Swans Reflecting Elephants

There never has been, and possibly never will be, an artist as eccentric or as wildly prolific as Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). Every aspect of his life added to his unpredictable persona – intoxicatingly brilliant some days, outrageously dotty on others.

Of course he is most admired for the hallucinatory, dream-like fantasies he created for his paintings, but he also turned his hand to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing and filmmaking.

He helped Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence for Spellbound, and had previously collaborated with the legendary film director Luis Buñuel in Un Chien Andalou, 1927 – a radically unstructured, disorienting exploration of Freudian free-association. It is best remembered for a scene with an eye in extreme close-up being sliced by a razor blade.

The film caused a sensation, and remains in the canon of ground-breaking cinema. It also greatly enhanced Dalí’s credentials as perhaps the most potent of the Surrealists.

He is undoubtedly a Spanish artist, although Dalí is not Spanish name, and he repeatedly claimed that his forebears were of Arab origin – ‘in my family tree my Arab lineage back to the time of Cervantes has been almost definitely established. I can even trace my ancestry back to the Moors.”

He also asserted that this helps explain why he had a love ‘of everything that is gilded and excessive, including oriental clothes and all things luxurious’.

He was born in Figueres, Spain in 1904, to a prosperous family who had recently lost their first son, also called Salvador. As a child Dalí was often told that he was the reincarnation of his dead brother, repercussions of which he felt throughout his life.

He was interested in art from a young age, and the Catalan landscapes of his childhood became recurring motifs in his later work.

Unlike many artists before him, his parents had been encouraging about fulfilling his artistic inclinations – he had his first drawing tutor at 10, and enrolled at the Madrid School of Fine Arts in his late teens.

Salvador was remembered as a student for his flamboyant, mischievous personality, rather than anything he produced in the way of art.

Favouring extremely long hair, he would dress like an English gentleman of the 19th century, including knee-length britches. The familiar moustache that became his identifying feature was inspired by his hero, the incomparable Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. Eventually, he was expelled for insulting one of his professors during his final examination before graduation.

Dalí took himself off to Paris, and was transfixed. He grew to know Picasso, and was deeply invigorated by all that had been achieved by the pioneering Cubists and Futurists.

Soon he was to be obsessed by the psychoanalytic concepts of Freud, eventually using them to generate imagery, exploring how to reinterpret and alter reality. He was becoming increasingly drawn to themes of eroticism, death and decay in his new work.

His mesmerising 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory has become one of the most popular images in the history of art – melting watches have become synonymous with his name, and in reality, with his brand.

Dalí sought to convey the fluidity of time, inspired after seeing how camembert cheese oozed out of shape in the sun. By flipping reality on its head, and having solid objects melt in the same way, he was able to play with rational perception. Ants are swarming as if attracted to rotting putrefaction, indicating Dali’s fascination with mortality. However, the picture’s core theme is the irrelevance of time to the subconscious, in this beguiling evocation of a dream-state.

In his 1937 picture Swans Reflecting Elephants, painted during what he would term his paranoiac-critical period, he highlights his familiar double-image that he had explained in his essay The Conquest of the Irrational.

Dalí had describedthis as “a spontaneous method of irrational understanding based upon the interpretative critical association of delirious phenomena.”

Even if it is a little unclear quite what he meant, the painting’s visual illusions are bewitching enough, and the picture itself is one of the greatest creations of the Surrealist movement.

Three swans are reflected in the central lake waters, bordered by trees; their heads are transformed into elephant heads in the reflection, just as the reflected trees are read as elephant bodies.

In this Catalan landscape, his meticulous brushwork swirls the bold autumnal colours to contrast with the stillness of the lake. This iconic tour de force perfectly demonstrates his powers in controlling a highly-complex composition.

As the impact World War 2 spread, Dalí and his wife/muse Gala fled to the United States, where they settled for eight years before they would return to Spain. He had embraced Franco’s dictatorship, much to the dismay of other Spanish artists. Dalí was no longer comfortable to be considered a Surrealist, and they no longer wanted to be associated with him.

He was to spend his last three decades exploring unusual media and processes, and increasingly oddball attention-seeking pranks. A new generation of artists had appeared, who respected his work and eccentricities, with Andy Warhol declaring him to be an important influence on Pop Art.

Dalí had bought a castle for Gala, where she would retreat alone for weeks at a time; Dali was not permitted to visit without her written consent. This only contributed to his depression and failing health, and in 1980, at 76, he became gravely ill. Supposedly Gala, who was by now reaching senility, had been dosing him with a cocktail of unprescribed medicines, increasingly destroying his remaining artistic capabilities. When she died, Dalí lost his own will to live, deliberately attempting to dehydrate himself.

There are reports that in his last days he was forced by his guardians to sign blank canvases that would later be used in forgeries of his work. He eventually died of heart failure at 84, and was buried in a crypt below the stage of his Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres.

Dalí’s legacy certainly lives on, as apparently does his celebrated moustache. When his remains were exhumed in 2017 for a court-ordered paternity test, the moustache was found to be perfectly intact, almost three decades after his burial. Most enduring of all, however, was his belief in the notion that life is the greatest form of art.