As the Olympics focus began to swivel toward Barcelona and the 1992 Games there, sports writers naturally had a look around the city and discovered native sons Picasso, Miro and Dali.

Salvador was already engaged with the coming XXV Olympiad, having been asked in 1960 by Juan Antonio Samaranch, then chief of the Spanish Olympics commitee and soon to lead the world organising body, to paint “The Cosmic Athlete” for a cultural festival to be held in conjunction with the XIXth Games in Mexico City eight years hence. The painting played a role in promoting Barcelona as well.

Samaranch came from a family of industrialists who collected art and counted Dali as a friend.

“The Cosmic Athlete”, nearly two metres tall, depicts a Hellenic discus thrower about to hurl the sun. He’s perforated with the same archways as the enclosing stadium. The spectators mimic the stance of a second figure, one that recurs in 1970’s “Hallucinogenic Toreador”, which was in turn a tribute to bullfighting, Spain’s national sport.

In 1968 “The Cosmic Athlete” was on show during the XIXth Olympiad in the Exhibition of Selected Works of World Art at a special gallery of Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art.

On display were 100 paintings and dozens of sculptures from around the globe, among them pieces by Magritte (”The Memory”) and Gauguin of France, Canada’s Alex Colville, Grosz and Kandinsky of Germany, Britain’s Francis Bacon and Norway’s Edvard Munch, as well as the Americans Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Roy Lichtenstein.

In 1984 “The Cosmic Athlete” joined nearly 500 other artworks, along with trophies and medals, for the IIND International Biennial of Sport at Madrid’s Museum of Fine Arts.

That same year Dali designed commemorative medallions in silver, gold and platinum for the Los Angeles Olympics.

And when 1992 finally arrived — Dali had by then died, of course — his “Athlete” went on view at the IOC’s pavilion at the World Fair in Seville. It hung alongside a Roman mosaic on loan from Barcelona’s archaeological museum, and nearby were Rodin’s “American Athlete” and Bourdelle’s “Hercules Archer”.

In 1986 when Barcelona announced its desire to host the Games, the aged and ailing Dali declared grandly from Figueras, “I support the Olympic candidature of Barcelona, with all my energy and with all the solar energy in the bronze muscles of the athletes.”

Still, some writers of the day put in a stretch justifying the Divine One’s presence in the locker room of world sport. R Balius Juli had no such problem, even if he began his article for an Olympics journal rather lamely by pointing out that, in his youth, Dali swam, rowed, hiked and camped outdoors.

More convincingly, Juli noted that Dali boasted in “The Secret Life” of excelling in the high jump and long jump in school.

Almost as good, Juli cited a passage in Dali’s autobiographical “Diary of a Genius” enthusing over the Tour de France:

“I should have liked the whole of France to get on to bicycles, everybody pedalling and dripping sweat, climbing inaccessible hills like impotent fools, while the divine Dali paints … Yes, yes, the Tour de France on bicycles produces in me such a persistent satisfaction that my saliva flows in imperceptible but stubborn
streams.”

Pairing Dali and sport needn’t have been such a stretch for any journalist. Quite apart from “The Cosmic Athlete” and the entire sweating, pedalling population of France, he’d always kept an eye on athletics.

In 1920, when he was 16, Dali painted “The Boxer”, and the following year a pair of portraits of Jaume Miravitlles and one of Joan Maria Torres, both local football heroes who were playing for Unió Esportiva.

You can see one of the Miravitlles portraits in this post. The other is here. His name is commonly spelled Miravidles in the titles of Dali’s pictures, and is elsewhere sometimes given as Miravitles too.

Jaume Miravitlles i Navarra (1906-88), known as “Met”, was a Figueras native and a close friend of Salvador’s in youth, though two years younger.

Along with Dali he was a co-founder in 1919 of the school magazine Studium, and his earliest political activism was at Dali’s side, launching a Social Renewal campaign in 1921 with Martí Vilanova.

Evidently Miravitlles and Dali remained friends long after, with Jaume even serving in the association that oversaw the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueras. In 2008 a Swann Galleries auction of art and books included some Dali items that had belonged to Miravitlles, among them a drawing of Don Quixote done in the late 1950s. It sold for $19,200. A Catalan-language book about them appeared in 2004, called “Els Dali de Catala-Roca”.

Within a few years of sitting for his soccer portrait by Dali, Miravitlles was politically notorious. He suffered for his commitment, but ultimately became a respected writer.

As an engineering student in Barcelona in 1924 he was arrested for distributing leaflets and sentenced to prison, but instead went on the lam to Paris.

There he completed his studies and appeared in both of the movies that Dali made with Luis Bunuel, though uncredited. In the piano scene in “An Andalusian Dog” he’s the chubby cleric, and in “The Golden Age” he plays a bandit.

Miravitlles returned to Catalonia and imprisonment in 1930, but on the proclamation of the Second Republic joined the Partit Comunista Català and stood for office several times. By 1934 he was humbled by the losses and switched to the BOC Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, becoming commissioner of propaganda during the civil war.

On July 19, 1936, it fell to Miravitlles to announce the cancellation of the “Popular Olympics” — the Games that were to have held in Barcelona as an alternative to the Berlin Olympiad that year, in an international protest against fascism and racism.

Miravitlles was secretary of the local organising committee for the Barcelona event, but General Franco launched his nationalist insurrection on the eve of their opening. The civil war had begun.

Miravitlles ended up in exile again at the war’s end in 1939 and moved to northern Africa, Mexico and finally New York, where he wrote for various magazines and newspapers. In 1962 he returned home once more and wrote under a pseudonym.

Dali, of course, stayed well clear of the civil war, and shed no tears for the failed and fallen republicans he once counted as friends. When the world war began he moved to the safety of America as quickly as possible, and there witnessed sport’s importance on a whole new scale, but we’re getting ahead of the story of Salvador the jock.

As he was preparing to lay siege to Paris in 1927, Juli points out, Joan Miró was advising him keep up the physical exercise, and the “Manifest Groc” (Yellow Manifesto) that Dali published the following year, along with Lluis Montanyà and Sebastiàn Gasch, assailing Spain’s bourgeois decadence, called sportsmen superior to any current intellectuals and better suited to understanding avant-garde art.

Sports and the cinema were nobler pursuits than the kind of theatre, concerts and lectures young people were attending at the time, the trio wrote. Artists should take up sports, Dali stressed in another article that year, the better to free their minds of ivory-tower restraints.

Dali’s paintings were already full of physical activity, although it was usually bizarre, with dead birds being batted about in games of tennis, for example, or his many depictions of bathers at the seashore, sprawled out like crabs among the rocks or more closely akin to seashells.

His affection for cycling was no affectation. He publicly hailed the triumphs of Louison Bobet, the triple Tour de France winner of the early 1950s, and in 1959 painted one of the 23 official postcards for the Tour.

Dali had been portraying cyclists, usually bearded and in chaotic bunches, since 1929’s “Illumined Pleasures”. They ride about with different objects on their heads in “Babaouo” (1932), “Surrealistic Gondola on Burning Bicycles” and “The Little Theatre” (1934), “Medium-paranoiac Image” (1935), “Perspectives” (1936), “Sentimental Conversation” (1944, show above) and “Hollywood” (1967).

Horses gallop and leap through even more Dali canvases, and racehorses specifically in a 1960 series of lithographs.

In 1936 Cecil Beaton took this photo of Dali and Gala in front of “Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds”, he holding a fencer’s foil, she wearing the mask.

“It is part of the spirituality of Dali to identify himself with the image of the fencing master and to integrate with this image the relationship he holds with his wife,” Wolfgang Becker wrote in the catalogue of the 1984 the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Mons exhibition “Art and Sport”.

“As an indirect result, he thus confers on his work as an artist the aristocratic character which responds to his idea of genius.”

Below, the fencing mask reappears, with a pistol (!), for Dali’s appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show”. It’s all explained in this post.

Seen here in close-up, “Poetry of America: The Cosmic Athletes”, painted in California in 1943, is widely believed to be, in part, a tribute to American football, even if the players’ uniforms hover between mediaeval and futurist. You can read a bit more about it in this post.

Two years later Dali produced “Melancholy, Atomic, Uranic Idyll”, in which baseball played a small, strange part, as seen in the detail below right.

Dali was going for a home run with America’s national sport at the time. The drawings he produced for Walt Disney’s animated film “Destino” in 1946 included several faithfully rendered baseball players.

In 1957, “Celestial Ride” had a scene from the ballpark straight off the television, mounted in the belly of an elephant.

In 1970 New York Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford, recently retired following a glory-bedecked 18-year career, found himself sitting next to Salvador Dali on an airplane.

It was a TV commercial for Braniff Airlines, the duo sharing the tagline, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

For the XX Olympiad in Munich in 1972 Dali created a poster in gouache, 20,000 copies of which were printed, and evidently also offered the quaintly Dalinean declaration, “Sport is the cornerstone of the body.”

The poster was the official image of an exhibition called “Man and the Sea” held in Kiel, where the Olympic regatta events were to be held.

“Golfer”, below, from 1973, is another sport-related lithograph. It’s shown together with an untitled drawing a football player.

“Goal!” was a gift in 1977 to Catalonia’s San Andres Sports Club, a football squad whose owner, according to R Balius Juli, later had to use the artwork as a guarantee against the wages he owed his players.

Juli mentioned a 1940 work I haven’t been able to find, titled “Three Characters and a Cypress”, in which two of the figures are jumping for a skull just as basketball players vie for the ball. Dali didn’t return to the hoops for three decades, when “Polyhedron: Basketball Players Being Transformed into Angels” appeared as the central element in one of the first holograms he produced.

It depicts the players turning into angels as they leap towards a ball in the form of the Earth. Notice Dali’s 1935 painting “The Angelus of Gala” on the right, a further allusion to the dual nature of things.

In November 2008, Spain’s National Heritage agency finally resolved four years of “horse-trading” by paying off the owners of “The Cosmic Athlete”, a Dali painting that had hung in King Juan Carlos’ office for three decades. It had been, quite literally, a battle royal.

As recounted in this article in the newspaper El Confidencial, the artwork had been commissioned by the Franco government in 1968 for that year’s Olympic Games in Mexico City.

An impressive two by three metres and fluid in its coloration and lighting, it represented Spanish art in a cultural exhibition at the Games. Afterwards Dali set an “exorbitant” price for it, and when the state balked, he sold it instead to Lopez Fuertes, an official of national sporting bodies, including the Spanish Olympic Committee.

But Lopez Fuertes was soon advised — by another official, the future Olympics chief Juan Antonio Samaranch — that King Juan Carlos also wanted the canvas. At “the end of the ’70s”, Lopez Fuertes agreed to loan the work to Zarzuela Palace, and it was hung in the king’s office, next to a portrait of his grandfather, Alfonso XIII.

At left, “Victim of the Bullfight” from 1972.

When Lopez-Fuertes died in 2004, his family, armed with a certificate of ownership, set about retrieving the painting, or at least compensation for it, and four years of negotiations began with National Heritage, royal heels being firmly dug in the whole time.

The agency ultimately offered to buy the painting, and said the family asked for €6 billion. The family denied this, saying it asked for far less. In the end they settled for €2.88 billion.

Despite being tucked away in the royal sanctum, “The Cosmic Athlete” — based on Myron’s 455 BC statue “The Discus Thrower”, or “Discobolo” — was well known in Spain.

In 1985 Dali lent his name to a campaign to bring the Olympics to Barcelona, authorising the city to reproduce the painting on posters and in thousands of signed lithographs.

And following Dali’s death in 1989, the state included the image on an 80,000-peseta coin, one of the commemorative Olympic currency it minted ahead of the Barcelona Games. Flip the coin, and there was King Juan Carlos.

The Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris was the setting chosen for Dali’s press conference on April 1, 1970, to unveil ambitious plans for the Teatre-Museo Dali in his hometown, Figueras, a culmination of his life’s work.

For reasons I haven’t been able to fathom, there was a wax effigy of his head present for the occasion. Perhaps it had something to do with April Fool’s Day.

The photo on the right shows the maestro in the Dali Theatre-Museum as it was being prepared. It’s examined in detail in this post.

The Moreau Museum was erected under the 19th-century romanticist painter’s guidance, on the site of his own home and studio, and opened in 1896, two years before he died. It became an unofficial meeting place for the original Paris surrealists, who would gather to discuss their passions.

They took their cues from Count de Lautréamont’s “Les Chants de Maldoror” and the ground-breaking poets like Rimbaud, Gérard de Nerval, who championed the significance of dreams, and the symbolists Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière. They thrilled at the art of Arnold Böcklin, James Ensor and Odilon Redon, and as for primitive art, Breton adored it, and Dali despised it.

That same year there was a major Dali retrospective at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, a show that moved in 1971 to the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, Germany.

In 1970 Dali also exhibited at the Knoedler Gallery in New York, the Galerie André-François Petit in Paris and the Musée de l’Athénée in Geneva.

The photo below was taken in January 1971 in a hotel suite, most likely his digs at the Meurice in Paris.

I haven’t been able to ascertain what the painting is.

In 1971 Dali created a chess set for the American Chess Foundation that he dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, a formidable player. It went on sale for $4,000, a formidable price, but it did comprise more than 48 ounces of sterling silver.

One of the sets was sold for $23,400 at Auction Gallery of the Palm Beaches in 2008.

The UPI photo here shows Dali holding one one of the pieces — the kings were modelled after his own thumbs, the knights, bishops and pawns after his fingers.

The queens were Gala’s fingers crowned with teeth and the rooks were based on the saltcellars used in the restaurant of the St Regis Hotel.

Half the pieces were sterling silver, the balance silver gilt by some accounts, 24-karat gold vermeil overlay according to GoddessChess.com, which also noted that “the tops of the castles are Salvador Dali’s nipples”.

FJ Cooper minted just 45 sets, and Dali signed every piece.

“I had a precise and yet symbolic concept,” Dali said, by way of explaining the digits.

“In chess, as in other forms of human alchemy, there is always the creator, above all, the artist as the creator. It is this that I wanted represented the hand of the artist, the eternal creator. How better to express this vision than by sculpting my own fingers?”

“Why the teeth?” Cooper wanted to know. “Why not?” Dali replied.

Whether Anatoly Karpov ended up with Dali’s fingers and thumbs isn’t clear.

Associated Press snapped their meeting in a New York restaurant in April 1979 as Karpov — declared the world champion four years earlier when Bobby Fischer refused to defend the title — was embarking for what would be his career-topping victory at Montreal’s “Tournament of Stars”. Karpov remained the undisputed world champ until 1985.

Gala takes on Salvador in a match at Hampton Manor, the Virginia home of his long-time patron Caresse Crosby, who put them up for a while when they moved to the US in 1940 (see this post).

At the Palauet Albéniz, which sits in the shadow of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and the Olympic Stadium and has the Joan Miro Museum as a neighbour, is a ceiling that Dali painted in 1969, a fresco entitled “The Hour of the Monarchy”.

With dizzying foreshortening indebted to Andrea Mantegna’s “Putti and Servants” on the ceiling of the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, Italy, “The Hour” commemorates Spain’s reversion to monarchy in the wake of Franco’s republic.

Paul Chimera has on his website Meeting Dali noted the similarities to earlier Dali masterpieces including “The Ascension of Christ” of 1958, shown below, and details like the soft watch dangling to one side.

The Palauet Albéniz, colloquially called the “Little Palace” and, in English, the Albeniz Mansion, was designed in 1928 by Juan Moya as the official Barcelona residence of the royal family.

It’s named for the Catalan composer Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909), best known for his folk-oriented piano pieces and tributes to Spain and its royalty. The photo here is by Gemma Baulo, from NacioDigital.

Josep Playa, an authority on Dali’s life in Spain who gives lectures on behalf of the Dala-Salvador Dali Foundation, has said the figures in “The Hour of the Monarchy” are performing the sardana, the beloved Catalonian circle dance that appears in many of Dali’s paintings from early on.

Here, as in the ceiling decoration for the Palace of the Wind at the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueras, shown below, can be seen some of the movements of the dance, in a “sardana of angels in the sky above the Empordà”.

Dali’s father was a great champion of the sardana, Playa says, often financing performances (one in honour of Federico García Lorca) and even helping edit the scores on occasion, as he did with a well-known piece called “For You I Cry”.

By 1921 the 17-year-old Dali was already acknowledged in his hometown as a talented artist, his skill having been lauded in the Barcelona newspaper La Tribuna. Salvador’s work was regularly on display at the Figueras festivals, for which he was invited to organise art exhibitions.

For a community tribute to teacher Enric Morera in October that year a periodical called The Empordà asked Dali illustrate its cover, from which a poster was also made. He depicted two couples dancing on “a kind of hill”. See this post about Dali’s early paintings of his hometown festivals.

Dali also did drawings of the dance for a biography of Pep Ventura, the musician and band leader who standardised the music for the sardana, and in 1928 he was commissioned to do a portrait of Ventura.

His 1921 watercolour “Sardana of the Witches”, now at the Dali Museum in Florida, is his best-known rendering of the dance, but his allegiance to the popular traditions of his homeland was faltering.

Dali biographer Dawn Ades has said that Dali was keen to learn the Charleston, the American dance craze, the better to distance himself from the provincialism of his native Catalonia.

Just the same, as late as 1979, Dali created “Pentagonal Sardana”, a stereoscopic work meant to be viewed with special glasses.

Here’s a view of the ceiling of the great hall at Gala’s chateau in Pubol, painted by her husband in 1971.

And in Madrid, for comparison’s sake, Goya’s ceiling fresco at the Hermitage of San Antonio de la Florida, which makes a peculiar appearance in this post about Dali’s student days.

Dali’s 1974 lithographed portrait of Rembrandt

The Mill Hill district of Blackburn, northern England, was once heavily industrialised and home to Plastic Textile Accessories Co, the firm for which Brian Mercer invented Netlon, the thermoplastic fabric today found in screens, artificial turf and numerous other handy products.

Awarded an OBE for his discovery, Mercer had licensees making it around the world, including in Cadaques, but he actually met Dali in New York. At a party there Mercer wore spectacles fitted with windscreen wipers. Dali somehow became convinced that it was brain power, not batteries, that made the wipers move.

They became friends and Mercer often visited his home in Port-Lligat, where Dali painted “Portrait of Dr Brian Mercer” in 1973. Mercer left it to Britain’s Royal Society, of which he was a member. Dali once planned to cover his entire museum in Figueras with Netlon.

That same year, 1973, Dali was invited to help Tarragona launch the 1,000th-anniversary celebrations of Emperor Octavian’s stay in the Catalonian city, then known as Tarraco, in 27 to 25 BC.

There was grumbling that the eccentric Dali’s presence would only demean the commemoration, but most people agreed with the city council that it was bound to help with the event’s wider publicity, and it did.

He’d only visited Tarragona once before — with Garcia Lorca in the summer of 1936– but had no recollection of what they did there.

Dali asked the city to arrange for him to make his arrival on the back of an elephant, in grand imperial style, and he even provided the name of a circus where the animal could be rented, but the notion went nowhere.

He wanted to back out at that point, but finally agreed to be brought by yacht from Alicante on August 17, 1973, and make his entrance in a carriage “towed” by a massive paper elephant.

The equestrian sketch he made in front of a crowd, showing the Roman Empire’s first emperor, newly crowned Caesar Augustus, was printed on postcards that were distributed in the thousands.

In 1975 it was Japan’s turn to see the divine Spanish blessing.

Dali was asked to create a sculpture of the Sun God emerging from the Pacific Ocean for the International Fair of the Sea, being held in Okinawa.

He delivered a melancholy, wave-washed mermaid perched on coral that, some suggest, offers rebirth and renewal to an island badly battered during World War II.

When “Sun God Rising in Okinawa” was loaned to the island’s Urasoe City Museum for a 2008 exhibition, citizens called on the owner, Spain’s Count Kiros, to give it to the prefecture permanently.

He offered to sell it, and a fund-raising effort was undertaken.