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”.

On June 16, 1956, Dali was invited to Madrid’s Pardo Palace to meet Generalisimo Francisco Franco. Beneath works by Goya, in Charles III’s immense castle that began as a ninth-century Islamic fort, the surrealist met the dictator who had been responsible for the execution of his friend, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

Eight years later, in April 1964, Franco’s government awarded Dali the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic in recognition of service benefiting the country.

Journalist Antonio Olano interviewed Dali in Cadaqués in 1969 and was in close touch with him while Franco was on his deathbed six years later. As recounted by Eduardo Palomar Baró on the website GeneralisimoFranco.com, Olano wrote in his subsequent book (likely 1989’s “Adios Dali”) that the maestro was “tremendously affected” by Franco’s illness.

Olano phoned Dali at the St Regis in New York to ask about his plans for the Figueras museum, but Dali immediately asked him if Franco was genuinely as seriously ill as news reports suggested. Assured that the generalissimo was fading, Dali stayed in daily contact with the Palace of Zarzuela at the Pardo in Madrid and every morning went to St Patrick’s Cathedral to pray on his knees.

Upon hearing of Franco’s death on November 20, 1975, Olano wrote, Dali “cried for a long time, as he had not done on the death of his mother”.

After his return to Spain following World War II, Dali had publicly voiced support for Franco’s bloodstained regime, for “clearing Spain of destructive forces”. He even sent the generalissimo a telegram “praising him for signing death warrants for political prisoners”.

In 1972 Dali painted a portrait of Franco’s favourite granddaughter, María del Carmen Martínez-Bordiú y Franco, the future Duchess of Cadiz, on the eve of her wedding to Alfonso de Borbón, to whom Carmen promised the picture as a betrothal gift, he pledging in return a ring that had belonged to its grandmother, Queen Victoria Eugenia, the consort of King Alfonso XIII.

Dali’s portrayal of the bride-to-be was, of course, headline news in Spain, and Hola! magazine made his initial sketching at the Pardo Palace its cover story in January 1972.

He made an ostentatious show of completing the painting, calling a press conference at the Prado Museum in May 1973 at which he added the final brushstrokes. Behind him on the wall, in what many thought was a provocative political juxtaposition, was one of Velazquez’s great works, “The Surrender of Breda”, also known as “The Lances”, dating to the 1630s (Wikipedia image). Perhaps Dali was saying something about capitulation.

In 1943 Dali had excised the two key figures of Velazquez’s painting for his “Portrait of Ambassador Cardenas”, seen here.

Juan Francisco de Cardenas, the Spanish Ambassador to the United States in 1933-34 and again from 1939 to at least 1941, is pictured with the Escorial palace near Madrid (where Philip II planned the Armada’s invasion of England).

In the ravine behind him, Ambrosio Spinola, the Italian general who led Spanish troops to one of their rare victories in the Thirty Years War in seizing the Dutch city of Breda in 1625. Spinola showed chivalrous compassion toward his Dutch couterpart, Nassau, making their post-battle meeting an eminently suitable allusion for a portrait of a diplomat.

Below are the finished “Equestrian Portrait of Carmen Bordiu-Franco”, and a photo of the artist presenting it to Franco.

Did Dali actually paint this portrait? In March 2007, on his 80th birthday, British publisher Peter Owen recalled going to Port Lligat sometime in the mid-1940s to collect the illustrations Dali had made for his novel “Hidden Faces”.

“They were so terrible we used only a couple — he scribbled them in bed,” Owen told The Telegraph.

“He was painting a portrait of Franco’s granddaughter, which was wheeled in, and he said, ‘He’s done quite well today,’ so obviously someone else was painting it and he was signing it. We were served the cheapest fizzy Spanish wine.”

Carmen Franco would pop up again in the Dali story in 1996, recalling in memoirs published in Hola! that she’d met Amanda Lear in the company of Dali and her grandfather in the late 1950s and early ’60s — both before and after Lear had her alleged sex change. Read about Amanda in this post.

Some argue that Dali’s outrageous pronouncements in support of Franco were just dadaist mockery, or at least opportunistic, but many remain convinced of his fascist enthusiasm.

In 2003 on the website Counterpunch.org, Vicente Navarro of Johns Hopkins University charged Dali with “active and belligerent support for Spain’s fascist regime” and claimed he had to leave his home in Port-Lligat “because the local people wanted to lynch him”.

That doubtless had more to do with a letter that Dali sent to the Spanish dictator Franco when it was announced that compensation would be paid to anyone who’d lost their olive trees in a particularly bad winter. The olives of Cadaques were fine, Dali pointed out, thus ruining any chance of payment to his neighbours.

Musician Costas Ferris asked Dali in the early 1970s about Franco’s Spain. “He didn’t say anything against the Spanish left-wing revolutionaries, but he said that the Communist Party was a mafia, and he hated mafias.”

It’s generally acknowledged, though, that Dali wished to remain apolitical. Still, on his return to Spain, Franco was waiting to greet him as a friend, and Dali was delighted to be received in audience.

By 1970 Dali was declaring himself an anarchist and monarchist, and to the musician Costas Ferris about the same time he said Franco wanted to be his friend “just because of the competition” — because Picasso had refused to give “Guernica” to Barcelona — “but I’m not a friend of Franco. I’m a friend of the future king, Juan Carlos.”

Dali had grown up leaning well to the left, of course, and was enthused by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, though he’d been just 13 years old when it occurred. It wasn’t so much the ideas of Marx and Lenin that appealed to him — he never did embrace communism — as the romance of rebellion against oppressors.

By his late teens he was an anarchist, and certainly supported independence for Catalonia. Dali’s father overtly opposed the moderate military dictatorship that began in 1923 under General Miguel Primo de Rivera, and the blood connection landed Salvador briefly in jail.

In March 1928 he and his fellow travellers Sebastià Gasch and Lluís Montanyà signed the Manifest Groc — the Yellow Manifesto — which denigrated the Noucentista movement then popular.

At the art academy in Madrid, Dali recalled with disdain in 1942, many of the other students were becoming committed to dangerous upheaval.

“Already it was apparent that a large majority tended vaguely toward the kind of liberal socialism which would some day become a fertile pasture for the extreme left.

“My position was that happiness or unhappiness is an ultra-individual matter having nothing to do with the structure of society, the standard of living or the political rights of the people. The thing to do was to increase the collective danger and insecurity by total systematic disorganisation in order to enhance the possibilities of anguish which, according to psychoanalysis, condition the very principle of pleasure.

“If happiness was anyone’s concern it was that of religion! Rulers should limit themselves to exercising their power with the maximum of authority; and the people should either overthrow these rulers or submit to them.

“From this action and reaction can arise a spiritual form or structure — and not a rational, mechanical and bureaucratic organisation. The latter will lead directly to depersonalisation and to mediocrity. But also, I added, there is a utopian but tempting possibility — an anarchistic absolute king. Ludwig II of Bavaria was after all not so bad!”

And here’s what he said about socialism in “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali”:

“Karl Marx wrote, ‘Religion is the opium of the people.’ But history would demonstrate that his materialism would be the poison of ‘concentrated hatred’ on which the people would really croak, suffocated in the sordid, stinking, and bombarded subways of modern life.”

Dali had his “own” version of “Guernica”, the powerful anti-war statement of “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)” from 1936, seen here — click for a large version — with its tormented figure in the throes of what Dali called “a delirium of autostrang- ulation”.

The beans? “One could not imagine swallowing all that unconscious meat,” Dali said, “without the presence (however uninspiring) of some mealy and melancholy vegetable.”

On his Meeting Dali blog, Paul Chimera has shared the revelation that the rectilinear shape formed by the battling limbs pretty neatly fits the outline of Spain’s frontier, even if the map has to be stretched a bit.

Also of note, at the lower left, seen chest up behind the gnarled hand, is one of Dali’s ubiquitous civil servants, as seen in “The Pharmacist of Ampurdan in Search of Absolutely Nothing” (featured in this post), “The Average Bureaucrat” and many other paintings. He made his debut in “Boiled Beans”.

In 2003 Spanish art historian Jose Milicua uncovered evidence that republican troops had used surrealist art to torture prisoners during the civil war.

An obscure “artist” named Alphonse Laurencic had used geometric abstraction and disorienting surrealist techniques to build cells in which fascist prisoners were tortured by being forced to stare at the walls incessantly. Beds were placed at sleep-depriving angles, bricks secured at irregular intervals on the floor to retard walking and the lighting was manipulated.

At any rate, for those who refuse to forgive Dali for his perceived fascism, there is finally the Bunuel argument. On to Toledo.

San Per de Rhodes Monastery, as it’s called locally, had a special appeal for Dali. The ruined castle at the top was known as San Salvador, and the old abbey below it was Santa Helena. Helena was Gala’s real name.

It strikes me as odd that people continue to be intrigued by the question of Amanda Lear’s gender. In late 2000 the Observer reported that, according to a transsexual named April Ashley (formerly able seaman George Jamieson), Amanda had once been Alain Tapp, who performed at Le Carrousel drag club in Paris in the late 1950s, under the stage name Peki d’Oslo.

That, Ashley claimed in her book “April Ashley’s Odyssey”, is where Dali met the person who would become Amanda Lear. Given Amanda’s apparent age, though, he/she would have been about 13 in 1959. (Perhaps he/she was!)

Ashley said Tap had his sex-change surgery in Berlin and circa 1964 was doing a leather act at Raymond’s Revue Bar in London’s Soho. She paid a customer to marry her and give her the surname Lear and a British passport.

Oddly, Ian Gibson had already included this “revelation” in 1997’s “The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali”.

In her own book, “My Life with Dali” (reissued in 2004 as “Persistence of Memory: A Personal Biography of Salvador Dali”), Lear says she met Salvador in 1965, at the Castell restaurant, when she was a student at a London art school. Gibson asked her to name it, and she told him her ghost writer had erred — she was at the Beaux Arts academy in Paris.

Such blunders led Gibson to conclude that Lear’s book was a mix of fact and fiction “almost as untrustworthy as Dalí’s ‘Secret Life’”, but it has to be acknowledged that her main source — Dali himself — loved to make facts up.

The truth about Amanda’s original gender was questioned only after her 1977 disco hit “I Am a Photograph” came out, prodded by her paramours Bowie and Ferry. The rumours only burnished her fame, so Lear held off on confirmation or denial until finally admitting to Warhol’s Interview magazine that Bowie had concocted the ruse to generate publicity.

An image created at Dali’s direction, “Bateau Anthrotropic”, using his “Debris Christ” sculpture at Port Lligat.

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An excerpt from “My Life with Dali”, possibly containing an alternative explanation for the maestro’s paranoiac-critical system:

“His glasses, in fact, were always so filthy that he could see nothing through them. He never thought of cleaning them and they were thick with, amongst other things, the honey he added to his tea. Sometimes I would clean them for him with a tissue. Putting them on, he would exclaim: ‘My God! What a difference! I can see everything, every detail. I think I preferred it when they were dirty. Then everything seemed beautiful, in a vague mist like the paintings of Eugene Carriere who, as you know, painted everything in chiaroscuro.’

“Looking at an object, he exclaimed: ‘A piece of paper! Without my glasses I thought it was an Egyptian scarab. You see, my dear, one’s life should be full of errors and perfumes. That way it is far more poetic.’”

Below, at the Lido in Paris: Nanita Kalaschnikoff on the left, Dali opposite with Lear on his right.

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“Dali claimed that his own desires, far from being noble, were solely base and contemptible, and that the desires he himself considered noblest were the most perverse,” Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret wrote in “Salvador Dali: The Paintings Volume 1,1904-1946″.

“He declared lust to be humanity’s means of defence against the reality principle, and added that the Marquis de Sade struck him as the most suitable role model for the unleashed desires of the young.”

They quoted him further:

“Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi’s Gothic architecture, my love of gold — there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind.”

“I invent the most involved perversions, impose my most extreme whims on them, convince each of the participants to do the maddest things, and extract the fullest admissions from them,” Dali told Andre Parinaud for “The Unspeakable Confessions” in 1976.

“When each of them is thus perverted, converted, subjugated, exalted, I one day bring the whole Eros Battalion together.”

Often at Dali’s parties was his friend the Italian Prince Dado Ruspoli (1924-2005), known as “the king of Capri”. He was a notorious playboy, a philanthropist, sometimes a poet, a 40-year heroin addict, played “Vanni” in “The Godfather: Part III” and was among Fellini’s inspirations for “La Dolce Vita”.

There’s more on Wikipedia about this character-and-a-half, who went around barefoot long before the hippies, coloured streaks in his hair long before the punks, once shared a flat on the Cote d’Azur with Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda, was at various times friendly with Cocteau, Picasso, Capote and Polanski and took lessons in hypnosis from Orson Welles.

In her 1986 biography “Salvador Dali”, Meryle Secrest quoted Dali’s lawyer, Michael Ward Stout, as saying that Salvador and Gala “seemed to enjoy corrupting people … They selected people of great ambition and limited means and threw them into the arena. It amused them, but it was rather ugly to watch.”

Carlos Lozano’s contribution to the centenary celebrations of Dali’s birth in 2004 was a tell-all book about the time he spent with the maestro in the 1970s. It has its loving passages, to be sure, but public attention remained riveted on the first word in its title, “Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me”.

This was the source of the peculiar tale cited above, about Samantha Eggar accepting Dali’s challenge from which other actresses had shied away — crawling through the uterine tube in the buff.

Eggar was in town with Kirk Douglas and Yul Brynner to shoot “The Light at the Edge of the World”, and one of the locations was Cape Creus, close to Dali’s house in Port Lligat (it was supposed to be an island near Tierra del Fuego).

Lozano wrote, with many ribald asides, that Dali and Gala had already regaled the Hollywood crowd over lunch at the Restaurant Gare de Lyon in Paris. On hand were Prince Dado Ruspoli, Princess Nanita Kalaschnikoff, Edward James, painter Leonor Fini and Amanda Lear, whom, Carlos claimed, Kirk Douglas was openly pawing.

Eggar missed the party, Lozano said, and to make up for lost time inveigled a meeting with Dali by seducing Lozano in his hotel room in Port Lligat. “It was the beginning of what was to become my career as Dali’s procurer.”

He said Dali was keen to meet her after he’d heard about their lovemaking and, on her arrival at his house, led them into the egg room and asked Eggar whether it was true “that American women do not fart?”

He explained that he was writing a book about farting, “a Catholic pastime despised by Protestants”.

“I have documentary evidence that popes are selected by the archbishops for their ability to fart. When the pope stands at that little balcony in the Vatican and raises his hand to the crowds in St Peter’s Square, what he is doing at that moment is letting go with an enormous fart.”

Without pointing out that she’s English, Eggar told him, “I love to fart, but only in private.”

Lozano said Eggar went along with a Dali routine that hadn’t worked on Isabelle Adjani or Brigitte Bardot when they came to visit. He quoted the artist as telling her:

“There is so much to see. And to smell. There used to be a famous brothel in Venice where the whores ate perfumed food prepared by an alchemist. Their speciality was farting in the faces of their clients. The gentlemen would choose different fragrances. C’est colossal?”

On the table, Lozano wrote, was a copy of a play Dali had written, “a tragedy in three acts, which he carried around the world locked in a trunk”, about “a beautiful princess in love with both a despot and a priest. He asked Eggar to read a selected scene, one of the more more livid tracts in a script filled with “long, passionate soliloquies on Dali’s habitual preoccupations: autoeroticism, sodomy and coprophilia”.

Lozano quoted from the text: “My tongue yearns for the taste of his pure white seed. I crave only to fill myself full with his angry sword. My body is a pit of desire. Bring me his faeces on a silver platter. Warm me and heal me with your golden rain.”

“We came to the room with the glass floor. The entrance was shaped like a vagina with bulging plastic lips … Inside, spread out like a strange snake, was a red tube about 10 feet long. It was made of canvas with a skeleton of thin metal hoops, each with a diameter no bigger than the width of my shoulders.”

Dali told “Salamander” to take her clothes off and “take part in an important experiment”. She didn’t hesitate.

Four years earlier, Eggar, at 26, had been nominated for an Oscar and won at Cannes and the Golden Globes as best actress for “The Collector”. When “The Light at the Edge of the World” came out in 1971, it did little at the box office and nothing at all for fans for Jules Verne, on whose novel it was based.

Just before travelling to Spain, Eggar’s husband, a minor actor, had sued her for divorce on grounds of extreme cruelty and sought custody of their children, ages three and two, but by July they’d ironed out their differences and the whole family travelled to a film shoot in France. It’s not clear whether this was part of the Jules Verne project, but in 1971 the couple did divorce.

In their 1993 biography “Salvador Dali, Or The Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait”, Carlos Rojas and Alma Amell cite a passage from Carlton Lake’s book “In Quest of Dali”, published three years earlier.

I haven’t seen this later work, but Lake evidently interviewed one Marina Lussato, who said she did the tube crawl for Dali in his Meurice Hotel suite in 1962. Dali told her she’d re-enacted birth in reverse, coming out of a phallus.

A Google search merely links “Marina Lussato” to Bruno Lussato, a long-time instructor at France’s National Academy of Arts and Trades, but only via “Marina Niggli” and “Marina Fedier”. It’s not clear if this is the same woman.

On his blog Lussato says that, as Dali’s “scientific adviser”, he lunched with him every day for a while at the Meurice at the time Joseph Foret was preparing the maestro’s “Apocalypse” prints for publication. Meanwhile, Lussato says without explaining, “Marina returned all kinds of services to him.” It must be stressed that it’s not clear whether this is the same Marina who Carlton Lake interviewed. UPDATE: Karl Heinz Klumpner has kindly explained who Marina was — and what she was not. See comment #1 below the post.

Carlos Lozano died in July 2000 following a long illness, at the same hospital in Figueras where Dali had died. He was 52. Read an interview with him at Netribution.

Below, keepsakes from Lozano’s memoir.