More about mystery in Dali’s art, an extension of this post.

In online blurbs and press releases, self-styled “Dalinean researcher” Roger Michel Erasmy continues to churn out “explanations” of Dali’s supposed magical or psychic precognition.

He earns his living writing books, though. “Le mystère de la gare de Perpignan” (1985), “Codex Dalianus” (1989) and “L’Apothéose du Dollar” (2004) present a more or less apocalyptic vision drawn from cryptic messages inferred from Dali’s canvases.

“Topical Abduction of Europe” (1983), from the elderly Dali’s “catastrophe series”, seems to be Erasmy’s launching pad, and Erasmy sees his oracle proved right in the politico-economic grappling of the European Union, with France’s May 2005 rejection of the European Constitution treaty being crucial evidence.

Dali, says Erasmy, foresaw the fall of the Nazism in “The Enigma of Hitler” (1939, detail here, with the Fuhrer circled) and the collapse of communism in both “The Enigma of William Tell” (1933, detail below), with Lenin knelt at his own coffin, and “Partial Hallucination — Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Grand Piano” (1931, shown further down).

Dali also predicted the 9/11 attacks (though I haven’t been able to identify in which artwork) and, as read in the “emblematic table” seen in “The Apotheosis of the Dollar” (1965, also further down), the disaster of the US-led war in Iraq.

Andrew Roberts, in “A History of the English-speaking Peoples Since 1900″, pointed out that the “newspaper” Dali once briefly circulated, the Dali News, had on November 25, 1947, published prophecies for the coming 10 years.

“The painter predicted such forthcoming occurrences as ‘The Summa Theologiae of St Thomas shall be revised by the atom cooked three times’ and ‘An American art critic of Irish blood shall win fame defending the Dalinian theory of painting.’

“He also predicted,” Roberts wrote, “that ‘Belgium shall know glory in legislation and finance’. Sure enough, 10 years later, that country became the focus for a new Great Power in the world.”

The European Economic Community came into being with a treaty signed in Rome on March 25, 1957, and the Belgian capital, Brussels, became the centre of the new European Union’s legislative and financial power.

Erasmy seems to believe that the figure sitting back from the piano keyboard in “Partial Hallucination” is Boris Yeltsin (it looks more like Max Ernst to me). The overall message is a warning about Russian aggression, he claims, drawing a line to Moscow’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and the intervention of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then also heading the European Union. Ukraine, however, remains vulnerable, Erasmy has noted.

“The new geopolitical order described by Dali does not correspond at all to the hegemonic ideas of President Bush, nor to the futuristic designs of the eurocrats of Brussels,” Erasmy wrote in 2007.

“Tuna Fishing” (1967) evidently foresaw the European Union’s 2008 decision to shut down Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishing, which caused an uproar in France.

The interpretations that Erasmy has shared for free on his Dali Décodé website and blog haven’t always enjoyed the success he claims his three books have met with the reading public.

The Frenchman’s divinations of the prophetic meanings in Dali’s art failed signally in 2007 when French voters chose Sarkozy as president over Ségolène Royal.

What made Erasmy so sure that Royal would win the election?

Because the other Dali painting on which he’s built a career — “The Mystery of the Railway Station of Perpignan” — supposedly contains the “code” 229 CL 66.

This “message” Erasmy transcribes (by means I don’t understand). via the date of modern France’s founding, September 22, 1792, to Royal’s birthdate, September 22, 1953.

And then there was this postage stamp Dali designed in 1978, depicting Dante’s Béatrice, which Erasmy said presents the “myth-sign of Marianne”.

The stamp went on sale on November 17, 1979, he pointed out — and on the 27th anniversary of that date Royal was nominated as her Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency. (Wikipedia says Royal was nominated on the 16th.)

Dali, Erasmy continued, produced no fewer than 64 variations on Millet’s popular painting “The Angelus” and insisted that the woman in the picture was a dominating “praying mantis” ready to crush the man. (Shown here are the left and right components of the stereoscopic “The Eye of the Angelus” from 1978.)

This woman, said Erasmy, is Ségolène Royal, who hails from and is president of the Poitou-Charentes region, where the repetition of the Angelus prayer was first introduced in 1318.

Dali Planet has much more about Dali and the Angelus in this post.

Finally, Erasmy noted, Cécilia Sarkozy — then still the wife of the eventual president — is the great-granddaughter of the celebrated Catalan composer Isaac Albéniz, for whom the city of Barcelona built a “palace” in 1929.

Forty years later Dali was asked to paint a fresco on the ceiling of the Palauet Albéniz (see this post), and did so with the coming reinvestiture of King Juan Carlos in mind. He called his mural “The Hour of the Monarchy” and this, in Erasmy’s mind, was a nod to Ségolène “Royal”.

Erasmy was surely on safer ground forecasting Barack Obama’s election on the basis of Dali’s “Poetry of America” (1943), which contains an acknowledged allusion to the evolving acceptance of racial equality.

Far less convincing is his claim that Obama’s effort to save the US auto industry was somehow foreshadowed in “The Appearance of the Town of Delft” (1936), with its vegetative car rotting from the roots.

And who has the energy to argue when he says the 2009 financial crisis was there for everyone to see in “Apotheosis of the Dollar”, and perhaps in “The Basket of Bread” as well?

The full title of the former painting is “Salvador Dali in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar in which You Can See on the Left Marcel Duchamp Masquerading as Louis XIV behind a Vermeerian Curtain which Is the Invisible Face, but Monumental, of Hermes by Praxiteles”.

Dali traced the moire patterns from an image projected on the canvas, just as the Old Masters had done in previous centuries to ensure precise measurements and perspective.

Although Erasmy didn’t specify which version of “Bread”, it’s a safe guess he was referring to the 1945 one (they’re quite similar anyway). The basket, he said, forms “a notation symbolic of the stock exchange” and the nub of a loaf suggests a severed penis. Thus the fiscal crisis marks the end of “a system built on phallic capacity, from now on threatened by the emancipation of women” (Erasmy champions Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel as well as Royal).

Erasmy seems to have done Dali’s admirers a more palpable service in locating the railway coach that was depicted in “The Mystery of the Railway Station of Perpignan”.

He claims to have found the car in 1986, abandoned behind the station and occupied, suitably enough, by a “tramp”. He talked the local transport firm Raymondis, which owned it, into letting him convert it into a “cultural platform”.

By 1994 Erasmy had the railroad coach in the “Dali Triangle” and the following year publicly inaugurated it in front of the press with the help of television celebrity Marlène Mourreau, who Erasmy said was “selected as godmother” to the project on the basis of her physical assets, “in conformity with the erotic phantasms of Salvador Dali”.

When last heard of — there were no updates on the website about this the last time I looked — the “Dali Wagon” was headed for Wolnzach in Bavaria in October 2005 for an exhibition of the work of 10 Eastern European surrealist artists calling themselves the “Heirs to Dali”.

This collective had been assembled by a German painter who goes by the names Angerer-DER-Aeltere and Ludwig Angerer the Elder and also includes Frenchmen Jean-Pierre Alaux, Jean Bailly, Yo Coquelin, Lukás Kándl, Jacques Resch, Jean Reus and Eli Tiunine, Miguel Garcia-Diez of Spain and Michael Maschka, another German.

What exactly happened to the Heirs’ proposed exhibition in May 2005 at the Place du Pantheon in Paris’ fifth arrondissement isn’t quite clear from Erasmy’s website. The event appears to have been originally planned to coincide with the centenary of Dali’s birth in 2004 and, with the Dali Wagon included, was deemed part of a project called “Train of Fantastic Art” (TAF 2004).

Art dealer Stephan Gissinger and Yo Coquelin, one of the Heirs, made the arrangements with the Town Hall, but everything fell apart, Erasmy claimed, due to “jealousies and meanness” involving a “cabal” that opposed him. Nothing seems to have happened in 2005 either.

Architect and painter Angerer designed a logo for the project from a likeness of Dali. His striking painting shown alongside it below is titled “Moderne Schoenheit 2″.

The 10 Heirs did manage to hold a show in 2007, however, at the thermal springs in Mont-Dore, west of Lyon. Michael Maschka won a trophy called the “Apocalypse Dore” for his painting “Travels to the Crystal Mountains”.

“The Black Mass”, 1974

Getting back to Dali himself, and along the same spooky lines, the maestro’s superstitions are well documented, but there’s room for speculation as to just how much he delved into the supernatural, apart from its utility to any hard-working surrealist.

Amanda Lear has recorded that anything green meant bad luck to Dali, and he “hated” green parrots as a result. Ill fortune also came from peacock feathers and starting a journey and marrying on a Tuesday.

He always carried a wooden talisman “wrapped in a sock and secured with a rubber band”.

Gala, he wrote, “believes in my wood — a piece of wood that I found at the beginning of our acquaintance among the rocks of Cape Creus, under extraordinary circumstances. Since then we have never been without this ‘pure Dalinian fetish’, though we have lost it on several occasions.

“Once we lost it in Covent Garden in London, and found in again the next day. Another time it had been taken out with the bed sheets. It was necessary to go minutely over the whole laundry of the Hotel St Moritz, yet we finally found it.

“This piece of wood has assumed in my mind the form of a compulsive maniacal neurosis. When I get the idea that I ought to go and touch it, I cannot resist doing it. At this very moment I am forced to get up to go and touch it … There, I have just touched it, and with this my anxiety, which otherwise would only have grown agonizingly, has been calmed.”

Gala had a chunk of wood just the same, and when she died, Dali gave it to Lear.

On one occasion when Lear’s love life was in turmoil, Dali went hunting for a particular carbuncle that would put things right.

In a 1939 letter to Luis Bunuel, Dali wrote: “For three years now I’ve been occupying myself passionately with all matters relating to ‘objective chance’. Destiny, prophetic dreams, interpretation of the smallest events in daily life in order to act in consequence, chiromancy, astrology, etc etc.”

At the Dali Museum in Florida in 2008, lecturer Vickie Brunner focused on “Dali, Women and the Occult”. She began with Lydia (often spelled Lidia) Noguer, the so-called “last witch of Cape Creus” to whom Dali referred in his autobiography “The Secret Life” as the “Godmother of my madness”. Noguer told biographer Ian Gibson that she was “the witch responsible for the whole business of Dali and a whole lot more besides”.

“Lidia de Cadaques”, 1954

Pictured here is the cover of a local history about Lydia published in 1954 by the celebrated author Eugeni d’Ors, featuring illustrations by Dali including the one above.

Noguer, who died in an asylum, was the person Dali turned to in 1930 after his father disowned him. He needed a place to live, so she sold the 26-year-old a fisherman’s derelict hut in Port Lligat, and it became his and Gala’s home — and the basis for the house they always kept, now the Dali House-Museum.

Dali wrote sentimentally about Lydia in his 1942 autobiography, recalling his and Gala’s return home after their second pre-war trip to the US. He refers to her using Eugeni d’Ors’ compliment, “La Ben Plantada” — the “well-planted woman”. Earlier he’d attached the description to his beautiful childhood neighbour Ursula (see this post).

“We arrived in Port Lligat toward the end of a very bright December afternoon. Never had I understood so well how beautiful the landscape of Port Lligat was …

“Already from afar we perceived the figure of Lydia ‘La Ben Plantada’, dressed in black and seated on the threshold of the door to our house, awaiting our return.

“When we got close, Lydia got up and came to meet us. She was weeping. We went inside, and she confided to us that her life with her two sons had become unbearable.

“Her sons no longer went fishing; they spoke only of their [imagined] radium mines; they spent most of the time lying on their pallets. Sometimes they would weep; sometimes, taken with dreadful fits, they would beat her. She showed us a scar on her head, pulling aside two strands of her white hair, and let us see the blue marks all over her body. A week later her two sons were sent to the madhouse in Gerona.

“In the afternoons Lydia would come to the house and weep. Port Lligat was solitary. A violent and persistent wind prevented the fishermen from going out to fish, and only the famished cats would skulk around our little house.”

Lydia puts in an appearance in the post about the Lligat house as well.

Much has been written about Gala’s talent with the tarot deck. Dali believed she could read the future in the cards and, according to Tim McGirk and Meryle Seacrest’s book “The Wicked Lady”, she did indeed foretell the day the day Nazi Germany would invade France.

She would consult the oracle every evening under an olive tree in their garden (or every morning, according to another source), and Dali would decide accordingly whether it was appropriate to do some painting that day or the next.

Gala’s engagement in such things had early on piqued the interest of the surrealists, who sought to channel the subconscious through hypnosis, thought-transference, seances and automatic writing.

While she was still living with Paul Eluard, before Dali arrived from Spain, there were weekends of group experimentation, and they tried to interpret each other’s dreams. The poet Robert Desnos would writhe around in a trance and then begin automatic writing.

Rachel Pollack’s book Salvador Dali’s Tarot” claimed it was Gala who “nurtured his interest in mysticism”, and to repay her he produced a deck featuring original paintings. But Amanda Lear, in “My Life with Salvador Dali”, says Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, commissioned the cards, and Dali in fact put her in charge of the designs.

Broccoli, wrote Lear, was making “Live and Let Die”, which had a black-magic theme, and Dali accepted the commission but soon bored of it, so he turned to her. She did the research and made collages from reproductions of Dali works in his books.

Pollack noted that the Dali Tarot, with Hebrew letters on the trump cards, drew on the Jewish Kabbalah. The 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet corresponded to the 22 trumps of tarot’s Major Arcana, four worlds of existence and 10 stations on the tree of life to the four suits of 10 numbered cards.

When Gala and Dali moved to Arcachon in the south of France in 1939, distancing themselves from the onslaught of war, their next-door neighbour was Leonore Fini, an artist even more eccentric than Salvador. She was involved in alchemy.

Amanda Lear described her at a restaurant outing in Paris as bringing “her own court” and wearing a full-length gown topped by a magician’s cape”.

“She had stars in her hair and carried a wand like a scepter.”

In 1939 Fini was a close friend of Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst’s partner, and the three of them shared an interest in alchemy and ritual magic. In answer to her question, Dali said he too believed in magic.

“It is the most primitive of all the religions,” he told her. “Man will always need magic. Superstition is simply the application of magic to everyday life.”

“I am not a mystic,” Dali was quoted as saying in Carlos Rojas’ book “Dali or the Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait”.

“I think I may be a pre-mystic, for since my childhood I have been in a state of pre-mysticism. I was impelled towards celestial things, even via evil [posession].”

On the other hand, it depends. In 1960 he told a New York Herald Tribunes reporter, “I am not only a mystic, I am also the reincarnation of one of the greatest of all Spanish mystics, St John of the Cross.”

He had vivid memories of being St John and could recall the experiences of the monkhood as well as “divine union”. He did indeed depict himself as a Franciscian monk in “Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus”.

An admirer of St Theresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, Dali felt that Christian mysticism might offer a door to the unknown.

Fleur Cowles, who wrote “The Case of Salvador Dali”, said he told her in 1957 that the “idea of an angel” stimulated him immensely, and he saw protons and neutrons as angelic elements. While he’d played a game called Seeing Angels as a child, which involved pressing against the eyeballs hard enough to produce phosphene images, he now believed in real angels, often embodied as people he loved and admired.

Amanda Lear recalled Dali spending an “entire winter researching old volumes regarding the study of odours. He theorised that the saintly odours of certain martyrs (such as the scent of violets) were directly related to the moral quality of the individual.” Only mystics were free of body odour, he speculated, and, since Lear didn’t perspire, she was “angelic”.

While at Madrid’s San Fernando Academy, Dali lived at the Students’ Residence, then itself a prestigious cultural institution, an incubator for Spain’s brightest young thinkers, among them Dali’s new friends Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Bunuel.

He submerged his natural shyness in flamboyance, dressing as a dandy, with long hair and sideburns, and stockings and knee breeches of a sort not seen in a century. For rainy days he had a waterproof cape that nearly reached the ground.

“I bought a large black felt hat, and a pipe which I did not smoke and never lighted, but which I kept constantly hanging from the corner of my mouth,” Dali wrote in his 1942 autobiography.

“I realise today that those who knew me at that time do not at all exaggerate when they say that my appearance ‘was fantastic’.

“It truly was. Each time I went out or returned to my room, curious groups would form to watch me pass. And I would go my way with head held high, full of pride.”

Dali squats in the middle during a life-modelling class.

Within a year Dali lost heart in his instructors, who he found too easy-going, too loose with tradition. They’d only just discovered French impressionism, which was by then old news to Salvador.

“[They could] teach me nothing. This was not due to their academicism or to their philistine spirit but on the contrary to their progressive spirit, hospitable to every novelty. I was expecting to find limits, rigour, science. I was offered liberty, laziness, approximations!

“These old professors had recently glimpsed French impressionism … I was already in full reaction against cubism. They, in order to reach cubism, would have had to live several lives!

“I would ask anxious, desperate questions of my professor of painting: how to mix my oil and with what, how to obtain a continuous and compact matter, what method to follow to obtain a given effect.

“My professor would look at me, stupefied by my questions, and answer me with evasive phrases, empty of all meaning. ‘My friend,’ he would say, ‘everyone must find his own manner; there are no laws in painting. Interpret — interpret everything, and paint exactly what you see, and above all put your soul into it; it’s temperament, temperament that counts!’

“‘Temperament,’ I thought to myself, sadly, ‘I could spare you some, my dear professor …’

“Professor of painting — professor! Fool that you were. How much time, how many revolutions, how many wars would be needed to bring people back to the supreme reactionary truth that ‘rigour’ is the prime condition of every hierarchy, and that constraint is the very mould of form?”

Below are two paintings by Dali from a year apart that demonstrate not just a burgeoning talent but the astonishing breadth of his experimentation as he reached for a style of his own.

“The Lane to Port Lligat with the View of Cape Creus”, 1922-23

“Bather”, 1924

In January 2008 Spain’s patrons of the arts mourned the death, at age 103, of Jose Bello, a writer and publisher who was regarded as the “last survivor” of the famous group of friends from the good old days at the Students’ Residence.

Admired for his witty, absurdist, three-noun poems, Bello was credited with helping script “Un Chien Andalou” — evidently the dead donkey on the piano was his idea. “But the truth is,” he once said, “that it does not matter to me that they did not include me in the credits.”

“Of Salvador, Federico and Buñuel,” Bello reminisced, “I never had any doubt that they were going to be creatively important.

“The last to arrive” at the residence that special semester, he said, “was Salvador, and I was the first to know him … His room was in the same hall as mine.

“There were drawings everywhere. They were excellent. He told me they were his. I immediately told Buñuel and Federico and we included him in the gang.

“Dali had an extraordinary talent for painting, but of the rest of things he did, I understood nothing. He didn’t know how to tell the time, nor that five duros equalled 25 pesetas, nor how to get a ticket for the streetcar or the theatre. Women didn’t concern him, he was as asexual as this table … Nothing — don’t even mention it.”

Dali and Bello flank Garcia Lorca.

At some point during his senior school days — one source says he was 24 — Dali filled out a routine student questionnaire that proved to be quite revealing. It ended up being published in the newspaper La Publicitat.

Asked about the education he’d received, Dali replied: “The things that I have learned only interest me in me. All the official teaching that I have received has been useful only in convincing me of their inefficiency.”

The next question was about books. “Literature has never held any interest for me in a living way,” he wrote. “The reading that pleases me more is scientific and documentary.”

Who did he admire most? The silent-film comedian Harry Langdon, Picasso and Lenin, “for their vital intensity”.

Religion? “I am absolutely and deeply anti-religious.”

“Cabaret Scene”, 1922

THAT OLD GANG OF MINE: Dali, Moreno Villa, Luis Buñuel, Gabriel García Lorca and Rubio Sacristán.

Along with his Zorro outfit and his bristling talent, Dali became known at the Academy for steeping a banknote in an alcoholic drink, giving it time to “dissolve”, and then downing the money cocktail.

True? Possibly, but first he had to learn to drink.

In a 2008 article on Buñuel, the Spanish newspaper El Pais recalled Luis and Pepin Bello becoming close friends, then Garcia Lorca turning up at the student residence, and finally “the disquieting, capricious and brilliant Dali”.

Together they read the Ramon Del Valle-Inclán’s bizarre autobiographical fiction and Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s machine-gun comedies, listened to jazz and Wagner and took on “the city and its temptations” — both Madrid’s and Toledo’s.

“They taught me how to go on a bender,” Dali wrote of his Students’ Residence chums in “The Secret Life”.

“I spent about three days at it: two days for the barber, one morning for the tailor, one afternoon for money, 15 minutes to get drunk, and until six o’clock the next morning to go on the ‘bender’. I must relate all this in detail.”

It started here at the fashionable Crystal Palace, which sprang up in Parque del Retiro in the 1880s, a wrought-iron and glass structured modelled on the one in London, to host a show of Asian tropical plants. Today it has occasional exhibitions of modern art.

He said the gang was having tea at the Palace when he suddenly decided his wild appearance had to go. His friends objected, but he’d made up his mind, not telling them his reason: “I wanted to be attractive to elegant women.”

He’d just realised, looking around the tearoom, what an elegant woman was — “a woman who despises you and who has no hair under her arms”.

The next morning he found a barber to give his hair a “rough” cut that he could later have the hairdressers at the Ritz Hotel sort out properly. Getting the trim was daunting — he was worried that the story of Samson might be true.

But as soon as the deed was done, “I felt myself a different man and … spat the last unprepossessing hair of my adolescence upon the pavement of time.”

He went to the Ritz, but headed for the bar and asked for “a cocktail”, leaving it to the bartender to choose one.

“It tasted horrible to me, but at the end of five minutes it began to feel good inside my spirit. I definitely dropped the idea of the barber for the afternoon and asked for another cocktail.”

Already soused, Dali was moved to tears to discover his “first white hair” at the bottom of his glass, which he regarded as a good omen, a sign that he was ageing and progressing on to new ideas.

He sipped again from the anti-Faustian “elixir of long life”, and then tried to remove the hair so he could examine it closely, but “it seemed hard and as if glued to the bottom”.

An elegant woman entered the bar and “spoke familiarly, lazily to the bartender” while he mixed her a drink. Dali surmised that they were talking about him.

“Suddenly a burning pain awakened in my finger. I looked, and saw a long cut that was beginning to bleed copiously. Out of my wits, I put my finger back into the glass so as not to spatter blood all over my table.

“I instantly recognised my error. There was no hair at the bottom of my glass. It was simply a very fine crack that shone through the liquid of my accursed cocktail. I had cut myself by mistake in sliding the flesh of my finger hard along this crack.”

His cocktail turned bright red and began to rise in the glass. Dali wrapped both of his handkerchiefs around his finger in a bid to stem the bleeding and decided to make his exit a dramatic one.

Injured hand in his pocket, he approached the bartender and the lady and handed the former a 25-peseta bill for his three-peseta bill, waving off the change. The barman was stupefied and Dali felt like he’d “broken the bank of the Hotel Ritz”, but he wasn’t finished.

He said he wanted to buy one of the cherries from a dish of candied fruit. Offered the cherry for free, Dali insisted on paying, and doled out another 25-peseta bill, which was accepted only after a “scandalised” stand-off.

Dali turned to the lady and said, “Senora, I beg you to make me a present of one of the cherries on your hat.” She agreed and he plucked the artificial fruit.

He placed both cherries on the bar and, with his one good hand, intertwined their stems. With a cocktail straw he transferred a dab of whipped cream from the lady’s drink to the real cherry. It now exactly matched the artificial cherry, which had a small tear through which its cotton stuffing showed through.

While the others watched in amazement, Dali retrieved his blood-filled cocktail glass from his table and popped in the cherries.

“Observe this cocktail carefully,” he told the bartender. “This is one you don’t know!”

And he left, feeling “as greatly moved as Jesus must have felt when he invented Holy Communion”.

Outside, “the sky over Madrid was a shattering blue and the brick houses were pale rose, like a sigh filled with glorious promises. I was phenomenal! I was phenomenal!”

The next morning Dali bought an expensive sport suit, with shirt and cufflinks to match, and a bamboo cane with a tassled leather handle. He slicked down his hair with brilliantine and picture varnish and created yet another sensation at school.

“The Drinker”, 1922

The scene next moves to the terrace of “the Cafe-Bar Regina”. Perhaps this was a predecessor to the cafe at the 180-room Hotel Regina on Calle Alcala near the Students’ Residence, which was built in 1928, after Dali had left school.

From there Dali went at one o’clock to meet his friends in the bar of an Italian restaurant called Los Italianos. There’s no such place today, but the Trattoria L’Spiraleon Alcala will do.

Dali had “two vermouths and some clams” while his pals savoured the story of his philanthropy at the Ritz, bringing the waiters to attention. The lads ordered “jellied madrilene, macaroni au gratin and a squab” with Chianti.

They returned to the residence for more money and headed for a German beer-house for lashings of lager and “some hundred cooked crabs”. Next came the Crystal Palace for martinis (”my first dry martinis, and I was to remain pretty faithful to them from then on”).

Continuously ravenous, they went back to the eager waiters at Los Italianos, where Dali sat at the piano and tried to play the Moonlight Sonata with one finger. He was eventually torn away with force and taken to the Rector’s Club at the Crystal Palace for “a little champagne”.

“Once we were seated Bunuel, who was more or less our master of ceremonies, suggested, ‘Let’s begin by drinking some whiskey, and later on we’ll eat a few tidbits before going to bed — and then we’ll take some champagne.’ Everyone thought this idea excellent, and we set to work.”

By 2am their “wolfish hunger” was baying again and Dali ordered “a plate of hot spaghetti and the others a cold chicken. Toward the end of my spaghetti I began to regret my choice and to look more and more longingly at the cold chicken …

“The talk now revolved about the theme imposed by the lyricism of the champagne which had been flowing for several minutes. This theme, as you have already guessed, was ‘love and friendship’.

“Love, I said, strangely resembled certain gastric sensations at the first signs of seasickness, producing an uneasiness and shudders so delicate that one is not sure whether one is in love or feels like vomiting …”

“Untitled — Scene in a Cabaret in Madrid”, 1922

At 5am, agreeing that “it was a cruel thing to have to go to bed just when everything was beginning to go better”, they uncorked another bottle of champagne, and swore a solemn oath that no matter what lay ahead and where they might end up, they would meet again in that very spot in exactly 15 years.

While the others bickered over the logistics of finding the same spot if something should happen to the building, Dali’s attention wobbled between the women at other tables and “a slight urge to vomit”.

Two more bottles of champagne later their night at the Rector’s Club ended, “but we found yet another bistro that was open till dawn, frequented by carters and night-watchmen and the kind of people who take trains at impossible hours”. Liqueuer was consumed as “dawn was already pecking”.

The next day between noon and 5 Dali had five vermouths with olives and a dry martini with slices of ham and anchovies. “I have no recollection of the lunch, except that at the end of it I had the whim of drinking several glasses of chartreuse.”

“At five or six o’clock in the afternoon we found ourselves once more seated around a table, this time in a farm on the outskirts of Madrid. It was a small patio with a magnificent view overlooking the Sierra de Guadarrama.”

The is the mountain range north of the capital, capped by Mount Peñalara at 2,428 metres.

“I had a large plate of cod with tomato sauce”, and then asked for a partridge, but they were out of season. Offered warmed-over rabbit with onions or a squab, Dali chose the bird, but the proprietress talked him into the rabbit, and he didn’t immediately regret it.

After three martinis he put into action a plan he called his “Parsifal”. He said he was going to the toilet but instead slipped away by taxi to the residence, where he spent an hour making himself “very handsome”.

“I glued down my hair as much as possible … and applied powdered lead around my eyes; this made me look particularly devastating in the ‘Argentine tango’ manner. Rudolph Valentino seemed to me at that time to be the prototype of masculine beauty.”

He was off to the Florida, a fashionable ballroom he’d heard about, intending to dine alone while choosing “with scrupulous care the necessary feminine material among the most beautiful, the most luxuriously dressed women, in order to carry out, come what may, that mad, irresistible thing, that thing almost without sensation and yet oppressive with pent-tip eroticism, that maddening thing which since the day before I had named my Parsifal!”

Dali “had no idea where the Florida was”, and nor do I, but how’s this?

Goya decorated the Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida with startling murals for King Carlos IV, and this is where his remains were reburied in 1919, nearly a century after he died in Bordeaux in self-imposed exile.

It’s hardly a likely place for a popular ballroom, but it’s an interesting “Florida” location in the context of Dali at any rate, so just suspend belief and we’ll carry on with the story.

Salvador ate a “sad and insipid” quarter chicken with two bottles of champagne and, as handsome as he was, “my head was reeling and a desire to vomit — which this time could no longer be confused with the delicate and uncertain sensation of ‘feeling oneself fall in love’ — made me get up with a disciplined sequence of movements.

“I politely asked a cigarette girl dressed as a Louis XIV page where the dressing room was. She made me a sign which I did not see, and I went into a room where there was a desk covered with letters and typewritten sheets of paper.

“I braced myself with the palms of both hands on this table and vomited copiously. After this I had a breathing spell, knowing that it was not over with, that my almost liturgical labour of ‘throwing up everything’ had just begun.

“The cigarette girl dressed as a Louis XIV page, who had followed me, remained motionless in the doorway watching me. I turned to her and, putting 50 pesetas in her cigarette tray, said to her beseechingly, ‘Let me finish.’

“And locking the door behind me I turned toward the table with the solemn and resolute step of one who is about-to commit hara-kiri, and again placing my two palms on its surface in an attitude identical to that of a while ago, I vomited again with an increased intensity.”

While Dali sampled “all the tastes of my soul, mingled with all those of my entrails”, he relived the previous few days in reverse.

“Everything was there: the warmed-over rabbit, the two delicate armpits, the wrists, the Patinir clouds, and again a piece of delicate armpit, and again a piece of chicken leg, and the cold expression, and again the warmed-over rabbit, expression, cold expression, warmed-over rabbit, delicate armpit, warmed-over rabbit, mushrooms, olives, monarchy, anarchy, anchovy, spaghetti, chartreuse, spaghetti, warmed-over clams, warmed-over rabbit, chartreuse, warmed-over clams, chartreuse, warmed-over rabbit, clams, armpits, spaghetti, vermouth, warmed-over, vermouth, warmed-over warmed-over vermouth, vermouth, bile, warmed-over, vermouth, bile, warmed-over, vermouth, bile, bile, clams, bile …”

“Madrid Suburb”, 1922-23

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.