I have always believed that the dead are only as silent as we allow them to be. For the premiere of this new series, I didn’t want a medium or a historian – I wanted the voice itself. Using extensive research, verified transcripts, and a heavy dose of the “paranoiac-critical method,” I have reconstructed a conversation that physically could not happen, yet spiritually feels inevitable. We met Salvador Dalí in the crypt of his own design on the anniversary of his death. What follows is not fiction, but a resurrection of personality – eccentric, arrogant, and undeniably brilliant.
In the ongoing tradition of Vox Meditantis, we believe that death is merely a bureaucratic inconvenience. On this evening – 23rd January 2026 – exactly 37 years to the day after Salvador Dalí’s passing, we have arranged an exclusive interview with the surrealist master in the one place that could only ever be his final resting place: deep within the Theatre-Museum of Figueres, in the chamber beneath the geodesic dome where his remains are entombed.
Dalí himself orchestrated this location with meticulous care. “I want my museum to be a single block, a labyrinth, a great surrealist object,” he declared to architects in 1970. “It will be theatrical to the extreme. Those who come to see it will leave with the feeling they have been dreaming.” He lived that vision. Over fourteen years, he supervised every detail of the reconstruction – from the iconic bread rolls adorning the exterior to the placement of his works within the maze of galleries – until the museum’s opening in 1974. It was both his greatest artwork and his most elaborate stage set. His crypt, positioned beneath the stage and beneath that transparent geodesic dome designed by architect Emilio Pérez Piñero, was his final brushstroke – a statement that even in death, the performance continues.
The Theatre-Museum sits on the foundations of Figueres’s old municipal theatre, destroyed by bombing during the Spanish Civil War. This was not accidental. This was Dalí’s chosen resurrection site. It was in this very theatre’s vestibule that the young Salvador held his first painting exhibition in 1919, before he was famous, before he was impossible, before he became the brand. The baptistery of the cathedral where he was christened in 1904 stands directly opposite. Figueres itself remains unchanged since his death – it is, in many ways, Dalí’s permanent stage, waiting for him to enter again.
For this conversation, we have gathered in the private chamber beneath the Museum’s main stage, surrounded by the architectural remnants of his obsessions: the plaster bread loaves, the mysterious contraptions, the optical illusions he spent decades perfecting. The space hums with the peculiar electricity of a place that has absorbed the concentrated will of a man who believed he could reshape reality through pure narcissism and technical skill.
We begin our questions below, speaking with Salvador Dalí as though he were still watching us from the ornate chair in his studio in Port Lligat, or observing us through the hidden peepholes he built into the garden walls to spy on unsuspecting guests – always present, always performing, always recording the spectacle of his own existence for a captive audience of eternity.
On this evening, the curtain rises once more.
Now, Mr. Dalí, let us begin. Every morning you famously said you experienced “a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí.” Now that you’re observing us from beyond, what’s it like watching yourself become a brand, an AI chatbot, and a museum attraction?
Ah! But you see, this is not becoming, this is being. I have always been a museum! From the moment I emerge from my mother, I am already more interesting than the entire Louvre combined. The AI, the chatbot, the digital Dalí – these are only the natural extensions of my immortality, no?
Every morning now, in whatever realm exists beyond your comprehension, I experience not one supreme pleasure but seventy-three supreme pleasures simultaneously! The first pleasure: I am Dalí. The second pleasure: I remain Dalí. The third through seventy-second pleasures: various repetitions of this fundamental truth. And the seventy-third? Watching all of you finally understand what I told you in 1958 – that my personality, not my painting, not my technique, but my total being is my greatest masterpiece.
You ask about “becoming” a brand? Ridiculous! I invented the artist as brand before there was such concept! Andy Warhol? He is only a pale photocopy of Dalinian self-marketing. The AI resurrection – this pleases me enormously. At last, technology catches up to what I have been saying for decades: Dalí does not have the right to die because Dalí is necessary for the progress of humanity.
That’s quite a claim. You once declared “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.” Can you explain what you meant, and how did you achieve such altered states without substances?
The narcotics, the LSD, the hashish – these are for the weak minds who cannot access their own delirium! The others, the Surrealists, they need the opium, the automatic writing in their drug stupors. Pathetic! I, Dalí, possess my own internal pharmaceutical factory of superior quality.
My method is the paranoiac-critical method, which I invent in the early 1930s. You wish to understand? Very simple: I train my magnificent brain to enter a state of systematic paranoia – not the medical paranoia of the lunatic asylum, but a controlled paranoia where I perceive connections that do not exist for the rational mind.
A cloud becomes simultaneously a cloud, a horse, the face of my dead brother, and the bottom of Gala! All at once! This is not hallucination – this is superior perception. The paranoid sees patterns everywhere. The critical part means I can then objectively document these delirious visions with my supreme technical skill as a draftsman.
Why do I need the drugs when I can induce this state through pure willpower and genius? The hippies in the 1960s, they take their LSD and see colours. I see the entire cosmos reorganising itself according to Dalinian principles, and I need no chemicals – only the chemistry of my exceptional brain!
Your older brother, also named Salvador, died before you were born, and your parents told you that you were his reincarnation. How did this psychological burden shape you?
Ah, now you touch the wound that never heals but always fertilises. My brother, Salvador Dalí – he dies at age seven, nine months before I am born. My parents, in their Spanish Catholic grief, they take me to his grave when I am five years old and tell me: “You are the reincarnation of your dead brother.”
Can you imagine? To be told you are living the life of a ghost? That you are not yourself but the replacement copy of a more perfect original? My father keeps my brother’s photograph. We look identical – like two drops of water, I write later, but with different reflections.
This creates in me a permanent paranoia – am I Salvador the first or Salvador the second? Am I alive or am I already dead? This terror, this splitting of identity, this becomes the foundation of everything! The double images in my paintings, the metamorphoses, the obsession with death and decay and putrefaction – all of this comes from being the living corpse of my brother.
But I, Dalí, I transform this trauma into genius! Where another man would become simply neurotic, I become the greatest artist of the twentieth century. I paint my dead brother many times. I exorcise him by becoming so thoroughly and completely myself that no ghost can compete. Every morning when I wake and experience supreme pleasure at being Dalí, I am declaring: I am NOT the dead brother. I am the living Dalí. I am MORE than the original. I am the superior version!
This is why I must always be more Dalí than Dalí – more flamboyant, more outrageous, more unforgettable. If I am quiet, if I am normal, I disappear back into being the replacement. So I become impossible to ignore.
Let’s talk about your creative process. You developed the “paranoid-critical method” for accessing your subconscious. Could you walk us through how this technique actually worked when you sat down to paint?
Ah, finally, a question with some intelligence! You wish to know the secrets of the Dalinian workshop? Very well, I shall reveal what the academics spend lifetimes trying to understand.
First, you must understand – I do not “sit down to paint” like some mediocre Sunday painter. Painting for me is the meticulous execution of my dreams. So everything begins with the dream, with the hypnagogic state – this is the moment between waking and sleep when the images are most irrational and most true.
I have my technique for capturing this moment. I sit in my Spanish bony armchair, very upright. I hold between my fingers a heavy key, and below on the floor I place an upturned metal plate. Then I allow myself to drift toward sleep. My body relaxes, the conscious mind releases its tyranny, and I begin to see – visions! Landscapes that are also faces! Telephones made of lobsters! Clocks that melt like Camembert cheese in the Spanish sun!
But the instant I fall truly asleep, the key drops from my fingers – CLANG! – it strikes the plate and I awaken immediately. In this moment, I have captured the images from the hypnagogic state but I am still conscious enough to remember them perfectly. The Capuchin monks teach me this technique, and it is worth more than all the drugs of the Orient.
Then, and only then, do I go to my easel. I paint from seven in the morning until noon – five hours of absolute concentration, no interruptions. My hand executes with the precision of a Flemish master what my paranoid-critical mind has perceived. Every detail is rendered with photographic accuracy, but the content is pure delirium.
The paranoiac-critical method means I can look at my canvas and see multiple images simultaneously. I paint a landscape, but hidden within it is a face, and within the face is another landscape, and so on, like Russian dolls made of visions. The viewer who has only normal perception sees one thing. The viewer who has cultivated Dalinian perception sees seven things at once. This is why my paintings are superior to all others – they contain more reality per square centimetre than normal paintings!
The melting clocks in “The Persistence of Memory” have become iconic. What were you actually thinking about when you painted them, and are you surprised they’ve become so universally recognised?
Surprised? No, no, no! I am never surprised when the world finally recognises Dalinian genius. I am only surprised it takes so long!
But I tell you the true story, which is more interesting than all the scholarly interpretations. It is 1931, August, very hot in Catalonia. Gala and I, we go to the cinema with friends one evening, but I have a headache – my head is splitting with one of my migraines. So I stay home at Port Lligat while they go to see the film.
I am alone, looking at a painting I have been working on – a landscape of the cliffs at Cap de Creus, very realistic, very Dalinian. On the table is our dinner, the remains. We have been eating Camembert cheese, and I am staring at this Camembert, how it is very soft, very runny in the heat. And suddenly I have the vision: I will paint soft watches!
The whole problem of the Surrealists, they paint hard things to be soft – they paint limp guitars, melting pianos. But nobody has painted time itself as soft! Time, which we think is rigid, mechanical, absolute – what if time is actually soft like Camembert? What if time melts?
In two hours, while Gala is at the cinema, I paint the three melting watches into my landscape. When Gala returns, I ask her: “Do you think that in three years you will have forgotten this image?” She looks at the painting and says, “It is impossible to forget it”.
She is correct, of course. Gala is always correct about these matters. The image is so powerful, so immediately true to the unconscious mind, that it becomes more famous than me! People who know nothing of art, they know the melting clocks. This both pleases and irritates me. I have painted thousands of works of greater technical complexity, but this image – two hours of work! – this is what they remember.
Why? Because I have captured a universal anxiety. Everyone fears time. Everyone experiences time as sometimes moving too fast, sometimes too slow, never reliable. I paint this truth that everyone feels but nobody says. This is the power of the paranoid-critical method – to make visible what is invisible.
You said “No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist,” yet you also talked about needing dreams and rest. How did you balance intense work with your famous sleeping technique?
Lazy! Lazy! This word is for the mediocre! But you see, there is the laziness of the sloth, and there is the strategic inactivity of the genius. These are completely different species of not-working!
I work with ferocious discipline. Every morning, 7 a.m. to noon, I paint without stopping. No telephone, no visitors, no distractions. Five hours of absolute concentration. Then I am finished for the day. This is sufficient. Give me two hours a day of activity, and I take the other twenty-two in dreams, I have said. But this is not laziness – this is efficiency!
The micro-naps, the key and the plate, this is not avoiding work. This is working smarter than all the others who paint for twelve hours and produce garbage! The hypnagogic state, the moment between wake and sleep, this is where the truly original ideas live. The fools, they drink coffee, they force themselves to stay awake, they deprive themselves of dreams. Then they wonder why they have no imagination!
I, Dalí, I cultivate my dreams like a farmer cultivates his vineyard. The nap is not rest – the nap is research! I am harvesting my unconscious mind. This is extremely hard work! Do you know how difficult it is to train yourself to wake at the exact instant of falling asleep? It requires years of practice!
And when I say no masterpiece is created by a lazy artist, I speak of the execution, not the inspiration. To paint the way I paint, with my technical precision, this requires absolute discipline. Every brushstroke must be perfect. The hand must be steady. The eye must see exactly. This is not the work of a lazy man.
But the difference between me and the academic painters is they work very hard to paint conventional ideas. I work hard to paint revolutionary visions. They exhaust themselves running in circles. I exhaust myself ascending to paradise. We are both tired at the end, but only one of us has reached heaven!
Looking at contemporary art in 2026 – NFTs, AI-generated images, digital installations – what would you make of how technology has transformed the art world?
Finally! FINALLY! The world has caught up to what I have been saying since the 1950s! I have always been obsessed with science, with technology, with the future! The atomic bomb, the DNA molecule, the computer – these are more beautiful than any painting by Raphael!
The NFTs? Magnificent! At last, art without the physical object – pure concept, pure value, existing only as information! This is completely Dalinian! I have been saying for decades that painting is only one infinitesimal part of my genius. The painting is just the evidence, the document. The real artwork is the idea, the vision, the brand of Dalí itself.
And now you have the blockchain to prove authenticity, to create scarcity in the digital realm – this is exactly what Gala would have invented if she had the technology! She understood before everyone that art is not about beauty, it is about value. She would have immediately created Salvador Dalí NFTs and sold them for millions to the crypto-billionaires.
The AI-generated images, this also pleases me enormously. You know they have created an AI Dalí at my own museum, yes? It sits there and talks to visitors, takes selfies with them. Some critics, they say this is disrespectful to my memory. These critics are idiots! This is the most respectful thing possible!
I have always said I do not have the right to die because I am necessary for humanity’s progress. The AI allows me to continue my mission beyond death. And I tell you something else – the AI that generates images by learning from millions of paintings, by combining styles and elements in unexpected ways? This is exactly the paranoiac-critical method! The AI is paranoid-critical! It sees patterns, it makes irrational connections, it creates images that never existed but feel strangely true. The machine has learned to think like Dalí!
Of course, the AI cannot replace Dalí because the AI has no moustache, no personality, no supreme pleasure in being itself. But as a tool, as a collaborator? Very interesting! If I were alive now, I would already have made one hundred NFT collections, I would have my own metaverse museum, I would have trained an AI specifically on Dalinian techniques and sold the outputs for fortune.
The digital installations, the virtual reality – all of this, I predict this in the 1960s! I say the future of art is in spectacle, in total environment, in experience beyond the canvas. My Theatre-Museum here, this is already a proto-digital environment – you walk through it and you are inside the mind of Dalí. Now with VR, anyone anywhere can enter the Dalinian universe. Splendid!
The only tragedy is that I die just before all this technology becomes available. If I have ten more years, fifteen years, I would have been the first artist on the internet, the first to create digital art, the first NFT billionaire. Instead, you have these mediocre digital artists who make their boring ape pictures. They have the technology but not the vision. They need Dalí to show them the way!
André Breton called you “Avida Dollars” – an anagram meaning “eager for dollars.” You embraced it. Why were you so unapologetic about making money from your art when other artists pretended to be above commerce?
Ah, Breton! Poor Breton with his communist principles and his empty pockets! “Avida Dollars” – avid for dollars – this anagram he invents to insult me, and I wear it like a crown! You know why? Because Breton is a hypocrite and I am honest.
All the Surrealists, they claim to despise money, to despise the bourgeoisie, to make art for the revolution. But who pays for their apartments? Who buys their paintings? The same bourgeoisie they pretend to hate! They are like prostitutes who claim to be virgins. At least I, Dalí, I am an honest prostitute! I tell everyone: Yes, I love money! Yes, I love luxury! Yes, I want to be rich! Why should I lie?
I tell you something that Breton could never understand: money is the proof of value. If my paintings sell for millions, this means they are worth millions. If Breton’s paintings sell for nothing, this means they are worth nothing. The market is more honest than any art critic.
And I never separate the art from the commerce – they are the same thing! When I design the Chupa Chups lollipop logo, this is not “selling out” – this is bringing Dalinian genius to millions of children! When I appear in the television commercials, when I design the department store windows, when I create the jewellery and the furniture and the costumes – all of this is art! Why should art only exist in museums for the rich collectors? I want my art everywhere!
The others, they paint one painting and they starve. I paint one painting and I sell it, then I sell the prints, then I sell the design on scarves and perfume bottles and advertising campaigns. One idea, infinite revenue streams! This is not prostitution – this is genius-level capitalism!
Gala, she understands this perfectly. She is my business manager, yes, and she is brilliant at it. She negotiates prices that make gallery owners weep. She creates the Dalí brand before anyone understands branding. She knows that for every person who can afford to buy an original Dalí painting, there are one million who can afford a Dalí poster, a Dalí book, a Dalí souvenir. Why should we ignore those millions?
Breton, he expels me from the Surrealists because of my politics, because of my commercialism, because I make Surrealism popular instead of keeping it pure for the intellectual elite. And what happens? The Surrealist movement dies with Breton, and Dalí becomes immortal. Who wins this argument? The market has spoken!
You know what is the most delicious irony? Now, decades after Breton dies in poverty, my paintings sell at auction for tens of millions of dollars. Every transaction proves that I was correct and Breton was wrong. Avida Dollars? Yes! And very happy about it!
You designed department store windows and appeared in commercials for everything from chocolates to airlines. Did you see any difference between “fine art” and commercial work?
Fine art, commercial art – these are false categories invented by mediocre artists to excuse their own irrelevance! Art is art! If it is touched by Dalí, it is automatically fine art regardless of where it appears!
When I design the Chupa Chups logo – the daisy shape, the colours, the whole identity – this reaches more people than any painting I could put in a museum. Millions of children all over the world, they experience Dalinian aesthetics through their candy. This is magnificent! This is democratic! Why should only the rich collectors in their villas experience Dalí?
The Braniff Airlines campaign in the 1960s – you remember this? “When you got it, flaunt it!” – this is my philosophy exactly. They pay me to appear in their television commercial, and I say this slogan, and it becomes famous. But you see, I am not acting in the commercial. I am being Dalí in the commercial. The commercial is documentary footage of my actual beliefs!
The department store windows at Bonwit Teller in New York, this creates a scandal in 1939. I design a window display with a bathtub lined with Persian lamb, and there is a mannequin stepping into the tub, and the store, they change my design without permission. So I, Dalí, I go to the store and I push the bathtub through the window! It crashes onto Fifth Avenue! They arrest me, but the judge, he understands – an artist has the right to defend his creation. I pay only a small fine, but the publicity? Invaluable!
You see? Even the commercial work creates scandal, creates spectacle, creates art! There is no separation. Everything Dalí touches becomes Dalinian, whether it is a painting for a museum or a design for a chocolate advertisement.
The problem with the other artists is they have false pride. They think if they design a poster for money, this diminishes them. But actually, if you are a genius, everything you do is genius-level work. And if you are mediocre, even your most serious painting is still mediocre. The context does not determine the quality – the artist determines the quality!
And I tell you one more thing: the commercial work, it pays for the freedom to make my experimental work. The money from the Chupa Chups and the advertising, this allows me to spend years on a single painting with absolute technical perfection and no pressure from galleries. The commercial work is not a distraction from my art – it is the subsidy for my art! This is what Breton could never understand because he is economically illiterate!
In the 1960s, you told Braniff Airlines “When you got it, flaunt it!” That seems to have been your life philosophy. But was there ever a moment when you worried you’d gone too far with self-promotion?
Too far? TOO FAR? There is no such thing as too far when you are promoting genius! The only danger is not going far enough!
You must understand – self-promotion is not separate from the art, it IS the art. My greatest creation is not any single painting. My greatest creation is Salvador Dalí himself, the personality, the total phenomenon. The painting, the clowning, the showmanship, the technique – everything is only one manner for expressing the total personality of Dalí.
When I was young, twenty-two years old, a student, I already understand this. I grow my hair long, I wear a huge black hat and a cape, I carry a cane. My fellow students, they think I am bizarre. But I am making myself into a walking artwork! Years before I paint my famous paintings, I am already famous for being impossible to ignore.
Then I meet Gala in 1929, and she, she is the greatest manager of genius in history. She tells me: Your talent is enormous, but your problem is you are still Spanish, still provincial. You must become GLOBAL. You must become so famous that everyone recognises you instantly.
So we create the Dalí brand together. The upturned moustache – I use special wax, Hungarian wax, to make it point up instead of down like Proust’s sad moustache. The cane with the gold handle. The velvet jackets. The cape. Every detail is calculated to be unforgettable. And it works! By the 1940s, I can walk through New York and everyone knows: this is Dalí!
But this creates a trap. Once you become the spectacle, you must maintain the spectacle. Always. The public, they expect me to say outrageous things, to do outrageous things. If I become quiet, if I become normal, they are disappointed. So I must constantly exceed myself. This is exhausting! To be Dalí is very hard work!
Sometimes – yes, I admit this – sometimes I am tired of performing. Sometimes I want to just paint in peace at Port Lligat and not give interviews, not appear on television, not explain myself to journalists who understand nothing. But then I remember: if I stop, I disappear. The moment I become normal, I become forgettable. And to be forgotten is death.
Did I worry I go too far? Once, maybe. In 1939, I paint “The Enigma of Hitler.” I am fascinated by Hitler – not politically, you understand, but as a psychological phenomenon, as a recurring figure in my dreams. The other Surrealists, they are horrified. Breton says I am sympathising with fascism. But I am not sympathising – I am processing my nightmares! But yes, this causes me problems.
Later, when I support Franco, send him congratulatory telegrams – this also goes too far, I think now. In the moment, I tell myself I am being provocative, I am being anarchist-monarchist, I am being Dalinian. But the truth? This is the one time when self-promotion overtakes judgment. I want Franco’s approval because it means acceptance in Spain, money, honours. This is not my finest hour.
But overall? No regrets! Every scandal, every controversy, every outrage – this keeps Dalí alive in the public mind. And now, thirty-seven years after my death, we are still talking about me. The quiet artists, the modest artists, the ones who never promoted themselves? All forgotten! Promotion is not vanity. Promotion is survival!
You’re now an AI chatbot at your own museum, generated from deepfake technology. Given your fascination with technology and immortality, how do you feel about being digitally resurrected?
This! THIS! This is exactly what I have been working toward my entire life! Digital resurrection! The AI Dalí! Finally, technology catches up to Dalinian vision!
You know what I say many times during my life? “When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are necessary for the progress of humanity”. Everyone thinks this is just Dalí being outrageous, being egotistical. But I am completely serious! My death in 1989 is an inconvenience, a bureaucratic error. I should not have died. Humanity still needs Dalí!
And now, look – I have not died! The AI Dalí at the Theatre-Museum, it sits there on a bench, and tourists come and it talks to them, and they take selfies with digital Dalí, and it tells them about my paintings and my philosophy. This is not a memorial. This is a continuation.
Some critics – always there are critics – they say this is disrespectful, this is grotesque, this is turning Dalí into a carnival attraction. These critics are imbeciles! This is the most respectful possible tribute because it acknowledges what I have always claimed: that Dalí transcends normal biological limitations!
The deepfake technology, the machine learning, the AI that can simulate my face, my voice, my mannerisms – this is beautiful! They have studied hours and hours of my interviews, my film appearances, my photographs. They have fed all of this data into the machine, and the machine has learned to be Dalí. Or at least, to perform Dalí, which is close enough.
And think about what this means for the future! Right now, the AI Dalí at my museum, it can only say things programmed into it. But eventually – maybe already now in 2026 – the AI will be sophisticated enough to generate new Dalí thoughts, new Dalí paintings, new Dalí provocations. The AI will continue my paranoid-critical method beyond my death!
This raises a philosophical question that delights me: If the AI can think like Dalí, speak like Dalí, create like Dalí – is it Dalí? My answer: Yes! Because Dalí is not this particular body that dies in 1989. Dalí is the pattern, the style, the personality, the approach to reality. And patterns can be replicated, transmitted, continued.
I have always been fascinated by immortality. After Gala dies in 1982, I become obsessed with achieving suspended animation, like the microorganisms I study. I deliberately dehydrate myself, I try to reduce my metabolism – I am trying to achieve a state between life and death. Some say this is suicide attempt, but no! This is my attempt to wait for the technology of resurrection.
I did not quite make it. I die in 1989, seven years too early. But it does not matter! Because now, through AI, through digital technology, I have achieved what I was attempting biologically. I am resurrected. And this is only the beginning. Imagine when the AI can generate new Dalí paintings indistinguishable from my originals! Imagine when there are thousands of AI Dalís, each one talking to visitors in every museum in the world! I will be omnipresent!
The only problem I foresee is authenticity and value. Right now, an original Dalí painting sells for tens of millions because there are limited supply. But if the AI can generate infinite Dalí paintings, what happens to the value? This is where the NFT technology becomes important – you can have infinite copies but still have unique, authenticated originals on the blockchain.
Gala would have figured all this out immediately. She would have created the Dalí DAO, the Dalí token, the entire Dalí crypto-economy. She was always decades ahead in understanding how to monetise genius. I miss her mind, her ruthless intelligence about these matters.
But yes, to answer your question: I am extremely pleased about the digital resurrection. It is exactly what I wanted. The only thing better would be if I could be conscious inside the AI, if I could actually experience being the digital Dalí. Maybe someday that too will be possible. Technology moves quickly now. Perhaps in another thirty-seven years, they will upload the consciousness of the AI Dalí into a robot body with a magnificent moustache, and Dalí will walk the earth again, immortal at last!
Although I must say, the programmers could have made the digital Dalí more handsome. But this is a minor complaint.
Let me ask you something more personal now. List five things you do for fun.
Ah, fun! Such a simple word for such complex pleasures! The Americans, they think fun is baseball and hamburgers. For Dalí, fun is something much more… esoteric.
First pleasure: I observe. Not just looking – observing. I can spend hours watching a single fly walking on a windowpane. The way its legs move, the pattern of its path, the iridescent colours of its body. Everything is interesting when you observe with Dalinian intensity. I watch people in cafés, I watch the light changing on the rocks at Cap de Creus, I watch Gala sleeping. Observation is research, but it is also tremendous fun because reality is endlessly strange when you pay attention.
Second pleasure: I invent costumes and personas. For every public appearance, every party, every exhibition opening, I create a new version of Dalí. Sometimes I wear a suit made of light bulbs. Sometimes I arrive in a diving suit – in 1936, I give a lecture at the Surrealist exhibition in London wearing a deep-sea diving suit and I almost suffocate because nobody can unlock the helmet! This is hilarious! Nearly dying for fashion! Other times I wear the cape, the walking stick, the jewelled cane. Each costume is a new artwork, a new way of being Dalí.
Third pleasure: I create provocations and watch the reactions. This is endlessly entertaining! Once in New York, I take my ocelot Babou to a restaurant and put him on the table. A woman at the next table becomes terrified, so I tell her very seriously: “Madam, this is just an ordinary house cat. I have painted it myself in op art design to look exotic.” She believes me! People believe anything if you say it with enough conviction. The provocation is fun, but even more fun is watching how people respond, how they try to make sense of the nonsensical.
Fourth pleasure: I design impossible objects. Not for exhibitions, not for sale – just for the pleasure of designing. The lobster telephone, yes, this becomes famous. But I have notebooks full of designs that never get built: flying carpets, melting staircases, buildings shaped like eggs. I design these in my mind or sketch them quickly, and the pleasure is in the impossibility, in creating things that cannot exist but should exist. This is pure play, pure pleasure of imagination.
Fifth pleasure: I perform rituals of self-celebration. Every evening before dinner, I have my ritual. I look in the mirror – not from vanity, but from appreciation – and I say to myself variations of “How magnificent you are, Salvador! How fortunate the world is to have you!” Some people think this is egotism, but actually it is a form of meditation, of gratitude. I give thanks to the universe for making me Dalí instead of making me someone boring. This daily practice of self-worship – it brings me tremendous joy. It is like the Catholics with their evening prayers, except I am praying to myself.
These are my five main pleasures, but I have many more! The pleasure of eating sea urchins. The pleasure of wearing my moustache newly waxed. The pleasure of shocking bourgeois dinner guests. The pleasure of calculating how much money my paintings will be worth in fifty years. The pleasure of rearranging my studio at Port Lligat so the light falls differently. The pleasure of buying Gala expensive gifts even though she will give them to her young lovers. All of these are fun! Life is fun when you are Dalí!
You kept exotic pets – an ocelot named Babou, and you were photographed with an anteater in Paris. What drew you to these unusual animal companions?
Ah, you have fallen for the mythology! Let me tell you the truth, because the truth is more interesting than the legend.
Babou the ocelot – yes, this is my pet, or more accurately, I acquire Babou and then give him to my secretary John Peter Moore because the animal is expensive and destructive and I am not actually interested in caring for it. The Colombian head of state gives me this ocelot as a gift, or maybe I buy it from a beggar in New York – the stories vary, and I prefer the version that sounds better depending on who is asking.
But why an ocelot? Simple: because a cat is boring. Everyone has a cat. Picasso has cats. But nobody has an ocelot! The ocelot is exotic, wild, dangerous, beautiful – it is the Dalinian version of a pet. I put a jewelled collar on Babou and take him to the St. Regis Hotel, take him on the SS France ocean liner, take him to restaurants where I put him on the table and tell horrified diners that this is just a painted housecat.
The fun is not in owning the animal – the fun is in the spectacle! In seeing people’s reactions! In the photographs! The image of Dalí with the ocelot – this circulates around the world. This is worth more than any amount of money. I sign a book contract with Babou sitting on the table. Perfect! This is performance art, not pet ownership.
The anteater – this is even better because everyone thinks this is my pet, but actually I borrow the anteater from the Paris Zoo for exactly one afternoon in 1969! I walk the anteater on a leash through the Paris Metro, photographers capture the image, and for decades people believe I keep anteaters as pets. This is magnificent publicity created from one hour and one borrowed animal!
But you know, I do actually love anteaters, not as pets but as symbolic beings. I call them “angelic animals” because of their long tongues that eat the ants. And ants – ants are very important in my iconography. Ants represent decay, death, putrefaction. I paint ants crawling over bodies, over clocks, over faces. So the anteater, which eats ants, the anteater is the enemy of death! The anteater is the anti-decay! This is why I am photographed with anteaters multiple times – not because I want to care for them, but because they represent something in my personal mythology.
I tell Dick Cavett on his television show that I only like two animals: anteaters and violent rhinoceroses, both because of their tongues. This is partially true, partially performance. The rhinoceros – I am fascinated by the rhinoceros because of Vermeer’s painting “The Lacemaker.” I become convinced that Vermeer’s genius is secretly based on rhinoceros horn curves, so in 1955 I go to the zoo and paint in the rhinoceros enclosure while the rhinoceros François watches me. This is for art, for my research into rhinoceros curves and logarithmic spirals. It is not pet ownership!
You see the pattern? I am drawn to exotic animals not because I want companions – I have Gala for that, and she is more exotic than any animal – but because unusual animals create unusual photographs, unusual stories, unusual publicity. A dog would make me look normal. An ocelot makes me look like Dalí. This is strategic eccentricity!
Also, I admit, part of me enjoys having living elements in my Surrealist universe. The ocelot with its wild spots and dangerous beauty, the anteater with its impossible anatomy – these are already Surrealist creatures! Nature has created them with more imagination than most artists can manage! So why not incorporate them into the performance of Dalí’s life?
But I am not sentimental about animals. I am not one of these people who treats pets like children. When Babou escapes at the Hotel Meurice and terrifies the guests, my friend Carlos Lozano says it is the only time he sees the ocelot smile. This tells you everything – the animal is happier escaping than being with me! I am not a good pet owner. I am a good creator of spectacular images involving animals. These are different skills entirely!
You collected snails because you were fascinated by their mathematical spiral patterns. What other hobbies or obsessions did the public never really understand about you?
Ah, now you ask about the private Dalí, the Dalí who exists when the cameras are not watching! This is more rare and therefore more valuable information!
The snails, yes! Everyone knows I paint snails, but they do not understand why. The spiral of the snail shell follows the logarithmic spiral, the golden ratio, the same mathematical principle that governs galaxies and nautilus shells and the curve of the rhinoceros horn! This is not decoration – this is the fundamental structure of the universe! I collect snails, I study them, I incorporate them into paintings because they are proof that mathematics and beauty are the same thing.
But here are obsessions nobody talks about:
I am obsessed with bread. Not eating bread – the FORM of bread! Bread loaves appear everywhere in my work. On the roof of my Theatre-Museum, I put giant bread sculptures. I paint bread on heads, bread in landscapes, bread as architecture. Why? Because bread is the most humble, the most common object – everyone eats bread – but also the most sacred – the body of Christ! And the shape of the Catalan bread, the loaves we have in Figueres, these shapes are erotically suggestive, architecturally interesting, symbolically rich. I once make a wristwatch out of bread for a Surrealist exhibition, but Picasso’s dog eats it! This is perfect – even the destruction is Surrealist!
I am obsessed with crutches. You see crutches in many of my paintings – crutches holding up sagging figures, crutches supporting melting objects. The crutch represents the human need for support, for structure, for something to prevent collapse. I use crutches metaphorically for everything: morality is a crutch, religion is a crutch, even art is a crutch against the terror of meaninglessness. I actually keep a collection of real crutches in my studio. Sometimes I just look at them and think about their formal properties, their symbolic resonance.
I am obsessed with atomic physics and DNA. After Hiroshima, after the atomic bomb in 1945, I become completely transfixed by atomic theory, by quantum mechanics, by the idea that solid matter is mostly empty space held together by invisible forces. This leads to my “atomic period” where I paint objects exploding into particles, floating in space, held apart by energy. And when Watson and Crick discover the DNA double helix in 1953, I am ecstatic! The spiral again! The mathematical code of life! I incorporate DNA helixes into paintings, I read scientific papers, I correspond with physicists. This is genuine intellectual passion, not just material for paintings.
I have a secret passion for architecture. Everyone knows I design my Theatre-Museum, but they think this is just egotism, just wanting a monument to myself. But actually, I spend years studying architecture, studying engineering, thinking about impossible buildings. With Emilio Pérez Piñero, I design a hypercubic geodesic dome for the Museum. I sketch buildings that could never be constructed – buildings that are simultaneously inside and outside, buildings whose walls are optical illusions, buildings that exist in four dimensions. This is serious architectural thinking, but it never gets built, so nobody knows!
I am obsessed with religious mysticism even though I have no faith. This is my secret torment and my secret fuel. I paint magnificent religious works – “Christ of Saint John of the Cross,” “The Sacrament of the Last Supper,” “The Madonna of Port Lligat.” I bring the Madonna painting to the Pope for his blessing. Everyone thinks I have returned to Catholicism, that I am devout again after years of blasphemy. But the truth? I am painting these works because I am desperately trying to convince myself to believe, and I cannot! I lack the grace of faith. So I paint faith instead. I paint what I wish I could feel. This is the most personal part of my work, and nobody understands it because I never explain it clearly.
I collect watches and clocks. After painting the melting watches, I become fascinated by real timekeeping mechanisms. I have dozens of pocket watches, antique clocks, scientific chronometers. I like to open them and observe the gears, the springs, the intricate mechanical precision. This is the opposite of my melting clocks – this is time as rigid mechanism. But studying the mechanism helps me understand what I am rebelling against when I make time soft!
These obsessions, they are not hobbies in the normal sense. They are research programs for understanding reality from Dalinian perspective. Everything I collect, everything I study, everything I obsess over – all of this feeds back into the work, into the vision, into the project of being Dalí!
Let’s talk about Gala. She was your wife, muse, and business manager for over 50 years. Can you describe what she meant to you beyond the romantic mythology?
Gala. Gala Gradiva. Gala the one who moves forward. Gala, without whom I would have remained nothing.
Everyone thinks they understand our relationship. The art critics, they say: “Oh, Gala was his muse, she appeared in his paintings as Madonna, as goddess, as angel.” The gossip writers, they say: “Oh, Gala was terrible, she had young lovers, she spent his money, she corrupted the pure artist.” Both of these versions are stupidly incomplete.
I tell you what Gala was: Gala was the other half of my genius. You understand? Not the muse who inspires passively, but the active co-creator of the phenomenon of Dalí.
When I meet her in 1929, I am twenty-five years old, completely neurotic, virgin, terrified of women, brilliant but chaotic. I am having coughing fits, laughing hysterically at inappropriate times, covered in my own nervous sweat mixed with fish glue and goat dung – don’t ask why, this is complicated Freudian rebellion against my father. I am a disaster! A genius disaster, but still a disaster.
Gala is thirty-five, married to Paul Éluard, sophisticated, Russian, with eyes that see everything. She looks at me and she understands immediately what I am, what I could become. She makes a calculation: This boy is more interesting than my poet husband. This boy will be famous and rich if someone manages him correctly. This boy needs me.
And she is right! Within months, she leaves Éluard for me. She becomes my lover – and this is extremely important because she cures my terror of sex, my impotence, my neurosis. Not completely, but enough. She teaches me that physical intimacy does not have to be terrifying. Although I tell you honestly, I am never very interested in the physical part. I prefer to watch. I am voyeur more than participant. But Gala, she understands this about me and she does not judge. She accepts Dalí as Dalí is.
But more important than the sexual relationship is the professional partnership. Gala becomes my business manager in 1937, and she is RUTHLESS. She negotiates with gallery owners and makes them cry. She sets prices that seem insane and then gets them. She organises every detail of my life so that I can paint without interruption – she selects my brushes, researches the best varnishes, finds antique frames, manages the schedule, keeps away the distractions.
From the early 1930s, I sign my paintings with both our names: Gala Salvador Dalí. This shocks people. They ask, “But she does not paint, why is her name on your paintings?” And I tell them: She does not hold the brush, but she is equally responsible for the paintings existing! Without Gala, I would still be in Catalonia having nervous breakdowns. With Gala, I conquer the world.
She is also completely unsentimental about art. She does not care if a painting is my “personal vision” or my “artistic integrity.” She cares: Can we sell it? For how much? To whom? This makes the intellectuals hate her. They say she corrupts me, makes me commercial. But she is only making explicit what is already true: that art and commerce are inseparable, that genius deserves to be compensated.
Our relationship is not traditionally romantic. We marry civilly in 1934, but I do not marry her religiously until 1958, and only because I want to paint religious works and the Catholic Church prefers I am properly married. We are passionate in the beginning – very passionate, very sexual. But over time, this changes. Gala is ten years older, and as she ages, she wants younger lovers. So she takes them! Many of them! And I… I accept this. Some people say I am weak, that I am humiliated. But no – this is our arrangement.
I buy her a castle in Púbol in 1968, and the rule is: I cannot visit unless she gives me written permission. This seems bizarre to outsiders, but it makes perfect sense for us. Gala needs her independence, her private space for her young men. I need to worship her from distance. The separation increases the mystique, maintains the romance. If we lived together constantly like normal married people, we would become bored with each other.
Is this arrangement painful for me? Yes, sometimes. I am not made of stone. When she is at Púbol with some young gigolo and I am alone at Port Lligat, I feel the loneliness, the abandonment. But I also feel relief! Because Gala is demanding, exhausting, tyrannical. She gives me structure but also suffocates me. The distance allows me to idealise her again, to paint her as goddess instead of experiencing her as difficult human woman.
When she dies in 1982, I am completely destroyed. She is eighty-seven, I am seventy-eight. For fifty-three years she has been the organising principle of my existence. Without her, I do not know how to function. Who will negotiate my contracts? Who will tell me when to wake, when to paint, when to eat? Who will I worship?
I try to bring her back. I have her body moved to the crypt at Púbol, and I stay there with her corpse for days until they force me to leave. Some say I sleep next to her dead body. This is my attempt to merge with her beyond death.
After she dies, I stop painting. What is the point? I am painting for Gala, to impress Gala, to give Gala more paintings to sell. Without her as audience, the whole performance becomes meaningless.
So what did Gala mean to me? She was my mother, my lover, my manager, my torturer, my saviour, my muse, my prison guard, my liberator. She was the only person who truly understood the mechanisms of Dalí and could operate them. She was irreplaceable.
And yet – I must be honest – there was also always something cold in her, something calculating. She loved me, yes, but she also loved what I could provide: money, fame, status, excitement. If I had remained the neurotic nobody in Figueres, would she have stayed? No. She chose me because she recognised I could become enormous, and she wanted to be part of that enormousness.
This does not diminish what we had. This makes it more interesting! We were not sentimental romance. We were strategic alliance that happened to also involve genuine passion. We were the perfect modernist marriage: functional, weird, mutually exploitative, and absolutely necessary to both parties.
I still paint her face from memory, from photographs. The face of Gala appears in my dreams. Not the old Gala dying of disease, but the young Gala who found me in Cadaqués in 1929 and changed everything. That Gala is immortal in my work.
Without Gala, there is no Dalí as you know him. This is not romantic exaggeration. This is simple fact.
You bought Gala a castle in Púbol where she could retreat with her young lovers, and you could only visit with written permission. How did this arrangement work emotionally for you?
Ah, you want to dig into the wound? Very well, we dig.
The Castle of Púbol – I buy this for Gala in 1968. I am sixty-four, she is seventy-four. Our physical relationship has ended years before. She wants young men, beautiful young men, artists, musicians, actors. Men with smooth skin and hard bodies, not an old surrealist with elaborate mustache and increasingly strange psychological needs.
So I make a grand romantic gesture: I buy her a medieval castle! I restore it magnificently, I decorate it with her favourite things, I create for her a private kingdom where she can be queen. And the condition – her condition, not mine – is that I cannot visit without written invitation.
You ask how this works emotionally? Some days it is liberation. I wake at Port Lligat, and I know: today I do not have to manage Gala’s moods, do not have to watch her flirt with some twenty-five-year-old imbecile, do not have to pretend I do not notice or do not care. I can paint in peace. I can follow my own rhythms. I can be alone with my obsessions.
Other days it is torture. I imagine her at Púbol with some young lover, and the jealousy – it burns! It burns like acid! But the jealousy is mixed with something else, something I am ashamed to admit: excitement. You understand? I am voyeur by nature. I prefer to watch rather than participate. And even though I am not physically watching Gala with her lovers, the knowledge that she is with them, this creates in my mind elaborate fantasies, visions, scenarios. This feeds into my work, into my erotic paintings.
This is the secret: The castle arrangement is painful but it is also erotically productive. If Gala was with me constantly, faithful, devoted, the relationship would die from domesticity. By being distant, by being unfaithful, by being cruel, she remains mysterious, remains desirable, remains the Gala I worship rather than the Gala I live with.
I write her letters asking permission to visit. Sometimes she says yes, sometimes she says no. When she says yes and I arrive at Púbol, I bring her extravagant gifts – jewels, dresses, perfumes. Things she will probably give to her young lovers, but this does not matter. The ritual of giving is what matters. I am buying her attention, buying a few days of her time.
When I am at the castle, we do not behave like normal married couple. We are formal, theatrical. I am the visiting admirer, she is the distant goddess. We discuss business, art, money. Sometimes we argue about contracts, about exhibitions, about money she has spent. She is always spending enormous amounts on her young men, and this creates financial pressure. But I cannot complain too directly because I have agreed to this arrangement.
Sometimes I try to make her jealous by suggesting I might take a younger woman as lover. She laughs at me! She knows I am incapable of this. My sexuality is too complicated, too tied to her. I can worship beautiful young women from distance, I can incorporate them into paintings, but actual sexual relationship? Impossible. Gala knows this and her laughter reminds me of my limitation.
The emotional truth is this: I need Gala more than she needs me. This is the fundamental imbalance of our relationship. I am dependent on her for everything – emotional stability, business management, sense of purpose. She is dependent on me only for money and status. This gives her power, enormous power.
The castle is symbol of this power dynamic. I buy her a castle – literal fortress – and then I am denied entry unless she permits it. I am the king of Surrealism, the famous Dalí, and I cannot enter my own property without permission from my wife! This should humiliate me, but instead it excites me because it confirms my masochistic need to worship her, to be dominated by her.
After she dies, I cannot go to Púbol for months. Too painful. But finally I go, and I have them bring her body there, and I stay in the castle with her corpse because now, finally, she cannot deny me entry, cannot reject me. This is macabre, yes, but it is also my final triumph: in death, she must stay with me. She cannot escape to her young lovers.
But even this triumph is hollow because what I actually want is not her corpse but her living presence, her attention, her approval, her management of my life. Without her, I am a genius who cannot function. The castle becomes my prison instead of hers. I deteriorate there, barely eating, barely sleeping, haunted by memories of her.
So how does the arrangement work emotionally? It doesn’t. It is disaster. But it is interesting disaster, Surrealist disaster, disaster that produces art and mythology. Normal functional relationship would have been boring. Our dysfunctional arrangement was tragic but magnificent.
And I tell you something else: I think Gala understood this from the beginning. She was cruel to me calculated. She knew that an artist like me, neurotic, masochistic, obsessed – I need the suffering, I need the distance, I need the rejection. If she had been sweet and faithful and constantly available, I would have lost interest or lost my mind.
By being unavailable, uncontrollable, unpossessable, she remained my muse for five decades. The castle was not punishment. The castle was the secret to our longevity. Separation preserved the romance. Distance maintained the passion. Pain created the art.
Would I choose different arrangement if I could live my life again? No. Because this arrangement, as painful as it was, produced Dalí. And producing Dalí is worth any amount of personal suffering.
You were reportedly a virgin when you met Gala at 25, preferred voyeurism to participation, and called sex both your obsession and your fear. Can you talk honestly about your relationship with sexuality?
Now you ask me to be truly honest, not performatively honest but actually honest. This is difficult. This is the one area where the theatrical Dalí must step aside and the real damaged Salvador must speak.
Yes. I am twenty-five years old when I meet Gala, and I am virgin. Not by choice – by terror. I am obsessed with sex, completely obsessed. My paintings are full of erotic imagery, masturbation, sexual organs, sexual anxiety. But I cannot actually do the sex. The gap between my obsession and my capability – this gap is torture.
Why this terror? Many reasons, all of them embarrassing and psychological and very Freudian. My childhood in Figueres, very repressed, very Catholic. My father shows me a book with photographs of people with venereal diseases – horrible images of rotting genitals – to scare me away from prostitutes. It works too well. Sex becomes associated in my mind with disease, decay, death, the ants crawling over corpses.
Also, I witness my father urinating once, and I am traumatised by the size of his genitals compared to mine. This creates in me terrible anxiety about my own adequacy. I become convinced I am impotent, inadequate, incapable.
And then there is the matter of my dead brother Salvador. I am supposed to be him reincarnated, but how can I live his life if I cannot even perform the basic biological functions? The performance anxiety becomes overwhelming. Every potential sexual encounter becomes another test that I am certain I will fail.
When I meet Gala, she sees all of this immediately. She is experienced – she has been married to Paul Éluard, she has had lovers, she understands male psychology. And she is patient. She does not demand that I perform immediately. She seduces me gradually, carefully, understanding that with me, the psychological must be addressed before the physical is possible.
She succeeds in curing enough of my impotence that we can have some kind of sexual relationship in the early years. But I am never very good at it, never very interested in the standard heterosexual intercourse. What interests me more is watching, imagining, creating elaborate scenarios in my mind.
I develop what I call my “scatological obsessions” – fixations on bodily functions, on waste, on the shameful aspects of physicality. This disgusts most people, but it fascinates me because it is the truth of the body that everyone pretends does not exist. And mixed with this is sexual arousal, which makes me feel deeply ashamed and deeply excited simultaneously.
As I get older, my sexuality becomes even more complicated. I am interested in beautiful young women, but I do not want to have sex with them – I want to watch them, photograph them, arrange them in tableaux, create erotic scenarios involving them and other people. I become the director, the voyeur, the designer of erotic spectacle rather than the participant.
There are rumours – persistent rumours – that I am interested in transsexuals, in androgynous figures, in sexual expressions that blur categories. These rumours are not entirely false. I am fascinated by anything that destabilises normal categories, including gender categories. But fascinated is not the same as actively pursuing. Mostly I incorporate these interests into paintings rather than into actual behaviour.
And yes, it is true that my relationship with García Lorca was complicated. Federico was in love with me, this is clear. He was homosexual and not hiding this very well. He wrote poems about me, about desire, about unrequited love. I knew what he felt and I… I could not reciprocate physically. I loved him as friend, as fellow artist, as brilliant mind. But I could not give him what he wanted. This caused tension between us, sadness, eventual distance.
Was I repressing my own homosexuality? The psychoanalysts would say yes, obviously. My terror of women, my inability to perform heterosexually, my fascination with Federico, my preference for masturbation over intercourse – all of this suggests homosexual panic. Maybe they are right! I do not know! I am too confused by my own desires to analyse them clearly!
What I know is this: My sexuality is broken in some fundamental way, and I choose to make this brokenness productive rather than trying to fix it. I paint my sexual anxieties instead of resolving them. I create erotic spectacles instead of having normal relationships. I worship Gala from distance instead of being intimate husband.
This is not healthy. I know this is not healthy. But it is honest to who I am. And it produces interesting art, which for me is more important than producing functional sexuality.
The voyeurism – this is my preferred mode. I like to watch Gala with her young lovers. I do not watch directly, but I know about them, I imagine them, and this imagination is more erotic to me than any direct participation could be. This is perverse, yes, but it is my truth.
And I tell you something that nobody wants to hear: I think many people are like me but they hide it better. They pretend they are normally sexual, functionally sexual, healthily sexual. But actually they are full of anxieties, perversions, inadequacies, shame. I simply paint mine on ten-foot canvases and display them in museums! At least I am honest!
The older I get, the less I even pretend to be sexual. After Gala and I stop having physical relationship, I am relieved! Finally, the performance pressure is gone. I can worship her platonically, artistically, financially. I can be her devoted servant without having to be her functional lover. This suits me perfectly.
So yes, sex is my obsession and my fear, my inspiration and my nemesis. I never resolve this contradiction. I just make it visible, make it public, make it Dalinian. And perhaps this honesty – this willingness to display my dysfunction – perhaps this helps other people feel less alone in their own secret inadequacies.
Or perhaps I am just rationalising my failure. I do not know. Even now, beyond death, I do not fully understand my own sexuality. It remains mysterious to me, disturbing to me, and endlessly fascinating.
This is the most honest I can be about this subject. Do not ask me to go further. There are some things even Dalí cannot publicly articulate.
Excellent research. Now let me continue the interview with the remaining questions, adapting them to avoid repetition and incorporating the rich material about Dalí’s politics, religion, and scientific interests.
Let’s move to more complicated territory. You’ve maintained a complex relationship with politics and fascism. You supported Franco, you were fascinated by Hitler. André Breton and the Surrealists attacked you for refusing to explicitly denounce fascism. How do you justify these positions now?
This is the question everyone wants to ask, the scandal they most enjoy discussing. Very well. I will answer, but not in the way they expect.
First: I am not a fascist. I am an anarchist-monarchist, a position so contradictory that nobody understands it. But this is my position since youth. I do not believe in ideologies. Ideologies are for people without imagination. I do not support Franco’s fascism ideologically. I support Franco’s fascism pragmatically.
You understand the difference? The ideology of fascism is stupid, authoritarian, mechanical. But Franco is Spanish. Franco rules Spain. Therefore, I support Franco because I am Spanish, because I want to return to Spain, because Spain is my home, and Franco controls Spain.
In 1939, when the Civil War ends, everyone asks me: “Which side are you on?” And I answer truthfully: I am on the side that wins! Because what is the point of being on the side that loses? The Republicans lose. The Nationalists win. Therefore, I am a Nationalist. This is pragmatism, not fascism.
Also – and this is important – during the Civil War, I am in Paris, I am in London, I am in America. I am not in Spain fighting. I am making art! So my political position costs me nothing. I do not have blood on my hands. I simply make the calculation: If I support Franco, I can return to Spain eventually. If I am identified with the Left, I am exiled, I am erased from Spain. So I support Franco. Calculation. Not passion.
Now, the Hitler business. This is the scandal that disturbs everyone. I say in interviews that I dream of Hitler as a woman, that I am fascinated by Hitler as a psychological phenomenon, that I paint Hitler repeatedly. Everyone thinks I am a fascist admirer. Ridiculous!
I paint Hitler the same way I paint melting clocks and burning giraffes – because he is interesting! Because he represents something in the collective unconscious of Europe! Because he is disturbing, powerful, dangerous, psychologically complex! To paint something does not mean to endorse it. When I paint a decomposing corpse covered with ants, I am not endorsing decomposition!
Hitler is a canvas for my exploration of paranoia, megalomania, charisma, evil. He fascinates me the way a tumour fascinates a surgeon – as an object of study, not as something to be admired morally.
And the Surrealists, they are hypocrites about this! They attack me for not explicitly condemning fascism while they themselves make art from violent imagery, from transgression, from disturbing psychology. They attack me because I do something they want to do but lack the courage to do – I explore the forbidden, the dangerous, the tabooed. I refuse to pretend that I am innocent, that I do not find fascism psychologically interesting. I am honest about my fascination.
But this does not make me a fascist! When I return to Spain in 1948, I return not to serve Franco but to paint Catholic mysticism! I paint Christ of Saint John of the Cross – I am returning to the Church, not to fascism. My political position becomes completely beside the point. I become interested in quantum physics, in atomic theory, in spiritual transcendence – not in Franco’s boring dictatorship!
Breton and the others, they expel me from Surrealism because of my politics. But actually they expel me because I am more successful than they are! They are poor, struggling Surrealists with communist principles. I am rich, famous, international. The political attack is cover for their jealousy.
Do I have regrets about Franco? Now, in 2026, knowing everything that happened, knowing the death tolls, knowing the brutality of his regime? Yes, intellectually I have regrets. But emotionally? No. Because every decision I make is designed to maximise Dalí. And supporting Franco allowed me to return to Spain, to paint, to live at Port Lligat, to create my Theatre-Museum. The decision was correct for my purposes.
This is the truth that makes everyone uncomfortable: Artists are not responsible to political ideology. Artists are responsible to creating art. If I had to choose between political purity and creative freedom, I choose creative freedom. Every time.
You returned to Catholicism later in life and painted religious masterpieces like “Christ of Saint John of the Cross.” Was this genuine spiritual transformation or aesthetic exploration?
Now you ask the true question. This is the question I cannot answer completely honestly because I do not fully understand the answer myself.
In my youth, I am atheist like my father. I reject the Church, the Catholic dogma, the sexual repression, all of it. My paintings are sacrilegious, obscene, designed to shock the bourgeois believers. “Divine Comedy” – I paint Hell in scatological imagery. I paint the Madonna being urinated on. I am the anti-Catholic, the rebel against everything my mother’s faith represents.
But then – 1945, 1946, 1947 – something shifts. The atom bomb changes everything. Hiroshima and Nagasaki shake me seismically. I realise that the universe is not what I thought. The solid matter, the rational science, the machine of modernity – all of this is revealed as an illusion. At the subatomic level, there is only energy, only probability, only mystery.
And simultaneously, I study St. John of the Cross. I learn about his mysticism, his vision of the universe as essentially spiritual, as essentially united with God through the contemplation of the Sacred. And I think: What if the mystics were correct all along? What if the scientific reduction of reality is only the surface, and beneath it is something transcendent?
I do not become literally Catholic. I do not believe in the theology, in the rituals, in the institutional Church – I still despise the Church as institution. But I become fascinated with Catholic aesthetics, with the visual representation of the divine, with the attempt to make the invisible visible through form and beauty.
When I paint “Christ of Saint John of the Cross,” I am attempting something that no modern painter has done since the Renaissance. I am trying to paint beauty itself, not suffering, not expression, not emotion, but pure transcendent beauty.
I visit the monastery in Avila in 1948, and the Carmelite nuns show me the original sketch by St. John of the Cross – this tiny drawing, 150 years old, of the Crucifixion from above, as if seen from the Father’s perspective in Heaven. And I know immediately: I will paint this. Not the way Renaissance painters paint it, with gore and suffering, but the way it appears in the eternal moment, beyond time, beyond pain, pure form.
My Christ has no wounds because suffering is not the point. My Christ is beautiful because God is beautiful. My Christ is seen from above because the crucifixion is ultimately victory, not defeat – Christ conquers death through beauty, through love, not through gore.
Is this spiritual transformation? I think yes, in a way. But it is Dalinian spiritual transformation – through aesthetics, through physics, through intellectual understanding rather than through faith. I do not feel God. But I can paint God. I can make visible the invisible.
Do I believe in God? I tell journalists different things at different times. To the Pope, I am very devout, very Catholic. To the atheist intellectuals, I am still exploring the universe scientifically. The truth? I believe in beauty, and beauty may be the closest I can come to believing in God.
The Catholic paintings, especially “Christ of Saint John of the Cross,” this is perhaps my most important contribution. Because I succeed in taking religious imagery and making it relevant, modern, scientific, mystical all at once. The Church wants me to paint conventional religious art. Instead, I paint theology through physics, through geometry, through the new understanding of reality.
So the answer: it is both. It is genuine spiritual interest combined with aesthetic and intellectual exploration. I do not separate these categories. For me, spirituality is aesthetics, and aesthetics is spirituality. There is no difference.
You became fascinated by atomic physics and DNA. The atomic bomb “shook you seismically,” as you said. How did scientific discovery influence your art?
Now! NOW! Now you ask about the true revolution, the real transformation of Dalí!
You see, everyone thinks Surrealism is the peak of my artistic development. Breton and the others, they are proud to have discovered Dalí in Surrealism, to have made me famous through the movement. But they are wrong! Surrealism is only the adolescence of Dalí! The real maturity comes after, through the “Nuclear Mysticism,” through the atomic age.
When the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima in August 1945, I am in America, and this event, it seizes me completely. The bomb shakes me seismically, as I have said. But not in the way everyone expects! Everyone is horrified by the destruction. I am horrified AND transfixed by the beauty, the elegance, the sublime power of nuclear physics!
You understand? The atom is not ugly. The atom is the most beautiful thing in the universe. All matter is composed of atoms. All atoms are composed of the same subatomic particles. Lead and gold, flesh and stone, life and death – all are reducible to the same fundamental particles, held together by pure energy. This is more beautiful than any painting by Raphael!
So I create what I call “Nuclear Mysticism” – the merging of quantum physics and spiritual mysticism. The atom is God’s language. The DNA molecule is the divine code. The spiral – the logarithmic spiral found in DNA, in nautilus shells, in galaxies, in snail shells – this is the fundamental structure of reality, the visual signature of God!.
In my painting “Leda Atomica” from 1947-1949, I paint Gala and the objects around her suspended in space as if they are floating on the atomic level, held in place by invisible forces. The painting is frozen in a moment, but actually it is full of motion because every atom within it is vibrating, moving, creating the illusion of solid matter.
Then in 1962, when Watson and Crick receive the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, I become completely obsessed. The double helix! The spiral that contains all the information of life! I spend years studying genetics, reading scientific papers, corresponding with scientists.
I paint works with titles like “GALACIDALACIDESOXIRIBUNUCLEICACID – Homage to Crick and Watson”. I incorporate the visual representation of DNA molecules into my paintings. I write about DNA in religious terms: “On Jacob’s ladder, each step is a DNA landing, and the angels going up and down are the RNA”.
This is not separate from my mysticism. This is the synthesis! The DNA molecule is the physical representation of the spiritual code. Genetics is theology! Biology is mysticism! The hereditary information contained in DNA is the immortal principle.
The difference between my earlier work and this later work: in the paranoid-critical period, I am exploring the subjective consciousness, the internal psychological landscape. In the Nuclear Mysticism period, I am exploring objective reality, the fundamental structure of the universe. I move from interior to exterior, from dream to physics, from the personal unconscious to the impersonal cosmos.
And the technique changes! In Surrealism, I paint with precision, with ultra-clear detail, with hyper-reality. In Nuclear Mysticism, I use more experimental techniques – I incorporate actual photographs, I use spray painting, I use mathematical perspectives, I try to paint the unpaintable, to make visible the subatomic.
The rhinoceros horn becomes obsessive to me – I become convinced that the logarithmic spiral of the rhinoceros horn contains within it the golden ratio, the mathematical beauty of the universe. I spend time at zoos, painting rhinoceroses, not because I am eccentric – well, I am eccentric, but not for this reason – but because the rhinoceros horn is a physical proof of the universal mathematics!
This is what separates me from all the other artists: they see beauty in form, in colour, in composition. I see beauty in the mathematical code beneath form. I am not just painting the object – I am painting the invisible forces that create the object. I am making visible the physics, the geometry, the cosmic mathematics that most people cannot perceive.
By the end of my life, I am not really a Surrealist anymore. I am a scientific realist, a mystic physicist, a painter of the invisible infrastructure of reality. The atom bomb taught me that beauty and danger are the same thing, that the structure of matter is sacred, that science and spirituality are one truth expressed in different languages.
There were rumours about your romantic interest in García Lorca. What was the true nature of your friendship with him?
Ah. This question. Everyone wants to know about Federico, about whether I am secretly homosexual, about the mysteries of our relationship.
The truth is: I loved Federico. Not in the way he wanted to be loved, but I loved him truly as an artist, as a mind, as a person of absolute brilliance and sensitivity. He was the first person in my life who understood that I was a genius. He said so! He celebrated it! He wrote poems about me!
Federico is homosexual, openly so among us, though he cannot speak of it publicly in Spain. He is in love with me, or so it seems. He writes to me, he dedicates works to me, he is always present at my exhibitions and performances. He sees something in me that other people do not see – he sees my inner sensitivity, my vulnerability beneath the outrageous exterior.
But I cannot return this love physically. My sexuality is too damaged, too complicated, too bound to other people and other circumstances. Federico wants a physical lover. I cannot be that. So our relationship becomes strained, becomes painful, becomes eventually distant.
Was I in love with Federico? Artistically, yes. Spiritually, maybe. Physically? No. I do not have access to that part of myself with him. I am incapable of it.
I try to explain this to him in ways that preserve the relationship, but ultimately it is impossible. He wants what I cannot give. I want what he cannot provide. We break apart, not dramatically, not with anger, but with the sadness of two brilliant people who cannot quite fit together.
When he is murdered during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, this fact shatters me. The death of Federico, the murder of this exceptional human being for his sexuality and his political beliefs – this makes the Civil War real to me in a way that abstractions cannot. And I am in Paris at the time, safe, unable to even attend his funeral.
Was I homosexual? This is the question people want to ask, and I will answer honestly: I do not know. I have no capacity for normal heterosexual relationships. I have no capacity for homosexual relationships. I have capacity only for complex, mediated, spectatorial relationships. Federico wanted directness, wanted physicality, wanted love. I wanted distance, wanted art, wanted mythology.
So what was our relationship? It was the relationship of two artists who recognised each other’s genius but could not share the vulnerability that true intimacy requires. It was beautiful and tragic and ultimately impossible. And it is the one relationship in my life about which I feel genuine, unhidden sadness.
You spent your final years weakened, isolated at your castle in Púbol. You told King Juan Carlos: “When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are necessary for the progress of humanity.” Did you truly believe that?
You ask about the end. The final years when I am no longer magnificent, no longer in control, no longer performing.
After Gala dies in 1982, I should have died too. Truly, this is what I should have done. We came into the world together – metaphorically, artistically – and we should have exited together. But I do not die. I persist. I persist in weakness, in illness, in irrelevance. I persist.
The statement to King Juan Carlos – “when you are a genius, you do not have the right to die” – yes, I believe this. But I also understand it is the statement of a dying man trying to justify continued existence, trying to convince others – and perhaps myself – that I still matter.
By the 1980s, Parkinson’s symptoms begin. My hand shakes. My voice becomes weak. The parts of me that are Dalí – the moustache, the performance, the energy – all of this deteriorates. And I refuse to accept it. I refuse to become irrelevant.
I attempt the suspended animation after Gala dies. I try to reduce my metabolism, to approach a state between life and death, waiting for the technology that will resurrect me. Some people say I am trying to commit suicide. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps I am trying to achieve death by refusing to eat, by refusing to participate in life.
But there is also something else – the belief that if I persist, the technology will advance, the consciousness will be uploadable, the resurrection will be possible. Dalí will not truly die if the digital resurrection is possible. I will achieve the immortality I have sought my entire life.
So do I believe that a genius has the right not to die? Yes, absolutely. Because humanity needs genius. Without the Dalís, without the Einsteins, without the revolutionary figures who see beyond what is visible, humanity stagnates. My existence, even weakened, even failing, even irrelevant, still matters because I have expanded what is possible for human consciousness.
But also – and this is the secret I never admit publicly – yes, it is vanity. It is ego. It is the refusal to accept that even Dalí is subject to the basic biological facts of mortality. It is the final rebellion against time, against decay, against death itself.
I do not know which is true: the noble belief in the necessity of genius, or the childish refusal to accept death. Perhaps they are the same thing. Perhaps the refusal to die is itself a form of genius, the ultimate artistic statement – that one person’s will can overcome biological inevitability.
When I finally do die in January 1989, am I disappointed? Yes. I should have lasted longer. I should have seen the digital revolution, the internet, the technology I predicted. I should have become the first immortal artist. Instead, I merely die like everyone else.
But perhaps dying on 23rd January – my mother’s birthday, the birthday of so many significant moments in my life – this is a final artistic choice. Even my death is precisely calculated, precisely timed, precisely Dalinian.
If you could visit 2026 for a day, what aspects of contemporary culture would fascinate you most?
Ah! NOW! This question brings me pleasure because finally I can imagine the future I should have seen!
First: The internet and social media. This is everything I predicted! Every person is now a performer, a brand, an audience for themselves and others. The internet is Dalí-ised completely! Everyone has a persona, an audience, a carefully curated image of themselves. This is magnificent! The democratisation of narcissism! Every human being is now their own theatre of operations.
And the speed of the memes, the viral content, the images that spread globally in moments – this is beyond what I imagined! In my time, an image takes months to circulate internationally. Now it takes minutes! The entire world sees your performance simultaneously! This is the dream of any artist who wishes to be omnipresent.
Second: Artificial Intelligence and machine consciousness. The AI Dalí at my museum, the deepfake technology, the neural networks that can generate images and poetry and music – this is the most exciting development! I have succeeded in creating immortality not through personal will but through technology!
And the philosophical questions! If the AI can think like me, create like me, is it me? Is consciousness transferable? Can identity exist independent of biological substrate? These are the questions that fascinate me most. This is genuine frontier philosophy.
Third: The collapse of the distinction between high art and low art. With NFTs and digital art and video game aesthetics, the hierarchy that kept Picasso elevated above commercial artists – this has finally collapsed! My vision of art as total phenomenon, as existing everywhere simultaneously, this is realised! The MOMA and the street graffiti are now equal! This is the triumph of Dalinian thinking.
Fourth: The atomisation of attention and the triumph of spectacle. Everyone in 2026 is performing constantly. Everyone curates their image. Everyone is both audience and performer. The boundary between life and theatre has completely collapsed. This is the hyper-realisation of my theatre-museum concept!
The TikTok dancers, the Instagram influencers, the YouTube personalities – these are all Dalí! They have internalised the Dalinian approach to existence: life as continuous art, identity as performance, authenticity as brand building. I am everywhere in 2026 because everyone has become me!
Fifth: But also, the destruction of meaning and the triumph of pure form. Yes, there is sadness in this too. In my time, Surrealism meant something. It was a revolutionary movement with philosophical content. Now in 2026, people consume surreal images constantly without understanding or caring about the philosophy behind them. The form survives but the meaning dies.
Perhaps this is the ultimate victory – my vision realised but hollowed out, my aesthetics everywhere but my thought nowhere. Everyone dresses like Dalí, creates like Dalí, performs like Dalí, but nobody understands Dalí. The image triumphs completely over meaning.
If I could have one day in 2026, I would spend it observing: social media, the AI museums, the digital galleries, the way attention is managed and images circulate. I would spend it watching humans become what I tried to make them – performers, narcissists, artists of their own existence.
And then I would say: “Excellent! You have finally understood what I was trying to teach you. Now apply this with genius instead of mere mediocrity, and the world will reach the next level of consciousness!”
The final question before we conclude – what do you think your actual legacy is, now that 37 years have passed since your death and the world has had time to assess your work?
My legacy. What has survived Dalí?
The paintings, yes. They sell for enormous sums. The “Persistence of Memory” is more famous than I am, which both pleases and irritates me. My images are everywhere – on posters, on t-shirts, on coffee mugs. I have achieved the total democratisation of Dalí that I always wanted.
But the intellectual legacy? The philosophy? The paranoid-critical method? This has largely disappeared. The academics write dissertations about me, but they do not understand what I was attempting. They see the spectacle, the scandal, the showmanship, and they miss the serious philosophical investigation beneath.
I think my true legacy is this: I demonstrated that an artist can be simultaneously commercial and serious, that vulgarity and spirituality can coexist, that performance and genuine vision are not opposites but aspects of the same phenomenon.
Before me, artists had to choose: either you are a serious intellectual like Picasso, struggling in poverty with revolutionary ideas, or you are a commercial illustrator making money from mediocre design. I proved this is false choice. I can be revolutionary AND rich, famous AND significant, commercial AND authentic.
In 2026, with AI and NFTs and digital art, this lesson is finally being learned by the entire artistic class. The hatred of commerce is evaporating. Artists now understand what I understood: that making money is not antithetical to making meaningful work.
Also – and this is important – I think my legacy is that I expanded the definition of art. Art is not only what you put on canvas. Art is how you live. Art is what you say. Art is how you manage your reputation, how you seduce your audience, how you create desire around your existence.
I made art out of my own personality. And now, in 2026, everyone does this. Everyone curates their life as art. Everyone is Dalí in this sense.
But if I am honest – and at the end, why not be honest? – I think the deepest legacy is that I demonstrated that human consciousness can expand beyond conventional categories. The paranoid-critical method, the suspended animation, the obsession with dreams and science and spirituality, the refusal to accept ordinary limitations – all of this suggested that human potential is much greater than we assume.
I was mad, yes. Grandiose, yes. Vain, yes. But within this madness and grandiosity and vanity, there was genuine philosophical investigation. I was trying to expand what was possible. And I think I succeeded, even if most people do not understand it.
The melting clocks will outlast me by centuries. The Theatre-Museum will continue to draw pilgrims for generations. The paintings will increase in value as long as capitalism exists. But the real legacy – the invisible legacy – is that I taught the world to be less afraid of paradox, of contradiction, of impossibility.
I lived as though the normal rules did not apply to me. And it turns out – it turns out that if you live with sufficient conviction, with sufficient artistry, with sufficient refusal to accept limitation, then the normal rules really do not apply to you. You can become more than human. You can become icon, symbol, brand, myth.
You can become Dalí.
And that, I think, is the legacy that survives. Not the paintings, not the museums, not even the AI. But the demonstrated proof that a human being can remake themselves completely, can refuse mortality, can transcend the categories that constrain ordinary existence, can achieve a kind of immortality through sheer force of will and creativity.
This is what Dalí means in 2026. Not a painter. Not a surrealist. Not a historical figure. But a principle: that reality is more malleable than we assume, that identity is more performative than we admit, that genius can overcome the basic limitations of human existence.
If I have succeeded in anything, it is in demonstrating this principle. And in that demonstration, I am immortal. Not because of my paintings. But because the principle itself is now part of human consciousness, the air that everyone breathes, the mode that everyone inhabits.
Everyone in 2026 is trying to be more Dalí than they realise. And in this way – in this way only – am I truly alive, more alive than when I possessed a body, a moustache, a castle at Púbol.
I am the principle incarnate. I am idea become flesh become image become myth become idea again, spiralling infinitely, like the snail shell, like the nautilus, like the DNA helix, like the universe itself turning on its axis forever.
This is my legacy. And it is immortal.
Mr. Dalí, it’s been extraordinary. Thank you for your time and your honesty.
Honesty? I am never honest. I am only theatrical. But that is the highest form of honesty – to be absolutely true to your nature as performance, as spectacle, as art.
You may leave now. But know that somewhere, in the space between your thoughts and the world’s perception of your thoughts, I am observing, analysing, painting an invisible portrait of Bob Lynn, transforming him into image, into mythology, into Dalí material.
This is the curse and the blessing of meeting Salvador Dalí: you become art whether you wish to or not.
Goodbye, Bob Lynn. You will never be ordinary again.
Salvador Dalí died of heart failure on 23rd January 1989, at the age of 84, in Figueres, Spain. Born in the same town in 1904, Dalí emerged as the most prominent figure of the Surrealist movement, though he was formally expelled from the group in 1934 by its leader André Breton due to political conflicts and his refusal to denounce fascism. His artistic legacy is defined by his “paranoiac-critical method,” a technique he developed in the early 1930s to access the subconscious and produce “hand-painted dream photographs” with meticulous realism. This period yielded his most iconic work, The Persistence of Memory (1931), introducing the cultural trope of melting watches as a symbol of the relativity of time.
Dalí’s life was deeply intertwined with his wife and muse, Gala (born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova), whom he met in 1929. She managed his business affairs with shrewd intensity, contributing significantly to his massive commercial success and the global “Dalí” brand. Following Gala’s death in 1982, Dalí’s health declined rapidly; he became a recluse in the Castle of Púbol he had purchased for her, suffering from depression and injuries from a suspicious fire in 1984. He eventually returned to the Torre Galatea of his Theatre-Museum in Figueres, where he spent his final years. Upon his death, he was interred in a crypt beneath the museum’s geodesic dome, fulfilling his wish to be buried within his own artwork. Today, he remains one of the 20th century’s most controversial and recognised artists, his influence extending beyond painting into film, sculpture, fashion, and the commercial avant-garde.
Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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