SALVADOR DALl
From top left, clockwise:
Impressions of Africa (1938), The Invisible Man (1929-32) and Skull with its Lyric Appendage Leaning on a bedside Table which should have the exact Temperature of a Cardinal's Nest (1934)
He would masturbate
behind his easel while a
group of nymphets posed naked for him.
’Dali anecdote'. He was a publicist who understood that the public likes a good story. In 1936, he gave a talk in London on ’plumbing the surrealist depths’ wearing a diving suit replete with an extravagant piece of diving headwear. He apparently would have suffocated had not some helpful individual come to the rescue by dislodging the said
headwear with a billiard cue. ,He was also .
notoriously temperamental, having a long- running feud with the filmmaker Luis Bunuel
24 THE lIST f; 2; 20fo:
with whom he collaborated on the films Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’or.
Yet, it is perhaps the anecdotes of a more sexual nature that give high colour to the life of Dali. He furnished his Parisian apartment with vases of spikenards because when squeezed, the white flowers exuded a fluid that resembled sperm. But for Dali, sex was more a spectator sport. He purportedly slept with his wife and muse Gala only once, making the post-coital announcement that
that was her lot. Instead, Dali preferred DIY gratification. He would masturbate behind his easel while a group of nymphets posed naked for him. Yet, he frequently declared he was impotent and had’a fear of physical intimacy. He liked to watch others and could be obsessive. He allegedly watched the transvestite April Ashley perform at the Paris drag club, Le Carrousel every night for six weeks in the late 1960s.
Yet, as easy as it is to see Dali as a voyeur