Whether Dali ever actually met American cartoonist Al Capp (1909-79) I haven’t been able to determine, but a photo from the Life magazine archives suggests they probably did.

The photo, reproduced at the bottom of this post, shows what must be a Capp cartoon sketch dashed off for what the bare-bones caption refers to as “TV show Schmali, with cartoonist Al Capp & Dali Salvador” in “in March 1949″ (even though the drawing is dated 1950).

It would be easy enough to imagine Capp, who created the Shmoo creature for his “Li’l Abner” comic strip, coming up with “Dali Schmali”.

They weren’t exactly on a par artistically, but Capp’s popularity no doubt outweighed Dali’s in America, and he too had made the cover of Time, in 1960.

In 1946 “Li’l Abner” got a new character, Lena the Hyena from Lower Slobbovia, the world’s ugliest woman, whose face was always covered. Capp said if his readers saw her face they would go insane, but the readers insisted, so he announced a contest, inviting other artists to submit a drawing of Lena as they imagined her.

The judges would be Frank Sinatra, Boris Karloff and Dali, and the winner would get $525. The prize went to Basil Wolverton, the cartoonist behind little-known characters like Powerhouse Pepper and Spacehawk. His “Lena”, shown here, first appeared in the October 28, 1946, issue of Life and went on to become a familiar face in Mad.

Further evidence that Dali and Capp did indeed meet is this photo submitted by Dali Planet visitor Karl Heinz Klumpner, who notes it was taken by Joe Walters and “is said to show” the two together. Dali looks a little burly and it’s odd that he’s pretending to draw an Al Capp cartoon, but the resemblance seems close enough.

Dali’s return to Spain in 1948, after spending the war overseas, had little of the warmth normally accorded a prodigal son, even though he went out of the way to smooth his repatriation.

Enrique Granell, an architect at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, wrote an account of the homecoming for the Barcelona website BCN, which can be downloaded in Pdf format here. What follows derives from that article.

Dali had left his homeland on poor terms, remembered first as a republican who’s spoken out in defence of Franco’s fascism and secondly as an eccentric and not very important artist. He had upset his fellow Catalonians by mocking tradition, the church and family ties and running off with a married Russian of questionable repute.

So when he came home, he set out to demonstrate at least a measure of orthodoxy, beginning with a visit to his father and sister in Cadaqués — with the press in tow. He and Dali Senior were pictured in the weekly Destino alongside headlines welcoming the now-famous artist back. (Salvador Dali Cusi, pictured here with his son, died in 1950.)

Dali told reporters he was returning to Spain for good, albeit not right away, and planned to have Emilio Puignau get busy on his house in Port Lligat. His artistic focus, he added, had shifted to classicism and, if not precisely religious themes, then at least mysticism.

He spent parts of 1948 writing and illustrating “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship”, a pastiche of a Renaissance artist’s manual, and designing the sets and costumes for a Rome production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”.

And in 1949, while still in Rome, he met Pope Pius XII. Dali had decided to abandon his atheist cynicism in favour of Catholicism. The pontiff accepted his sincerity and blessed the painting that Dali had brought for him, the first of two versions he would do of “Madonna of Port Lligat” (detail here, click for the complete image).

In a lecture the following year, Dali tried to explain “Why I was Sacrilegious”, and in 1950 published an article on “The Decadence of Modern Art”. To Ian Gibson, author of a no-punches-pulled biography of the artist, it was “the most outrageous self-publicity campaign of his life”.

If it was a scam, Dali kept it up for a long time. A decade later he was back in the papal chambers, this time to meet Pope John XXIII.

It has been claimed, however, that althought there is full documentation of Dali’s November 1949 audience with Pope Pius, the only account of his May 1959 papal visit appeared in the French daily newspaper Paris Match that month. The Vatican did not dispute the report, it was noted, but neither the papal agenda nor the official Vatican newspaper The Roman Observer took notice of Dali’s presence.

He also made a point of visiting Eugeni d’Ors in Puigcerdà, the man who had alerted his father about his shameful pre-war shenanigans.

Picasso had long ago left Spain too, but was never anything else but Spanish in the world’s eyes. Joan Miró had returned after the Germans seized Paris and still occupied a pedestal in his countrymen’s eyes. He’d been asked about Dali’s imminent return and said as much as, “Oh, you mean the guy who paints neckties.”

Dali’s claimed to find the remark funny, but didn’t restrain his counterpunch: “The art of Miró, like all abstract painting, derives from decorative, or pseudo-decorative painting: they’re the ones who paint neckties, or furniture.” But he pointed out that he admired and always defended Miró abroad.

Dali spoke about Picasso in two public lectures on art, in October 1950 in Barcelona and in November 1951 in Madrid, at the inaugural Hispano-American Biennial Exhibition of Art.

“Picasso is a genius, but a genius of destruction,” he said on the first occasion. “His painting has a purely negative character, although in certain way this same character is the unique virtue of Picasso.” He compared him to an anarchist who cleans out the deadwood.

In Madrid, Dali delivered his oft-quoted comparison: “Picasso is Spanish; I am too. Picasso is a genius; I am too. Picasso is known in all the countries of the world; I am too. Picasso is not a communist; neither am I.”

Meanwhile he had eight new paintings on view at the exhibition, and the crowds queued to see them alone: “The Madonna of Port Lligat”, “The Piece of Cork”, “The Spectre of Sex Appeal”, “Basket of Bread”, “Leda Atomica”, “Dali as a Boy Raising the Skin of the Water to See a Sleeping Dog in the Shadow of the Sea, “The Ear of Wheat” and “Christ of Saint John of the Cross”.

Gaya Nuño was among critics who trashed Dali’s show in print, though, saying he had “weakened his legend” with his forays into the mystic and now seemed “more eager for reputation” than anything else.

In late 1948 a writer using the name Oriol Anguera (Golden Oriole) published a psychiatric analysis of Dali, producing many of the now-familiar explanations for his quirks and concluding with a quote from “Hamlet” — “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

The issues raised — without benefit of Dali’s own excuses in “The Secret Life”, his autobiography that wasn’t released in Spain for many years — helped create a “love him or hate him” rift in public opinion about the artist. Ana-Maria Dali’s own book about her brother, published in 1949, didn’t improve attitudes toward him, especially when she revealed that the previous year’s family reconciliation had been a con.

Dali responded sullenly to these books and a third, gallery director Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño’s 1950 biography, by agreeing to an official version written by the nationally known interviewer Del Arco. It was disarmingly called “Dali in the Nude” and had a photo on the cover to prove its intent to hide nothing.

Between the cover and Dali’s bombastic pronouncements about his fellow Spanish artists, the book caused a scandal, and he kept a low profile for the next year.

Not until 1956 did Dali receive anything resembling a general public embrace in Spain, but with the help of the spirit of the late Antoni Gaudi, it was an event worth waiting for, as described in this post.

“The Trinity”, a 1960 study for “The Ecumenical Council”, still hangs in the Vatican Museums, although it doesn’t get a lot of promotion on the official website.

In fact none of the modern artists whose canvases were donated to the Holy See are mentioned, among them Gaugin, Chagall, Klee and Kandinsky. The paintings are on display at the gallery, however, jolting visitors from a romantic reverie awash with the expected Renaissance masters’ pious works, including murals by Michelangelo.

In the Borgia Rooms they stumble onto “The Trinity”. One tourist reports online seeing “a crucifixion by Dali that’s absolutely mesmerising”, though it’s not clear whether he means this painting, which is obviously not a crucifixion.

Other visitors have posted photos they took at the Vatican of this painting, without mentioning the title. I haven’t been able to find out any details about it. UPDATE: Karl Heinz Klumpner has kindly identified the painting. See comment #1 below the post.

Below are two Google Earth views of the Vatican Museums, seen at top left in the upper image and up close in the lower.

The Borgia Apartments were a private wing built for Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, pope from 1492-1503) and being decorated by Bernardo di Betto, known as il Pinturicchio, at the time of the pontiff’s death. His mission was to depict the Borgia family’s self-proclaimed divine origins.

They were opened to the public at the end of the 19th century, and in 1973 Paul VI dedicated most of the rooms to the Vatican’s collection of 600 modern “religious” paintings, sculptures and graphics. The Pinacoteca itself dates to 1932, constructed specifically as an art gallery for Pius XI.

“The Ecumenical Council”, for which “The Trinity” was a preparation, features a less sexual Supreme Being within a Roman alcove (the baroque Vatican basilica that has been credited to the brush of Isidor Bea — see this post), flanked by a pair of saints whose faces are unrecognisable but, at a glance, might suggest Dali and Gala. Yet Salvador and Gala are both clearly portrayed beneath these figures.

The Holy Spirit hovers, completing a “trinity” of four, and across the centre of the scene gather the bishops and cardinals of the Ecumenical Council, rendered in such a dissolute way that some interpret their procession as signifying humanity’s adherence to meaningless tradition, in contrast to the Dalis’ sharply defined characteristics.

It’s interesting that Dali shows himself at a blank canvas, gazing at the viewer. It’s very much open to interpretation: Is he saying, “Now watch what I’m about to do”, or is he genuinely stumped as to how to depict the great mystery of the Holy Trinity?

Below is a sketch from the same time, also titled “The Ecumenical Council”.

The Church seemed to fuel Dali’s penchant for the enigmatic. He once hosted a two-hour press conference in Rome speaking entirely in Latin, a language he didn’t understand, apart from the root constructs it gave French and Spanish and whatever he might have recalled from mass.

On another occasion the Vatican had to gently deny his request to let him be filmed as he was nailed to the Sistine Chapel floor — crucified, in a sense — and thus adding his own two pesetas to the tireless joke about why Michelangelo didn’t also paint the Sistine floor.

But when Dali leapt back into Catholicism’s embrace in 1960 he bequeathed upon it a shower of new iconography, the rest of the surrealists chortling the whole time — at least until it suddenly wasn’t funny anymore.

Sharing Marx’s disdain for religion as the opiate of the masses, André Breton hit his own ceiling when he discovered that Dali had submitted “The Sistine Madonna” for the December 1960 International Surrealism Exhibition at the D’Arcy Galleries in New York.

He whipped out another tirade in the form of a leaflet called “We Don’t Ear It That Way”, not only trashing Dali’s supposed “conversion” but attacking Gala as a blasphemous stand-in for the Madonna, given Mrs Dali’s scandalous sexual appetite.

Also known as “Ear with Madonna”, “The Sistine Madonna” has been duly recognised as a precursor to pop art and op art. Dali’s use of Benday dots was well ahead of Roy Lichtenstein’s famous comic-strip blow-ups, and in incorporating a newspaper photograph of Pope John XXIII’s ear, he was showing Warhol the merit in sampling “found” images.

Within the pontiff’s ear is Raphael’s own “Sistine Madonna” from the 16th century, a detail of which is shown below.

The inclusion of trompe l’oeil items — the sheet of paper and a cherry dangling from a string, both casting shadows — forecast an even later favourite of modern art, although this was a revival of a trick found in 17th-century still-lifes.

The use of half-tone “screen dots” does of course hark back to pointillism, but Dali added a paranoic-critical dimension to produce optical illusions. In 1963’s “Portrait of My Dead Brother” the dots form a stylised bird emerging from the head and soldiers mustered at the chin of the subject (the original Salvador Dali, who died in childhood).

In 2005 there was a flurry of news-media interest when art expert Armando Ginesi announced that Dali had done a sculpture of Jesus on the cross for an Italian priest — in thanks for exorcising a demon from him.

Italy’s Ansa news agency reported that Ginesi found the 60x30cm crucifix among the personal belongings of Gabriele Maria Berardi in a storeroom in Rome. The priest had died in 1984.

Ginesi said Berardi told friends and relatives he performed an exorcism on Dali in France in 1947 when the friar was on temporary suspension from his order over a financial blunder.

Two Spanish experts on Dali purportedly told Ginesi there were “sufficient stylistic reasons” to believe it was his work. The sculpture of Christ belonged to the charity Berardi founded in 1971, the Association of the Volunteers of Charity (AVC), which Ansa said intended to sell it to raise funds.

Although this tidbit was widely disseminated on the Net, no follow-up seems to have been reported online, but Father Berardi certainly lives on. He was indeed an exorcist, according to several sources, and “one of the most credited exorcists in the history of the Catholic Church”, according to promotions for the books that Gabriella Carlizzi has written about him, which allude to his canonisation, a rather dubious prospect.

Steeped in controversy, Carlizzi — who calls herself the priest’s “spiritual daughter” — is elsewhere credited as the founder of the AVC, but seems to claimed she was appointed its director by Berardi … the year after he died.

The Catholic Church has formally distanced itself from the AVC, no doubt because its members claim to have been receiving, since 1989, instructions from the priest “by direct thread from Heaven” (”filo diretto dal Paradiso“). Father Gabriel allegedly wanted these messages kept secret, but gave his blessing for their publication following the May 1992 murder of Judge Giovanni Falcone, Sicily’s anti-Mafia crusader.

From what I’ve been able to understand in Italian-language sources, Carlizzi appears to have offered police evidence in this and other high-profile crimes which she or her associates obtained through supernatural means. The police declined, and the truth of her claims is, needless to say, hotly debated.

According to the AVC, Christmas 1992 witnessed the rebirth of Christ, in Rome, under the name “Giusto”, returned to defeat satanic corruption and usher in a New Era.

Carlizzi’s busy website is here, and it has an offshoot site on Berardi here, though as of July 2008 the latter was “under construction”.

The website of the Provincia della Santissima Annunziata dell’Ordine dei Servi di Maria offers a biography of Father Gabriel — born in Carpegna, Pesaro e Urbino, in 1912, ordained 1935, parish priest in Saint Martino, a chaplain in World War II, devoted to the needy and the politically persecuted and, from 1957 until his death, attached to the convent of the Seven Founding Saints, where he launched his Volunteers Association to help the poor hospitalised in Rome.

When death came with heart failure in 1984, it says, he was much admired.

The site mentions “dramatic personal experiences” without elaborating, but there’s no mention of exorcism, canonisation or Salvador Dali.

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Salvador and Gala arrive in New York aboard the Vulcania on the penultimate day of 1948.

They’d just seen Luchino Visconti stage version of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” in Rome, for which Dali handled the sets and costumes. In the year ahead he would do the same for “Salomé” by Strauss, directed by Peter Brook at London’s Covent Garden from a libretto by Oscar Wilde, and José Zorrilla’s “Don Juan Tenorio” in Madrid.

Dali was deeply into the theatre, and fame had long since overtaken him, but he wasn’t finished painting by a long shot.

The final year of the 1940s had seen the publication of “Salvador Dali as Seen by his Sister”, and in 1950 big brother felt obliged to take Anna Maria to task in a pamphlet called “Memorandum”.

At New York’s El Morocco nightclub.

In the Big Apple several of Dali’s works, including “Meditation on the Harp” from 1933, were on view at the Delius Gallery in “Exhibition of 20 Paintings Old and New from Duccio to Dali”.

He also participated in the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Paintings at the Carnegie Institute, and later in the year he exhibited at the Carstairs Gallery in New York, the first of five shows he would stage there throughout the decade.

Dali’s father died in September 1950. By then the wayward son was deep in the mystic, as he’d loudly proclaimed in a lecture the year previous year at Barcelona’s Ateneu Barcelonès. The title was “Why I was Sacrilegious, Why I am Mystical”.

When in New York in the 1950s and ’60s, Dali was a regular customer at the House of Heydenryk, picture-framers extraordinaire. He’s seen below with Henry Heydenryk Jr (1905-94), the fourth generation of the family-run business and the one who brought the venerable house to America.

“He would enter the showroom with a new original painting in one hand and a leashed ocelot on the other,” the shop’s website says. “Dali purchased Renaissance-period frames or custom-made Heydenryk originals that enhanced his surrealist imagery.

“In 1958 the Owen Cheatham Foundation sponsored the unique, once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between Mr Heydenryk and Dali, in which the two masters created lighted shadow boxes for 28 Dali-designed jewels.”

As well as providing frames for some of the top museums in Europe, the company’s founders in the Netherlands worked with Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza and members of the Rothschild family, framing their private collections.

It handled major impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, and the website cites a “legend” that Van Gogh once entered the showroom and offered some drawings in exchange for a frame.

In America its clients included Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth, Milton Avery and Robert Motherwell, and it framed Picasso’s first postwar exhibition and his last show in the US. In Europe the firm framed shows by Matisse, Chagall, Miró and Tanguy.

In 1957 Nugget magazine published a series of articles in which Dali offered predictions for the future, though it was noted that some of these had already appeared in other North American publications.

The extraordinary suite of “dream” illustrations below was published in Coronet magazine in October 1950 under the tagline “The distinguished modern painter interprets the fantasies of a land we all have visited”.

Among the subjects are wish fulfilment, anxiety and fear, creation, disintegration and frustration, kaleidoscope, escape and love.

Coronet was a general-interest, art-friendly monthly that appeared from 1936 to 1971, until 1961 under Esquire’s ownership.

Dali would have got on well with the original editor, Arnold Gingrich (1903-76). Another regular passenger on the translatlantic ship Normandie, he created Esquire, giving it the name after receiving a letter addressed to Arnold Gingrich Esq.

At Syracuse University in upstate New York (which coincidentally has a collection of Coronet editions and articles) is Dali’s little-known 1952 canvas titled “The Tree”, shown below with details.

Far better known at Sims Hall — one of two art galleries at Syracuse — is “Portrait of Colonel Jack Warner”, his homage to the movie magnate discussed in this post, and “Moses and the Pharoah”, seen below and with a close-up.

This last painting, done in 1966, was among a gift of 25 paintings from New York City attorney Arnold Grant, one of the school’s alumni.

(Shown here only for comparison purposes is “Moses and the Monotheism”, made in the 1970s using a copper-from-wax process.)

Syracuse University has a permanent art collection of 45,000-plus objects, including works by Picasso, Rembrandt, Hopper and Wyeth, and more than 100 of these are displayed at various places around the campus.

Upstate New York tends to be dismissed as the Big Apple’s backwater, but it’s ended up with an intriguing array of Dali art.

At the State University of New York in Buffalo is one of Dali’s backdrop variations for the ballet “Labyrinth”, which was produced at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in 1941. See more about Dali’s theatrical dabblings in this post. The scenery painting was a gift to the school from Robert Millonzi.

And BU also has Dali’s “Portrait of Katharine Cornell”, from 1951.

Katharine Cornell (1893-1974), a popular stage actress who went on to become a theatre owner and producer, was raised in Buffalo and attended the university. There’s a performing-arts theatre at BU today named in her honour.

The story is told that Cornell — shown here in a 1933 photo by Carl Van Vechten, in character as “Lucrece” — was among the thousands of Americans struggling to complete one of the classic-art jigsaw puzzles that Robert and Katie Lewin produced, “Adoration of the Magi”, when Noel Coward appeared at her door with the latest release — Dali’s “Double Image — Apparition of the Invisible Bust of Voltaire”.

Read about the Dali puzzles in this post. Below is an aerial view of the Buffalo campus.

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo features “The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image” from 1938. See it in this post.

While we’re making the rounds of American university galleries, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, has one of Dali’s pieces too — a 1961 portrait of Louis Sachar, brother of the founding president, Abram Sachar — although I’ve been unable to find a picture of it.

The Boston Globe, reviewing a December 2008 exhibition at the Rose called “Invisible Rays: The Surrealism Legacy”, described the Sacher portrait “an appropriately odd Dali”: “Louis Sachar, looking prim in a suit but with his head off-centre on his shoulders, stands in the foreground of a velvety desert, with a looming tower and the sky opening as if with the word of God.”

Also in that show were works by de Chirico, Ernst, Magritte, Miró and Tanguy.

As far as the university’s collection is concerned, most critical attention seems devoted to the Warhols, Rauschenbergs and Lichtensteins at the Rose, although even they were forgotten in early 2009 when Brandeis’ directors, spooked by the global cash crunch, voted to close the museum and sell off the $300 million worth of contents — 7,200 works in all.

The national uproar was unprecedented, with the campus newspaper Justice perhaps getting in the best metaphor: “a junkie pawning his wedding ring”. Wall Street ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff’s associates Carl and Ruth Shapiro were the university’s biggest patrons.

Within weeks an apologetic Brandeis board backed down somewhat, saying the Rose would remain open “for academic purposes” but would “eventually” stop being a public museum, and “only a small number of artworks would be sold, if necessary”.

At no point in the news-media coverage was Dali’s painting mentioned.

On December 4, 2000, “My Wife, Naked, Watching Her Own Body Becoming Steps, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture” set a record price for a Dali painting when Sotheby’s London sold it to a private collector by telephone for £2,863,500 ($4,126,680).

Painted in New York in 1945, it depicts Gala contemplating the mysteries of architecture as it echoes her own form.

In his autobiography “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali”, the maestro claimed that it was the sight of Gala’s back that convinced him instantly she the incarnation of the childhood love for whom he still yearned. He compared this painting to “the serene perfection of the Renaissance”, with Gala “as well painted as a Raphael”.

It’s a matter of speculation whether the tiny figure seen roaming around inside the structure on the right, as if trapped in a vast cage, is Dali.

A decade before the Sotheby’s sale, on May 15, 1990, “Lapis-lazuli Corpuscular Assumption”, painted in 1952 and shown below, came very close to that amount when it set the record up until then at Christie’s New York, fetching $4,070,000.

The closest any of his other works has come to these two was in 2006, when “Galatee” (1954-6) brought $2.6 million.

Eclipsing the price for Dali’s “Assumption” at the same auction was Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr Gachet”, which commanded a then-world-beating $82.5 million. Works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso and Gustav Klimt have since exceeded that figure.

In fact, Dali is far down the earning scale. As of December 2008, the website ProductionMyArts.com listed the world’s 130 most expensive paintings, and the selling price given for #130, a Mark Rothko, was four times the price of Dali’s “My Wife”!

“Corpuscular Assumption” presents Gala as a Nietzschean-style “superwoman” being lifted to Heaven by what Dali called “anti-matter angels”.

Utilising his favoured motif of the period, molecular disintegration, he levitates his wife amid octagons in a blast of rhinoceros horns, above an altar on which hovers the crucified Christ, without the cross.

Dali captured bird’s-eye views of subjects, like the Christ here, with the aid of a glass floor in his Port Lligat home. The other “perspective” on this device, of course, is that the transparency also made it perfect for voyeurism when guests were inclined or induced to frolick above or below (see this post).

In the photo shown here, Dali is serving as master of ceremonies at the May 1959 “Ball of the Little White Beds” in Paris, with clown-violinist Claude Laroche. Amid the festivities, Dali stood atop a steel crane to lecture on the intrinsic perfection of the rhinoceros horn.