'Swans Reflecting Elephants' Features 'Mystery Man': Who is This Background Figure?

There's been some debate as to the identity of the human figure at distant left in Dali's great oil on canvas, "Swans Reflecting Elephants."

Some says it's artist and Dali friend, Marcel Duchamp. Others insist it's Edward F.W. James, the British poet and patron of surrealism, who purchased a number of important Dali paintings in the mid-1930s.

Shown here, together with the canvas, is a photo of Duchamp. Was it him or James? What might your thoughts be about the "mystery man"?

Images used under Fair Use guidelines and solely for journalistic purposes. The two best places to see original Dali works are the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, and the Teatru-Museu Dali in Figueres, Spain.

Rare Christmas Image by Salvador Dali!

Here's a quite rare image by Salvador Dali, painted in 1960 for Hallmark Greeting Cards. It turns out this one wasn't used, but two other images by Dali were reproduced on the company's cards. They're now considered fairly rare collectors' items.

Look for two more rather rare Dali-related photos coming to this blog in early 2015.

(Image used under Fair Use provisions and solely for journalistic purposes).

Pink Rhino Joins Salvador Dali at the St. Regis Hotel!

Here's a photo of the Divine Dali accompanied by friends and acquaintances in the King Cole Lounge of the stately St. Regis Hotel in New York, circa 1974. The young man in the foreground is Charles Wright, from Boston, Mass. at the time -- an artist who, as I recall, had painted a pink rhinoceros on a T-shirt as a gift for Mr. Dali.

If memory serves, some of the others in this snap are mathematics/physics professors from an east coast university, probably consulting with Dali on some creative/scientific Dalinian project. (Photo used here for journalistic purposes only.)

'Hallucinogenic Toreador' Possibly Dali's Most All-Inclusive & Important Painting

Your humble blogger's favorite Dali painting has long been "Santiago El Grande." But if asked which Dali canvas captures, better than any other, the overall essence of Dali's inspirations, techniques, and Catalan sensibilities, my answer keeps locking on one work: the immense and dazzlingly colorful "Hallucinogenic Toreador" (1970, Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida).

I recently stopped off at the museum again, en route to Sanibel Island, Florida, accompanied by my wife, who's seen in the left foreground here. I never tire of this remarkable picture -- maybe the best double-image ever depicted by Dali's sure brush.

On Dali's easel in Spain for at least a year, "Toreador" includes, of course, an apotheosis of the bullfight -- an iconic Spanish spectacle Dali attended with some regularity (while wife Gala deplored the "sport". I do, too, but that's another story).

The work also features, at lower left, a nod to Spanish Cubist painter Juan Gris, as well as the legend of St. Narciso, symbolized by the large flies.

It's no surprise that an entire book was written about the painting, translated, "All Dali in One Painting." It is quintessentially Spanish and quintessentially Dali!

(Images used based on fair use/journalistic purposes only, and not for commercial use.)

Dali Gained Inspiration from Many of the Classics

Salvador Dali's art often was informed -- and made extraordinarily interesting -- by works of many of the great artists that came long before him.

Here, in his "Rhinocerotic Disintegration of Illissos of Phidias" of 1954, Dali paid homage to the Greek sculpture by Phidias that's owned by the British Museum and has recently been lent to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Dali reimagined the Greek river-god's morphology, now comprised of atomic particle-like "rhino horns" and exhibiting a discontinuity of matter that intrigued the scientifically minded Surrealist master.

For Dali -- consumed at this period in his career with new discoveries in mathematics and atomic physics -- the horn of the rhinoceros was a natural logarithmic spiral and inherent in the mathematical harmony of his exacting compositions. (Painting in the collection of the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, Figueres, Spain, and used in this blog for fair use/journalistic, non-commercial purposes only.)