Salvador Dali’s Unapologetic Love of Commerce

“Selling Out with Salvador Dali,” produced by Paul
Feine. Approximately 4:30 minutes.

Original release date was July 16, 2014. The original writeup is
below.

Salvador Dali
attained international acclaim as a young artist in the 1930s. In
1933, curator Dawn Ames described Dali as “surrealism’s most exotic
and prominent figure.” Surrealist poet
Andre Breton wrote that Dali’s name was “synonymous with
revelation in the resplendent sense of the word.” In 1936, Dali
made the cover of Time magazine.

Dali didn’t simply sit back and enjoy the acclaim. He exploited
it. Dali was a shameless self-promoter and admitted to having a
“pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash.” Ultimately, it was
Dali’s unapologetic drive for fame and fortune that proved to be
too surreal for the Surrealists. Andre Breton, whose opinion of
Dali soured over time, created an anagram of Dali’s name: Avida
Dollars (“greedy for money”). Breton and the other Surrealists,
many of whom were closely allied with the French Communist Party,
expelled Dali from their group in 1939. Dali responded, “I myself
am surrealism.”

Over the next several decades, Dali became increasingly
flamboyant and controversial. He arrived at a lecture in Paris in a
Rolls Royce filled with cauliflower. He did commercials for
Alka-Seltzer and chocolate bars.
He was thrilled when Sears sold his prints to the masses. He signed
sheets of blank lithograph paper and sold them for $10 a sheet. As
Dali became increasingly popular with the masses, however, his
reputation among art critics suffered.

“There was an era when being a successful artist made you
suspect, made your art suspect,” says Hank Hine, executive director
of The Dali Museum. “When I was going through school, we were not
shown Dali. He was not part of the canon. Yes, we would buy
posters, we could find his images, but largely he was not part of
the serious discussion of values, which is what constitutes serious
art. I believe that has changed.” Others in the art world agree.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Michael R. Taylor, for example,
believes that “Dali should be ranked with Picasso and Matisse as
one of the three greatest painters of the 20th century.”

Reason TV recently visited The
Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, to learn more about how
Dali the artist embraced the marketplace for art.

Approximately 4:20 minutes. Produced by Paul Feine. Additional
camera by Zach Weissmueller. Music by Peter Walker.