Salvador Dalí was born in Figueras on 11 May 1904. He commenced his studies at the School of Fine Arts, Madrid, in 1921, where he met the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. In 1923 he was suspended from the school for subversive behavior, and was finally expelled in 1926. He owed little to his professors at the School in any case and vigorously promoted the notion that he had been born a prodigy. His first solo exhibition was held in 1925 at the Dalmau Gallery, Barcelona, and his first in Paris was at the Galerie Camille Goemans in 1929. Dalí worked with Buñuel on the film Un Chien andalou (1929), perhaps the earliest and most celebrated Surrealist film. The same year he met many of the Surrealist artists and was officially accepted into the movement, bringing with him a talent for notoriety.

The Persistence of Memory, his first exhibition in New York, in 1932, was an immediate success, and Dalí courted the public with a flamboyance that was to characterize the rest of his career. This was followed by his first one-man show in the United States in 1933 also at the Julian Levy Gallery. By now married, Dalí and Gala make their first trip to New York, and his series of special illustrations of the city appears in the American Weekly from February to July. His third exhibit at the Julien Levy Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York was a great success and in 1935 Levy publishes The Conquest of the Irrational in New York and Paris. This major essay expounds on Dalí’s "paranoiac-critical" method, a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge, based on the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena." Dalí lectures at the Museum of Modern Art on "Surrealist Paintings and Paranoiac Images." The same year he entered into an agreement with Edward James, the English writer and collector, to purchase many of his works. Like many of the avant-garde artists, Dalí fled Europe for the United States of America in 1940, returning eventually in 1948. Dalí's career continued to flirt with scandal, making him one of the few modern artists known to the general public. In old age, his 'bad boy' image institutionalized, he received retrospective exhibitions, honors, dedicated museums to house his work, and was even elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Dalí died in Figueres on 25 January 1989.

JULIAN LEVY (1906-1981) - left Harvard without a degree after three and a half years. He subsequently traveled to Paris to make movies. While working in a bookstore, he organized an Atget exhibition and then decided to start an art gallery, using money inherited from his mother. The Julien Levy Gallery (1931-49) was a pioneering and influential modern gallery, serving as New York’s primary source for surrealism, neoromanticism, and photography. Among those he exhibited during his first two years were Walker Evans, Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Pavel Tchelitchew, and George Platt Lynes. Levy’s first wife, Joella, was the daughter of the poet Mina Loy, and Loy served as the gallery’s Paris contact. Levy knew McBride not only though professional contact but through the askew salon, and McBride was often a guest at the Levy’s parties.

Last week a still abler Parisian surrealist named Salvador Dali arrived in Manhattan with a load of minutely painted canvases to bewilder the eye of logic.

Surrealist Dali, 29, is called a Parisian because that city has been his home for six years. Actually he is a Spaniard, an admirer, friend and onetime disciple of his fellow Catalan expatriate Pablo Picasso. It is hard enough for any surrealist to explain what he means, but dapper, quick little Salvador Dali was additionally handicapped last week but the fact that he speaks no English at all. Still he made a valiant effort. Reporters were ushered into his hotel suite which had been prepared as a visual object lesson. In the center of the room was a small table. On the table was a red plush Catalan liberty cap and a rocking chair. Balanced on the seat of the chair was a yellow shaded table lamp. There were also two six-foot loaves of French bread on the mantelpiece and a banner with a strange device, a white skull, a key, a leaf, a woman’s slipper and the letters DALI.

Surrealist Dali rushed forward effusively and promptly began pulling etchings and small paintings from his portfolio. Through his sponsor, Mrs. Caresse Crosby he explained his methods.

“I used to balance two broiled lamb chops on my wife’s shoulders, and then by observing the movement of tiny shadows produced by the accident of the meat … while the sun was setting I was able to attain images sufficiently lucid and appetizing for exhibition in New York.

“I do all my work subconsciously. I never use models or paint from life or landscapes. It is all imagination. That is. I see everything in a dream as I am working, and when I have finished a picture I decide what the title is to be. Some times it takes a little time before I can figure out what I have painted.

Newshawks refrained from further questions to concentrate on the etchings. One showed a chair in the middle of a forest. From a spigot in the side of the chair water poured., A hand grew out of a tree trunk. It was tossing in the air omelets that slid down a nearby board.

The chair in the forest and dozens of other Dali works went on view last week at the Julien Levy Gallery. Among them; Monument to Woman and Child, a great gray whorl that might be wood or weathered rock, in which can be seen ogling men’s faces, clutching hands, Napoleon, the Mona Lisa, a pair of buttocks; The Spectre of Sex Appeal, with a little child in a blue sailor suit by a rocky seashore gazing at a gigantic diseased figure propped up by forked sticks.

The fanciest title belongs to the simplest canvas: Skull and Its Lyrical Appendage Leaning on a Night Table Which Has the Temperature of a Cardinal Bird’s Nest. An elongated grand piano is flying off into the air. The keyboard runs earthward into a heart-shaped skull, which is indeed leaning on a night table. Sharp eyes can find the cardinal bird, but there is no nest.

The first Dali canvas to attract general U.S. attention was shown at last summer’s Century of Progress Exhibition under its official title, The Persistence of Memory. All Chicago knew it as “The Wet Watches.” In the foreground were four great watches. One dripped over the edge of a table like so much melting butter. A second, like an old washrag, hung over a dead branch. The third reposed on the back of a small monster with a long delicate nose. The fourth, rigid, was crawling with ants.

Critic Lewis Mumford thus describes the Dali canvases.

“Unlike the sentimental painters who represent dreams as misty and delicate Dali shows them hard and as severely realistic in surface as dreams often are….Dali does not permit the dream to dissolve; his pictures are, as it were, frozen nightmares.”

They are also completely devoid of humor and largely erotic. A familiar property in Dali paintings is a crutch which supports fantastic pieces of flesh.

Painting in his métier but the cinema is Salvador Dali’s hobby. Already he has written and helped to produce two surrealist cinemas, Le Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or. The latter film an irrational hodge-podge of sense and sensuality, was banned in Paris but shown behind locked doors in Manhattan two winters ago. Excerpt from the official synopsis of L’Age D’Or.

“In the course of a final ineffectual episode, the protagonist … answers with foul insults and returns determinedly to the woman he loves. At this very moment an inexplicable accident separates them forever, and the man is last seen throwing a burning tree out of the window, a large agricultural implement, an archbishop, a giraffe feathers.”

SALVADOR DALI - THE FASHIONABLE, very disputed and very difficult exhibition of the week is the Salvador Dali show in the Julien Levi Gallery. And it is not cubistic, either. It seems that perfectly straight, highly finished, beautifully colored painting can have its difficulty, too, for Señor Dali is psychoanalytic. He doesn’t paint you from the outside but from the inside.

This innovation made an instant hit with the carefully chosen and extremely “advanced” assembly at the private view on Tuesday, and this in spite of the fact that psychoanalysis had been considered “out” as a dinner-table topic, these two years past. But we had never had it in pictures, you see. In pictures it is different. It has a fresh and unexpected note. Or possibly Señor Dali is an unusually good “control”. Isn’t that what they call it? A “control?” In spiritualistic circles, I mean. For obviously, it is his own self that he is analyzing all the time.

This starts Señor Dali off to a new kind of reputation with us. This is his third. He has been a psychoanalyst all the time, only we didn’t know that. At first, when the strange pictures began to come over, we thought him more than a little mad. That example in the present show at the Modern Museum called “The Persistence of Memory” was one of them.

You remember it, no doubt, with the apparently melted watch bending at right angles over the ledge, crystal, dial, hands and all. That was at the time when some of our more profound counselors were urging us to be a little mad, like the Russians, so that we might be better artists. Señor Dali, we thought, was overenthusiastic, but just the same, he was in the proper school, and so he was taken right in by our collectors.

The year after that, however, when a new invoice of Dali pictures arrived in this country, there was considerable consternation just at first, for the new compositions were thought – there is no harm in telling it now – risqué. However, for one reason or another, all the pictures sold, and quickly. I know one gentleman who told me he had never bought oil paintings before in his life, but he had been so thrilled by the Dalis that he could not resist the temptation to acquire two. But for all that, he hung the two paintings high up in an obscure corner of his sitting room so that he would not be obliged to explain them to his female relatives when they came to visit him. He could not explain them, anyway. He just liked them.

But lately, I understand, he has taken the two pictures down from their obscurity and placed them prominently in his parlor with spotlights on them, and all the other Dali collectors have done the same, for in the light of the new revelations of the current exhibition this art is found to be entirely O.K. It is psychoanalytic. Do you see? Everything goes – in psychoanalysis. It’s all a dream. Do you see? It’s nothing you have done or will do, but, as far as I can make out, it’s something you have repressed. Therefore it’s altogether to your credit. Especially when it is so marvelously painted as Señor Dali does it.

I dare say if you were to look at some of these highly finished miniatures through a telescope you would see these landscapes receding to endless perspectives, which each little hillock behind every other little hillock, all in impeccable gradations, just as in nature. When these qualities in the Dali oeuvre shall have been well advertised, you will find all the old-timers dashing, or perhaps, “hobbling” is the word, to the gallery, in order to feast with their own eyes upon, at last, the destruction of this cursed cubism which has occupied the public attention too long and has just swelled up again this week at the Modern Museum into historic proportions. But such, alas, the Dali clientele will not be formed. It’s for the new people, I think, like the gentleman I told you of, who liked them spontaneously and didn’t’ t know why.

P.S. I think the work called “Javanese Manikin” is Salvador Dali at his best. I don’t think he’ll ever dig anything better out of his subconscious. It is extraordinarily weird and extraordinarily attuned to the scientifically deranged emotional life of the day.