imposing presence in any room with her beauty and flamboyant fashions. And like the Divine Dali, her art came from a place deep inside her, as she was forced to develop a inner vision during extended teenage bouts with an ocular ailment that saw her eyes bandaged shut for months at a time. When the bandages came off, she wished to document what she had been inwardly visualizing and declared herself an artist.
The self-taught Fini began to exhibit her art at the age of seventeen and she knew anyone worth knowing in Paris and internationally. She also designed clothing and ballet and opera sets. Her design for the bottle of Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shocking perfume is considered iconic. She is one of the most photographed people of the 20th century and famously attended dozens of costume balls in elaborate costumes. She was always in magazines. During her lifetime she was quite a big name, although by the time of her death in 1996, she’d become a bit obscure. The French government even refused to take paintings in lieu of back taxes owed by her estate, although she was called “...the most undervalued artist of the 20th Century” by the Art Dealers Association of America.
Schiaparelli’s Shocking
A reappraisal of her work seems due and this appears to be happening with the publication of a monograph/biography of Fini titled Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini
Fantastic portrait series titled “Saints and Sinners” from New York City-based artist—and founder of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School—Molly Crabapple. Each print is available for $80 over at Molly’s website.
More after the jump…
A brief history of recent pop culture, as told through various photographs of Alice Cooper and Friends.
Marxism: Alice and Groucho.
The Super Group: Alice, Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson, Marc Bolan, 1973.
Surrealism: Alice and Salvador Dali.
Popism: Alice, Ray Manzarek, and Iggy.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
When Alice Cooper met Colonel Sanders
Culled from various but special thanks to This Is Not Porn
More photo-history with Alice plus bonus clip, after the jump…
Max Bialystock’s advice from The Producers, “When you’ve got it flaunt it!” was never more apt for an artist than Salvador Dali. Like Mel Brooks’ fictional character, Dali was a showman, a performer who loved money, fame and success. Unlike Bialystock, Dali was good with his finances, as his publisher Peter Owen once told me that Dali wandered around playing the mad man until the issue of contracts and money was raised, then Dali dropped the pretense and became lucid for the duration of any negotiations. As Owen noted, “Dali was a notary’s son.”
Dali’s need to show-off often eclipsed his genius as an artist. His appearances in public attracted more attention than his artworks, it was something he willingly indulged, once addressing an Anarchist rally with a loaf of bread tied to his head; at the opening of the 1936 London Surrealists Exhibition, he wore a deep sea diving suit; and was put on trial by his fellow Surrealists after he issued a public apology for attending a party dressed as the murdered baby Charles Lindbergh jnr., his wife, Gala dressed as his kidnapper. It wasn’t the dressing up that offended the Surrealists, but Dali’s apology - “sorry” it seems was the hardest word for Breton and co.
The Surrealists dismissed Dali as a grubby money grabber, but it is more likely they were jealous of his talent and envious that Dali had a sponsor, Edward James, a British millionaire, son of an American railroad magnate. James sponsored Dalí for a number of years and was repaid with his inclusion in Dali’s painting “Swans Reflecting Elephants”.
Dali’s need to show-off came from a greater need than just a love of money. Throughout his childhood, he fought against the memory of another Salvador - his older brother who had died in infancy. As Dali later wrote in his autobiography:
All my eccentricities I habitually perpetrate, are the tragic constant of my life. I want to prove I am not the dead brother but the living brother. By killing my brother I immortalize myself.”
Originally made for French television Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali (1970) is a brilliant and beautiful film that captures the artist in fine fettle, as he delights in performing for the camera. Here’s Dali indulging in his trademark mix of showman, clown and serious artist: hammering out a tuneless miaow on a cat piano (Dali associated pianos with sex after his father left an illustrated book on the effects of venereal diseases atop the family piano as a warning to the dangers of sexual intercourse); or sowing feathers in the air, as two children follow pushing the head of a plaster rhinoceros; or, his attempt to paint the sky.
Directed by Jean-Christopher Averty, with narration provided by Orson Welles.
Austin-based comic artist Paul Maybury writes:
This is the sign that more or less got me pushed out of Wholefoods. I apparently offended a lot of people with it. One older white lady didn’t like the angry black man yelling at her. And a Vegan didn’t like that Mr. T. pitied her because she wouldn’t eat meat.
Still, it was a blessing in disguise for Paul Maybury, who has moved on to far greener pastures than an over-priced yuppie grocery chain as an award-winning artist and writer for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Heavy Metal, Ubisoft, Metro, Image, Criterion and Mirage Studios. WTF was Whole Foods thinking firing a talent like this? This guy rocks!
See more of Paul’s awesome Whole Food signs after the jump…
Dangerous Minds couldn’t think of a better 111th birthday salute to the Hitch than to review his far-too-short dream-sequence collaboration in Spellbound with the clown-prince of surrealism, Salvador Dali.
Rachel Campbell-Johnson wrote in detail about the team-up for the Times Online, and Joel Gunz at Alfred Hitchcock Geek went into Hitch’s affinity with surrealism.
Atlanta, Georgia’s High Museum Of Art is showcasing an exhibit of Salvidor Dali’s later work. Included in the exhibit is a piece from 1973 called “First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain” which…
[...] depicts a three-dimensional Alice Cooper wearing two million dollars worth of jewelry including a tiara and necklace while holding a statuette of Venus De Milo as if it were a microphone. A plaster sculpture of Alice’s brain, topped by a chocolate éclair covered in ants, another Dalí oeuvre, was placed behind the cross-legged rock star and the set-up was documented by Dalí using (then) cutting-edge hologram technology.
Dali was an Alice Cooper fan and it was after seeing the band perform live in 1973 that he invited Alice to sit for the hologram project. The Dali/Cooper connection certainly makes sense considering both men were ‘shock artists’ and each of them, in their era, were known for producing gruesome good fun, from Dali’s riot inducing An Andalusian Dog to Cooper’s decapitated baby dolls, dancing teeth and guillotine.
See footage of the Dali exhibit after the jump…
Model, painter, disco diva and the absolute fiercest of the pioneering transsexuals (along with Candy Darling), Amanda Lear
The story goes that the gangly, yet exotic Eurasian beauty Peki had a nose job and sex change in Casablanca paid for by Salvador Dali, who frequented Le Carrousel, in 1963. Amanda, as she is now known, then makes her way to London to become a part of the swinging Chelsea set where she is rumored to have had a relationship with Rolling Stone, Brian Jones. She models for Yves St. Laurent and Paco Rabanne and is a constant muse for the Divine Dali, but her career is held back by rumors that she was born a man.
Roxy Music front man Bryan Ferry sees Lear on the runway during an Ossie Clarke fashion show and invites her to be the model for Roxy’s For Your Pleasure album cover walking a black panther on a leash. They had a fling and that image has become iconic. Lear also has a yearlong affair with David Bowie who sings Sorrow to her in his 1980 Floor Show (broadcast here on the Midnight Special in 1974). Bowie helped Lear launch her musical career and by the late 70s she had become a best selling disco singer and television personality in Europe with hits like Queen of Chinatown and I Am a Photograph. She collaborated with Eurodisco duo La Bionda (who Tara is nuts about and has posted here about them)
Her autobiography, My Life With Dali came out in 1985 and it begins when she would have been approximately 24 or 25 years of age. No mention is made of her life before arriving in London in 1965. When Dali biographer Ian Gibson confronted her on camera about the gender of her birth, Lear angrily—and not at all convincingly—stonewalled him. She has always vehemently denied that she was a transsexual despite it being a well-established fact. She even posed nude for Playboy and sunbathed naked on beaches to dispel the rumors. All this really proved was that she had a kickin’ bod!
Amanda Lear still looks amazing and continues to perform She has a thriving side career as a painter.
Modeling in the 60s with Patti Boyd Harrison and Karianne Muller (later a Roxy Music cover girl herself):
Salvador Dali—or Avida Dollars if you prefer—shilling for Lanvin Chocolate in the early 70s.
