DALI PLANET is a collection of nearly 200 posts that trace the life — more or less chronologically — of Salvador Dali, from his family origins in the late 19th century to his death in 1989 to the major tributes bestowed on him posthumously in 2004, the centenary of his birth, and beyond.

This is, I believe, the most comprehensive Dali biography available for free online, and continues to be amended as fresh information comes to light.

These episodes in a remarkable life first appeared as posts on my art blog, Dali House, between July 2007 and January 2008, and that series was in turn based on my Dali Planet tour for Google Earth.

Many of the “posts” on this blog-style site take the form of information “balloons” designed for Google Earth that are in .jpg format, so the search mechanism can’t read them, but the menu index will guide you to almost anything specific. Unfortunately you can’t copy and paste from a .jpg, but go ahead and copy the balloons. (If you do, a simple credit to Paul Dorsey’s Dali Planet would be appreciated, especially with a link.)

Also, in many cases the Google Earth tour dictated the order of the posts by geographical proximity, and that’s why the posts sometimes veer away from the biograhical chronology.

Please note that the copyright for the great bulk of Dali’s artwork belongs to the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, based in his hometown of Figueras, Spain, and many of the photographs are outside of public domain. I use them here non-commercially to illustrate my essays.

Finally, Dali Planet is a collection of information from many online sources, and cannot be considered flawless. If you see any errors, or have any comments or suggestions, you can contact me via the “Get in touch” link in the menu.

“My life,” Salvador Dali once said to the moans of his many detractors, “is one tragical sequence of exhibitionism.”

There is a lot to dislike about Dali. He was a male chauvinist, ridiculed his friends’ needs, kowtowed to fascists, was sexually aberrant and admitted to “a pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash” that ultimately almost wrecked the market for his own art due to fraud and forgery.

How greedy was he? He told the Greek actress Melina Mercouri in 1965 that he would make anything for money. “Anything! I do not have any kind of scruple.” His and Gala’s neighbours in Port Lligat claimed that in their later years they kept separate trunkloads of dollars, Spanish pesetas and French francs. And, when signing autographs for fans, Dali would often pocket their pens.

At right, with Amanda Lear, his “little squirrel” of the ’60s, who gets her own star on the Daliwood Walk of Fame.

Was he perverse? He said that while he was painting his first surrealist works, like “The Great Masturbator”, he thought about the women of Paris who always spurned his advances: “With my hand, before my wardrobe mirror, I accomplished the rhythmic and solitary sacrifice in which I was going to prolong as much as possible the incipient pleasure looked forward to and contained in all the feminine forms I had looked at longingly that afternoon …

“At the end of a long, exhausting and mortal 15 minutes, having reached the limit of my strength, I wrenched out the ultimate pleasure with all the animal force of my clenched hand, a pleasure mingled as always with the bitter and burning release of my tears — this in the heart of Paris, where I sensed all about me the gleaming foam of the thighs of feminine beds. Salvador Dali lay down alone in his bed.”

There are a few more such anecdotes in this tour, but as to the central debate over whether he was in fact sexually impotent, he shrugged it off: “For the artist, the libido and sexual instincts are sublimated in the artistic creation. Because of that, every great artist is a little impotent in the sexual sense.”

So no “Dali the Next Generation”, then? No. He had an “instinctive horror” of children, who he referred to as “embryons”. “No like le embryons!” he cried in the 1970s documentary “Hello, Dali”, even as he made the sign of the cross over an infant being carried past him.

“The sons of extraordinary men are almost always mediocre,” he grumbled, and on another occasion he commented that Picasso’s offspring were all crazy. “Imagine what a child of Dali’s would be like!” he warned.

“I started calling myself a genius to impress people, and ended up being one,” Dali said, and on another occasion: “When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.”

In a 1994 article for Time, the influential art critic Robert Hughes lamented that Dali had long before his death “collapsed into wretched exhibitionism” and dimissed him as “an important artist for about 10 years, starting in the late 1920s”.

This is a grave error in judgement that others tend to repeat without due consideration. In the same magazine Richard Lacayo, reviewing the 2005 Dali retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, recited the usual litany of complaints:

“For a long time the near universal judgment on Salvador Dali was that he had outlived himself. The surrealist work he did from 1929 to 1939 was brilliant and durable. After that came decades of repetition and kitsch, the years of his collaborations with Walt Disney — never completed — and his magazine ads for Elsa Schiaparelli lipstick.

“It didn’t help that from early on he was art’s state-of-the-art goofball … Then came the Spanish Civil War. When it was over Picasso refused to set foot in Spain so long as the victorious Franco still reigned. But Dali was soon returning for a part of each year — and worse, giving his blessing to the Generalissimo’s wretched regime.”

By the time he died “Dali’s wobbly postwar output and his threadbare shenanigans had tarnished his reputation for good — or so it seemed.”

Fortunately the Philadelphia exhibition convinced Lacayo of the unfairness of this one-sided view, and other shows like it around the world did the same for millions more doubters.

I share the contention that Dali was a genius throughout his life, and his art was often miraculous. Even one of his severest critics, George Orwell, acknowledged that, “He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud.”

Dali was certainly confounding, and often deliberately so. The goal of his art, he said, was to “systematise confusion and thus help to discredit completely the world of reality”.

He created thousands of paintings, drawings and prints and dozens of sculptures and designed stage sets and costumes for the ballet and the theatre.

He illustrated books, made films, explored emerging technology, concocted commercial advertising and came out with clothing, jewellery, perfume, even tea sets.

Only a handful of his creations were trite; a few were surely self-serving. The rest remain compelling, forceful, mentally provocative and even spiritually nurturing.

And he did all of this with a profound understanding of celebrity, anticipating Warhol by decades, not to mention performance art. “Dali took it as his fundamental intellectual responsibility to irritate and transgress, exuberantly and unrepentantly,” art historian Charles Stuckey wrote in Art in America.

He did so convinced that mankind had reached a dangerous precipice. “Our epoch is dying of moral scepticism and spiritual nothingness,” he fretted in his autobiography, “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali”.

“Imaginative slothfulness, entrusting itself to the mechanical, momentary and material pseudo-progress of the post-war period, has de-hierarchised the spirit. It has disarmed it, dishonoured it before death and eternity. Mechanical civilisation will be destroyed by war. The machine is doomed to crumble and rust, gutted on the battlefields, and the youthful, energetic masses that have constructed them are doomed to serve as cannon fodder.”

In the conflagration of Hiroshima, however, Dali recognised the promise of a new beginning. The atom’s division set him on a new course between the science of spinning molecules and the serenity he found in the Catholic faith of his forebears that produced some of his most timeless work.