The first time Dali’s work was seen in the United States it was at the 27th Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928.

Three of his paintings were on view at Andrew Carnegie’s museum (pictured in the aerial shot below), though not “Female Nude” or “Unsatisfied Desires”, seen above, which had caused a scandal earlier in the year when they were shown at the Maragall Gallery in Barcelona.

Dali responded during a lecture by insulting “all the painters who were doing twisted trees”. He was proud of causing an uproar. A few years later at Barcelona’s Atheneo he called the founder of an event’s host organisation “the pederast and the great hairy putrified man”.

“Everyone threw chairs and broke up everything,” he scoffed. “The police had to protect me.”

In Paris, meanwhile, Dali signed his first contract, with art dealer Camille Goemans, met again with Picasso and Miro, made his first direct contact with surrealist ringleader Andre Breton (seen here in a photo by Man Ray) — and made another tour of the brothels.

In Figueras in the autumn, Dali and Luis Bunuel wrote the screenplay for “Un Chien Andalou”, which would end up as a conceptually incoherent yet graphically riveting 17-minute milestone in cinema history, best remembered for its scenes of a straight razor slicing across a woman’s eyeball (actually a cow’s eye) and ants devouring a rotting hand.

Dali had exhibitions at Pierre Colle’s gallery at 29 Rue Cambaceres in Paris for three consecutive years beginning in 1931, the first two of them solo shows.

The initial exhibition, which was also Dali’s debut solo show in Paris, included “The Persistence of Memory” (discussed at length in other posts), and the Vicomte de Noailles bought “The Dream” (pictured in this post) and “Sleeping Woman-Horse-Invisible Lion” (see this post), which Dali called “the fruit of my contemplations of the rocks of Cape Creus”.

Jean Cocteau picked up “The Profanation of the Eucharistic Host”, seen above (”a painting of Catholic essence”), and Andre Breton went for “William Tell”, seen below, Dali’s first depiction of the legend, soon to become one of his recurring themes.

“The art critics began to be more seriously interested in my art,” Dali wrote in his 1942 autobiography, “but only the surrealists and society people seemed to be really touched to the quick.”

He and Gala started making the rounds of high-society dinners, where was greeted with a mix of fear and admiration. Dali reckoned the mix was right to draw the “elegant ladies” into his plan to found “a secret society of bread” that would bring about “the systematic cretinisation of the masses”.

He might have vaguely had in mind “The Conquest of Bread”, a political book popular among leftists, written by the Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, which Dali alluded to in “The Secret Life”, though he said he’d never read it.

In the atomic year 1945, referring to the version of “Basket of Bread” he did that year, Dali said he wanted to depict “the immobility of the pre-explosive object”. Above are both paintings with the same title, the 1926 edition on the right.

At right, using his loaf in November 1958.

“Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject 19 years ago. By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism.”

To the Parisian socialites of 1931 Dali proposed baking a loaf 15 metres in length and then surreptitiously leaving it somewhere “not too conspicuous or too frequented” where its mysterious appearance would spark widespread public consternation.

“I suggested the inner gardens of the Palais Royal. The bread would be brought in two trucks and placed at the designated spot by a gang of members of the secret society disguised as workers, who would seem to be bringing a pipe to be laid down as a water main.” Then appointed spies would wait for the reaction.

“Ordinary French Loaf with Two Fried Eggs Riding Without a Plate” or, as the title is sometimes given, “Average French Bread with Two Fried Eggs without the Plate, on Horseback, Trying to Sodomise a Heel of Portugese Bread”, 1932

Dali predicted that the huge loaf would be examined carefully in case it held explosives or poison, and since it didn’t, people would be left to speculate endlessly. Deciding that it couldn’t be the work of a madman, suspicion would turn to some political motive, or possibly a student prank, or even a surrealist statement.

“But this supposition, I knew, would not fully have convinced anyone. Those who knew the disorganisation and the incapacity of the surrealist group to carry through anything requiring a minimum of practical effort directed to no matter what end knew them beforehand to be incapable seriously undertaking the building of the 15-metre oven indispensable for the baking of the bread.”

Just as interest was beginning to cool, Dali said, a 20-metre loaf would appear out of the blue at the court of Versailles.

Two 1932 paintings both called “Anthropomorphic Bread” with 1977’s “Fertility”, showing an ear of wheat.

“The existence of a secret society now became flagrant to everyone’s eyes,” and everyone would scan the newspapers for word of a third loaf, “so that these Dalinian loaves of bread were already beginning to ‘eat’ the other news, of politics, world events and sex, making these insipid and reducing them to a secondary rank of interest.

“But instead of the third loaf of bread which was expected, an event exceeding all the limits of plausibility would occur. On the same day, at the same hour, 30-metre loaves would appear in public places of the various capitals of Europe. The following day a cable from America would announce the apparition of a new loaf of French bread 45 metres long lying on the sidewalk and reaching from the Savoy Plaza to the end of the block where the Hotel St Moritz stands.”

Foreseeing “a state of confusion, of panic and of collective hysteria”, Dali believed it was possible to “ruin systematically the logical meaning of all the mechanisms of the rational practical world”.

The naked female profile from “Untitled — Female Figure with Catalonian Bread” from 1932 finds echoes in “The Signal of Anguish” of 1934, lower left, and “Fountain of Milk Spreading Itself Uselessly on Three Shoes”, 1945 (detail here).

The year before, 1930, Dali had been invited to give a lecture at the Ateneo Barcelones, a bastion of traditional intellectual thinking, and decided to stir people up. He launched into a defence of the Marquis de Sade, saying he was a far truer intellect than the late patriotic writer Angel Guimera, not knowing — or so he claimed — that Guimera was the founder of the society he was addressing.

When Dali denounced Guimera as “that great pederast, that immense hairy putrefaction”, mayhem ensued, with chairs flying at the stage. He had to be rushed outside and into a taxi by a phalanx of security guards.

“Untitled (Still Life with White Cloth)”, 1969

Soon after, a Barcelona anarchist group decided it would like to hear Dali speak and assured him he could say anything he wished. He asked them to have a loaf of bread ready for him on the night, “as long as possible, and straps to tie it with”.

Dali sprinkled his lecture to the group with obscenities, prompting an audience member to complain that there were women and children present.

“I answered him that an anarchist centre was not exactly a church,” and besides, his own wife was present. He started blaspheming as well, and his listeners’ fury mounted.

Then Dali gave the signal for the bread to be brought onstage and, as prearranged, had it strapped to the top of his head, horizontally.

“While the bread was being fastened to my head the tumult increased, showing all the preliminary symptoms of a general fracas.” In the chaos, with Dali shouting out the lines to his poem “Rotten Donkey”, an audience member went into an epileptic fit and upended everyone who tried to control his wild convulsions.

“The evening ended in an unimaginable general confusion,” Dali recalled, but the organisers “were well pleased. ‘You went a little far,’ they told me, ‘but it was very good.’”

With Gala and his sculpture “Retrospective Bust of a Woman” — missing its loaf chapeau.

Some years later, while staying in New York, Dali would roam the streets with a long French loaf under his arm. One day in front of the Waldorf Astoria the bread was so dry that it broke in two, and deciding to cross the street to dine in the Sert Room, Dali slipped and fell, the pieces of bread scooting away.

A policeman helped him up and Dali carried on, but then turned around to see about his loaf.

“They had simply disappeared without leaving the slightest trace, and the manner in which they were spirited away is still an enigma to me …

“I definitely had the bewildering and disquieting impression that this was a delirious and subjective phenomenon, and that the bread was there somewhere before my eyes, but that I did not see it for affective reasons that I would subsequently discover and that were connected with a whole long history involving the bread.

“This became the point of departure for a very important discovery which I decided to communicate to the Sorbonne in Paris under the evocative name of ‘The Invisible Bread’.

“The Invisible Man”, 1932

SEE ALSO:
More from the bakery

New York dealer Julien Levy bought “The Persistence of Memory” at the 1931 Paris show for $250, calling it “10x14 inches of Dali dynamite” (his father urged his son to change the title to “The Limp Watches”), and loaned it to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, for its year-ending “Newer Super Realism”.

In fact he loaned it “the whole group of paintings and drawings” he’d been gathering for his own surrealism exhibition coming up in January.

Levy offered to sell the painting to Atheneum director Chick Austin for $350, but Austin opted instead to buy “La Solitude”, seen above, for $300, making that piece the first Dali painting to enter any museum’s collection.

The Wadsworth show opened on November 15 or 31, 1931 (sources differ) with eight paintings and two drawings by Dali, along with work by Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Man Ray and others.

Dali’s contributions were collectively the star of a show, and grabbed national headlines.

“These pictures are chic,” Wadsworth director A Everett (”Chick”) Austin proclaimed. “They are entertaining. They are of the moment. We do not have to take them too seriously. We need not demand necessarily that they be important … We can laugh at them.

“Some of them are sinister and terrifying, but so are the tabloids … Sensational, yes, but after all the painting of our day must compare with the movie thriller and the scandal sheet.”

Dali himself would come to the Wadsworth — America’s oldest public art museum — in 1934, accompanying another show and giving a lecture on art as well.

It was in this speech that Dali uttered his oft-quoted assurance, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.”

Levy took “The Persistence of Memory” back to his own gallery for the show that began on January 29, 1932. Also on view were pieces by Picasso, Pierre Roy, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell and others.

“The Persistence of Memory” still had a busy touring schedule ahead of it over the next few years. During its 1934 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which bought the painting, one critic urged his readers to “page Dr Freud” if they wanted to decipher its meaning.

The Julien Levy Gallery, however, remained Dali’s chief advocate in the US for years. Levy gave him a show of his own from November 21 to December 8, 1933, exhibited his drawings and etchings in April 1934, and followed that with yet another tribute from November 21 to December 10, 1934.

New York artists, by and large, weren’t exactly bowled over by the surrealists. Balcomb Greene asked Arshile Gorky, “How can you see this commercial trash?” Gorky replied, “If a man can give you one image becoming another, that takes a lot of plastic ability.”

New York socialites had no reservations at all. To celebrate the success of the late-1934 show at the Levy Gallery, where more than half of the 22 paintings sold for “very high” prices, the Spaniard was feted at an outrageous bash that’s been called the “Dali Ball” or just “the surrealist ball”. Dali dubbed it “oneiric”, and it was indeed “dream attire required”.

But the fact that it was hosted by the A-list Social Register didn’t save the event from scandal.

Caresse Crosby and Levy’s wife Joella organised the costume party at the posh Manhattan nightclub Le Coq Rouge on January 18, 1935. It was the eve of the Dalis’ departure for Europe. In a single afternoon they’d come up with a decor that included a bathtub full of water suspended precariously on the stairway, and in one corner a whole skinned beef with a yawning belly supported by crutches, stuffed with a half-dozen record players.

The guest of honour showed up with his head bandaged and a glass case fixed to his chest that had a brassiere inside it, but even he was jarred by the other costumes. “I myself, though I may be considered to be fairly inured to eccentricity, was surprised at the truculent aspect of the witches’ Sabbath,” he wrote.

Several “practically naked” women had painted gory gouges on their bodies, stuck safety pins in their flesh and wore cages over their heads. One man in a bloody nightshirt had on his head a nightstand out of which a flock of hummingbirds was released.

But it was Gala’s outfit that sparked an international incident. She came dressed as an exquisite corpse wrapped in celluloid who seemed to be giving birth to a baby from the top of her head. The realistic doll was being devoured by ants and its skull was in the claws of a phosphorescent lobster.

The problem was that the Lindbergh baby kidnapping had been dominating the headlines all year and Bruno Hauptman was then on trial for the child’s murder. Monsieur de Roussy de Sales, covering the case for the Petit Parisien newspaper, included in his latest dispatch a mention of Gala’s seeming insensitivity in wearing a bloody replica of the Lindbergh baby on her head.

It was a charge picked up by Luis Buñuel, who wasn’t even in the US at the time, although for some reason he situated the Dali Ball in Chicago. See this post.

By the time Salvador and Gala arrived back in France it was a full-fledged scandal, with newspapers as far off as Moscow agog at the perceived audacity. Dali issued denials of any ill intent, but the artist was later reported to have denied his denials to associates in the surrealist movement, who of course welcomed every outrage.

The Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism” ran from December 7, 1936 to January 17, 1937, and along with Dali there was Miro, de Chirico, Duchamp, Klee, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Ernst and Picabia.

More of Dali’s art was at the Julien Levy Gallery from December 10, 1936 to January 9, 1937, and again all through October 1937, this time accompanied by works from Ernst, Berman, Tchelitchew and Leonid.

And still Levy persisted, with Dali solo exhibitions from March 21 to April 17, 1939, and from April 22 to May 19, 1941.

Throughout February 1941 Gordon Onslow Ford gives four lectures on surrealism “as a psychological barometer registering the desire and impulses of the community”, at the New School for Social Research. In the audience were Matta, Yves Tanguy, Robert Motherwell, Jimmy Ernst and, according to some sources, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky.

The lectures were accompanied by small exhibitions in an adjacent room. The first was devoted to Giorgio De Chirico, then 10 paintings by Ernst and Miro on February 5, Magritte and Tanguy on the 19th, and March 5 surrealist painting of the last four years by Delvaux, Brauner, Paalen, Seligmann, Matta, Onslow Ford, Jimmy Ernst and Esteban Frances.

Next to the front door, for reasons I’ve never seen explained, was a garbage can with “Dali” written on it.

The Museum of Modern Art staged twin Miró and Dali shows from November 19, 1941, to January 11, 1942.

Between March 13 and April 11, 1945, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented “European Artists in America”, featuring 41 painters and sculptors who’d moved to the US since 1938. As well as Dali, it featured Kurt Seligmann, Breton, Chagall, Mondrian, Duchamp, Ernst, Léger, Tanguy, Ossip Zadkine and Jacqueline Lamba.

“Figure and Drapery in a Landscape”, circa 1934

America makes its choices, Dali wrote in his 1942 autobiography, “with all the unfathomable and elementary force of her unique and intact biology”.

“She knows, as does no one else, what she lacks, what she does not have. And all that America ‘did not have’ on the spiritual plane, I was going to bring her … precisely the horror of my rotten donkeys from Spain, of the spectral aspect of the Christs of El Greco, of the whirling of the fiery sunflowers of Van Gogh, of the airy quality of Chanel’s decolletes, of the oddness of fur cups, of the metaphysics of the surrealist mannequins of Paris, of the apotheosis of the symphonic and Wagnerian architecture of Gaudi, of Rome, Toledo and Mediterranean Catholicism.”

In 1934, following his row with the other surrealists, his expulsion from his father’s home, his marriage to Gala, and his solo London show, Dali had been talking about the United States with Alfred H Barr Jr, the director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who he met at the Vicomte de Noailles’ place in Paris.

“His information on the subject of modern art was enormous. By contrast with our European directors of modern museums, most of whom still had not heard of Picasso, Alfred Barr’s erudition verged on the monstrous. Mrs Barr, who spoke French, prophesied that I would have a dazzling future in America, and encouraged me to go there.”

He and Gala dearly wanted to go, but had no money. Fortunately, Rene Crevel had introduced them to another wealthy American, Caresse Crosby, who’d bought Le Moulin du Soleil in the Forest of Ermenonville, northeast of Paris in Oise.

She and Dali plotted to build the 15-metre oven there that he needed to bake his giant loaf of bread with which to befuddle the masses.

Below is a Google Earth view of the forest itself.

A few years later, in June 1940, 800 hectares of trees were destroyed in a fire, and in 1974, in about this spot, Turkish Airlines Flight 981 crashed here. A memorial recalls the 346 victims.

“Every weekend we went to the Moulin du Soleil,” Dali wrote. “We ate in the horse stable, filled with tiger skins and stuffed parrots.”

Surrealists and society people were drawn to the place knowing “things were happening” there. The phonograph played Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” constantly and Dali glimpsed for the first time The New Yorker and Town & Country, lapping up the images of America.

“I want to go to America, I want to go to America … This was assuming the form of a childish caprice. Gala would console me: as soon as we could scrape together enough money we would go!”

Dali claimed to have realised that nothing was really stopping him from getting to New York when one day he lashed out at a “repugnant” legless blind man rolling along Boulevard Edgar-Quinet on a wheeled cart. He kicked the cart and sent it scurrying, and it dawned on him that he was neither blind, lame nor “plunged in abjection”. So he booked passage on the Champlain.

Possibly it was karma that made his first ocean crossing so horrific. Supposedly with a $500 loan from Picasso, he and Gala set sail on the Champlain in late autumn.

“As soon as I felt myself on the high seas, a great fear of the ‘ocean space’ took hold of me. I had never yet in my life sailed out of sight of land, and the creakings of the ship appeared to me more and more suspect.”

Catastrophe loomed, Dali was sure, so he attended every safety drill strapped into his life jacket, which he kept on even lying on his bunk in their cabin. Gala found him pathetic and hilarious by turns.

Glowering at the ship’s officers “as my executioners”, Salvador downed champagne constantly. Meanwhile Caresse Crosby, also on board, was asking the captain how long a loaf of French bread the galley might manage. The baker came up with a baguette two and a half metres long.

Tipped off by Crosby and keen to meet Dali, reporters boarded the ship when it reached New York at noon on November 14, and he duly produced his loaf — which the newshounds duly ignored. In an even bigger surprise, “They knew stupefying details about my life.”

“They immediately asked me if it was true that I had just painted a portrait of my wife with a pair of fried chops balanced on her shoulder. I answered yes, except that they we’re not fried, but raw.

“Why raw? they immediately asked me. I told them that it was because my wife was raw too.

“But why the chops together with your wife? I answered that I liked my wife, and that I liked chops, and that I saw no reason why I should not paint them together.”

See this post for more about what became the Dalis’ penchant for ocean voyages.

Finally on terra firma, the newlyweds stayed at the St Moritz Hotel on Central Park South, now the Ritz Carlton, on the seventh floor. Their first dinner engagement was with the Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis Simpson, who will be making more appearances in Dali’s life shortly.

“Javanese Mannequin”, 1934

On his first night in New York Dali had a dream “involving eroticism and lions”. He awoke early in the morning to and could still hear lions roaring, now mingled with the sound of ducks quacking and other animal noises. The waiter who brought breakfast explained that the hotel was right across the road from the Central Park Zoo.

Another lion’s roar — at the Barcelona Zoo — inspired the elongated limbs, heads and rumps that Dali so often painted resting on crutches. He pictured the roar extending out from the animal’s mouth. “I conceived these distortions,” he wrote, “whose prolonged appendix forms represent in my aesthetic system something like the ‘cavernous roarings of form’.”

At right, “Manhattan Skyline”, sometimes identified as “La Lune”, done years later.

Dali commemorated their American debut with an elegy to the Big Apple’s phallic towers:

“New York, you are an Egypt! But an Egypt turned inside out. For she erected pyramids of slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organ-pipes of your skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty!

“New York, granite sentinel facing Asia, resurrection of the Atlantic dream, Atlantis of the subconscious. New York, the stark folly of whose historic wardrobes gnaws away at the earth around the foundations and swells the inverted cupolas of your thousand new religions.

“What Piranesi invented the ornamental rites of your Roxy Theatre? And what Gustave Moreau apoplectic with Prometheus lighted the venomous colors that flutter at the summit of the Chrysler Building?

“New York, your cathedrals sit knitting stockings in the shadow of gigantic banks, stockings and mittens for the Negro quintuplets who will be born in Virginia, stockings and mittens for the swallows, drunk and drenched with Coca-Cola, who have strayed into the dirty kitchens of the Italian quarter and hang over the edge of tables like black Jewish neckties soaked in the rain and waiting for the snappy, sizzling stroke of the iron of the coming elections to make them edible, crisp as a charred slice of bacon.

“New York, your beheaded mannequins are already asleep, spilling all their ‘perpetual blood’ which flows like the ’surgical fountains of publicity’ within the display windows dazzling with electricity, contaminated with ‘lethargic surrealism’.

“And on Fifth Avenue Harpo Marx has just lighted the fuse that projects from the behinds of a flock of explosive giraffes stuffed with dynamite. They run in all directions, sowing panic and obliging everyone to seek refuge pell-mell within the shops. All the fire alarms of the city have just been turned on, but it is already too late. Boom! Booml Booml Booml

“I salute you, explosive giraffes of New York, and all you forerunners of the irrational — Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, and you too, unforgettable Buster Keaton, tragic and delirious like my rotten and mystic donkeys, desert roses of Spain!”

What Dali saw himself as bringing to the New World was an “infekzious poizun”, the surrealism he would inject into America’s bloodstream. The Land of the Free was swiftly addicted.

Below, “Gangsterism and Goofy Visions of New York”, an illustration for a series of articles about American life that Dalí wrote for The American Weekly from 1934 to 1935.