From 1955 to the mid-1980s, Isidor Bea painted substantial portions of some of Salvador Dali’s most celebrated canvases. It comes as a shock the first time Dali’s admirers hear this, but they have to get used to the idea that it’s true, and then find a way to keep on admiring him.

Given the talent that Dali brought to each and every work, it’s really not hard to do.

Sceptics and Dali associates have long denigrated Bea’s relevance, insisting he did nothing more than paint big swaths of sky or the filigrees on building facades, the drudge labour. But there are also claims that Bea was “the real Dali”.

A native of Torre del Segre in the Catalan province of Lerida, Bea was a gifted (and quick) professional painter of theatrical scenery, who ended up being minimum wages as one of several studio assistants to Dali. Dali initially put him up in a hotel in Cadaques, then moved him into a tiny house on his Port Lligat property.

“I was a kind of robot imbued by Dali,” Bea is quoted as saying, shortly before his death in 1995, on this website, which credits him with painting — not merely assisting on — “all the major works by Dali”, starting with “The Last Supper”.

A timeline at ArtExpertsWebsite.com has Bea “essentially” painting “all of Dali’s large canvases” right from the start in 1955. And after the maestro’s declining health halted his output in 1981, it says, he kept producing “nearly one canvas a week … at the likely hands of either Manuel Pujol Baladas or Isidor Bea”.

It refers to Pujol Baladas as “the young Dali” and says he joined the studio in 1973, working “under the direction of Gala”.

The Artcurial catalogue for a Perrot-Moore Art Centre auction in 2003 listed some “Dali” paintings that were in fact executed in their entirety by Bea. It’s been suggested that this is one of them, below: “Nature Morte Vivante” (”Living Still-Life”), from 1956. Certainly it has an unusual composition for a Dali picture, with more clutter than is customary.

In his 2000 collection catalogue for the Dali Museum in Florida, Robert S Lubar credited Bea with the “detailed rendering of the great basilica” in “The Ecumenical Council” and with contributions to both “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” and “The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus” — in which Bea suppposedly appears as the Bishop of Gerona, Saint Narcisso, in the lower left corner.

(This was the same Narcisso from whose tomb, according to a Spanish legend, clouds of gadflies would emerge to drive off anyone trying to invade the country. The story is revisited in “The Hallucinogenic Toreador”.)

Another Dali assistant, Emilio Puignau, painted the grid of squares in “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory”, Lubar claimed. His accreditations are backed up by several Spanish authorities on Dali, who have documented Bea’s involvement and Puignau’s contribution to “The Nuclear Cross” and “Christ of St John of the Cross” as well.

In his own book, “Vivencias con Salvador Dali”, published in 1995, Puignau insisted that, as talented as his assistants might be, Dali was the only true master in the studio.

The Cadaques native had taken over his father’s small construction company, and for 50 years, starting in 1934, worked on Dali’s expanding Port Lligat house and on the Pubol castle. When the Dalis were overseas, he supervised the household.

Puignau said he helped Dali paint the cross in “Saint John of the Cross”, as well as the cubes that fill much of “The Nuclear Cross”, “Desintegration of Persistence of Memory” and “Assumpta Corpuscularia”.

Also awarded to Bea by other sources: Dali’s 1966-1970 “Odyssey” series, and “Santiago el Grande”, which one source says “has more paint from Bea’s brush than Dali’s”.

But to Carlos Lozano, who wrote in 1969 of his years with Dali, Bea was only assigned the tedious background work, after which Dali took care of the details. But Lozano qualified that too: “A canvas needs only one touch from the hand of the Divine and it is sufficient to make it a Dali.”

In his 1998 biography “The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali”, Ian Gibson said he’d interviewed Bea before his death, and Gibson summed up his role like this:

“Bea was just the person that Dali needed at a time when he was planning a series of large-scale paintings, for, as a scenographer, he was used to laying out theatrical backdrops and had an unerring eye for perspective. Moreover, he was affable, discreet, totally reliable and highly industrious.”

Louis Markoya, who was Dali’s protegé in the early 1970s, says he heard him lament that Bea was sometimes too meticulous, so Dali would have to redo his work.

In his dubious 2008 memoir “Dali & I: The Surreal Story”, crime-fiction writer Stan Lauryssens claimed to have witnessed the extent of fakery in Dali’s world while living in Cadaques with the maestro as his nearest neighbour.

He met Isidro Bea, whom he called the “real” Dali, and saw the extent of the painting that Bea did on Dali’s behalf. Asked by a reporter why Bea didn’t go public about doing so much work without getting any credit, Lauryssens said, “No one would have believed him.

“People don’t want to know. Take the Dali museum at St Petersburg in Florida. All their big canvases are painted by Isidro Bea.”

Asked by the website SimplyDali.com to back up his claim that museums around the world display fake Dali art, Lauryssens cited the assertion by Florida-based Art Experts Inc that all Dali prints created in the 1970s and 1980s “are considered ‘fakes’, while all Dali paintings produced between 1981 and 1983 are in the hands of either Manuel Pujol Baladas or Isidro Bea”.

He said Bea asked to meet him after Dali died and “confirmed to me that it took him only a couple of days to copy every square inch of Señor Dali’s giant ‘Battle of Tetuan’ from a colour photograph in Life magazine”.

Pujol Baladas was known in Spain as “Young Dali”, Lauryssens said, between 1975 and 1982 having been responsible for 500 oil paintings attributed to Dali and several thousand watercolours.

To Pujol Baladas’ denial to the media that he ever made such a claim, Lauryssens cited the assistant’s March 1983 interview with Rafael Cid in the Spanish magazine Cambio 16, in which he admitted to being paid by Dali to execute 430 paintings on the maestro’s behalf. “I was Dali’s official forger”, he’d supposedly avowed, and was arrested soon after the interview was published, though the outcome isn’t provided.

Lauryssens was asked, after making (or repeating) all these charges, if he throught his book and the film version of it would tarnish Dali’s reputation. He admitted earning a lot of money selling fake Dalis, but landing in a lot of trouble too.

Isidro Bea may have had a key role in the controversy surrounding the 1997 exhibition of 135 Dali works mounted in Torino by Giuseppe and Mara Albaretto. Dali’s friend Robert Descharnes said only three of the 26 oils on view were genuine. Bea may well have painted these works and, possibly with Gala’s approval, the Albarettos tried to pass them off as Dali originals.

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From the 1967 “Apollinaire” suite: “The 1914-1918 War”

“Drawing is the honesty of art,” Dali said in 1976. “There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.”

True enough in its context, of course, but the reams of prints illegally released under his name leave collectors and vendors quaking to this day. This is despite the fact that Dali genuinely created more that 1,700 limited-edition works on paper in his time.

Lithographs, etchings and engravings were on occasion made from original printing plates that he hand-engraved or etched, or, far more often, he dashed off a charcoal or watercolour on paper to be photographed for printing.

“Woman with Parrot”

Dali was proud of his draughtsmanship. In the catalogue for the 1943 exhibition of his work at the Knoedler Gallery he wrote, “For all my imitators, for all my detractors, and for all my polemicists, I have but one unique response, probably the most difficult to furnish today: a good drawing.”

The drawings were always done fast and with flourish, and he knew any doodle would earn a handsome sum, so by dashing off a sketch he could pay his medical and legal bills, reward a good deed done for him, and, on rare occasions, assist someone in need of quick cash.

“Pere et Fils”

Sometimes a little more flair than usual was utilised, as when he created his “Apocalypse” suite by exploding specially produced grenades filled with nails. Another time he fired ink pellets from a rifle to cause random scatterings — on wood, canvas and even livestock. He slathered an ink-soaked octopus on lithographers’ stones for part of his “Don Quixote” series.

Perhaps the most celebrated series of prints Dali created was “The Divine Comedy”, made between 1950 and ‘52 as a commission for the Italian government. Shown above are “Adam” and “St Peter”, both illustrating the Paradiso section of Dante’s epic.

Dali painted 102 watercolours, well short of the 200 originally envisioned, and these were first exhibited in 1954 in Rome, followed by shows the next year in Venice, Milan and New York.

The Italian press railed against the choice of Dali (a crazy Spaniard) to honour the homeland’s greatest poet, however, and the Communist Party objected to spending money on whimsical art when there were more pressing demands for taxpayers’ money. The series was off to an awful start, with private financing proving difficult to find, and its bad luck continued when, in the 1970s, thousands of fake copies flooded the market.

Here’s one of the prints from 1969’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — one etching and 12 heliogravures on Mandeure paper, released in an edition of 2,500 copies.

This is “La Femme Visible” from 1930, a photographic portrait of Gala (apparently it’s somewhere in there), rendered as a heliogravure reworked with a needle. It was conceived as the frontispiece to a book.

This was part of Dali’s monumental “Argus Aubusson” tapestry from 1972-73, on which he reproduced some of his most famous images with the intention of decorating the walls of the Theatre-Museum in Figueras.

“The Three-cornered Hat and The Dream” from either 1965 or 1975 (sources differ) was one of three panels that Dali offered to Peter Moore for the entrance to his home in Salqueria, but was in fact primarily executed by Isidor Bea, a gifted artist who painted portions of Dali’s most famous canvases (see this post).

“Alchemie des Philosophes” from 1976 was a series of 10 mixed-media prints, published in an edition of 225.

Dali’s 1967 “Casanova” suite comprised 12 erotic sketches, including “Pears for Dessert”, “Snails — an Erotic Instrument”, “Excrement”, “Voyeurism” and “Eel”.

The Goya series was produced between 1973 and 1977, just 200 pieces plus 20 artist’s proofs, and made their debut at the Goya Museum in Castres, Spain. Dali supposedly used diamonds to etch the plates, which are versions of Goya’s own “Caprichos” (or “Caprices”) etchings from 1799.

Like the “Divine Comedy” illustrations, the Goya variations ran afoul of the law when Spanish police found 80 plates from the suite in a Cadaqués warehouse belonging to Dali’s long-time secretary Peter Moore. The Gala-Dali Foundation declared them forgeries, evidently an unauthorised reissue of Dali’s originals.

Shown below in three views, “Paysage Angelique”, a watercolor and ink drawing on paper from 1958, fetched around $150,000 at a 2008 auction.

The Salvador Dali Museum in Florida bought “Untitled (Baseball and Ballerina)” in 1998 to honour the newfound local team the Tampa Bay Rays. It was a sketch for the Disney-Dali animation “Destino”.

When the Rays won the American League pennant in 2008, says Janice Embrey, a museum docent and member of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, this picture took pride of place on a wall, replacing a portrait of Eleanor and Reynolds Morse, the museum’s main benefactors.

“I asked why the ballerina was on the field,” she says, “and I was told, ‘Her head is the ball’.”

“Memories of Surrealism” was a 1971 suite of 12 photo-offset lithographs and original etchings. It’s displayed here with “Le Christ”, from 1964.

From 1943, the highly detailed work below (with a detail following), identified as “Projets de Rideaux de scene et etudes preliminaires” was sold at auction in 2008 for $360,000. It merges what art critic Juan Antonio Ramírez called the “Four Mechanisms” — mutation, paranoic control over perception, morphological echo and a confusion of figures.

An anthropomorphic tree at the top left and right recall the cover of Dali’s novel “Hidden Faces”, the swan alludes to Gala as well as Leda and the swan, Saint Jude with a cross attests to his faith, and the crutch cites God’s protection.

“Masked Mermaid in Black” from 1939 is one of Dali’s forays into clothing design that the other surrealists found so demeaning. It was created for his 1939 World Fair pavilion, which had as a co-sponsor a Pittsburgh rubber manufacturer, who actually produced the costume from Dali’s prescient artwork. Next to it is “Thought Machine”, and iIllustration for 1935’s autobiographical “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali”.

“Don Quixote and Sancho” is a 1966 etching published by Sears in an edition of 100, and a revisit with one of Dali’s (and all Spaniards’) favourite themes.

Above and in two details below, “Tancrède”, rendered in watercolour, gouache and gold paint in 1968, is a scene from the opera of the same name by André Campra. The scales are said to symbolise a choice for Tancrède, who’s seen drenched in blood alongside Clorinde on the right, embodying pain and the desire to die, and Pierre le Solitaire in white on the left, a representation of God or duty.

Below are some randomly selected prints and drawings.

“Rod and Gun” from 1947

“Surrealistic Bullfight — Burning Giraffe” from 1967

“The Old Hippy” from the 1969 “Hippies” series

“Corridor of Katmandu” from the 1969 “Hippies” series

An illustration for “Macbeth”
Dali also illustrated “As You Like It” and produced one series of 15 original engravings titled “Much Ado about Shakespeare” and another of 16 etchings called “Shakespeare II”.

“Piano Under the Snow Tapestry”, 1972

“The Judgement”

“Witches with Broom” from the 1968-1969 “Faust” suite

Among the better websites carrying many images of Dali prints is DaliPrintGallery.com.

Dali had a peculiar relationship with the ancient Goddess of Love and Beauty, which in itself shouldn’t come as a surprise.

In his many depictions of her, his preferred variant was the Venus de Milo (actually it’s Aphrodite of Milos), rather than the Medici Venus or Botticelli’s, or any other.

Maybe it was because the Milo is the most iconic and easily recognised; perhaps because, armless, she already tends to the surreal.

There are, too, the notions that the Milo is love reborn, and was “only 84 years old” when Dali was born. The statue was found in 1820, and thus, in a sense, beauty was reincarnated, straight out of the legend of the Judgement of Paris, her apple long since gone missing.

While still a child, Dali made a terracotta copy of the second-century BC original, which is at the Louvre, and later recalled, “My first experience as a sculptor gave me an unknown and delicious erotic joy.”

In 1936 there was a slew of drawings and, ultimately, the painting “Anthropomorphic Cabinet”. Here a gaunt figure whose identity is obscured by long hair draped across the face offers itself for inspection, inside and out, as seen in this post about K20 Kunstsammlung, the museum that owns one of the more famous versions.

The extended arm seems to be a warning not to approach, unless you’re ready for anything. The drawers are mostly already ajar, though, and despite the macabre head, it’s clear there’s nothing to be feared.

It was a simple matter, after that, to offer the Goddess of Love up to close scrutiny as well. Venus also became a chest of drawers.

“The only difference between immortal Greece and the contemporary era,” Dali explained, as quoted by biographers Descharnes and Néret, “is Sigmund Freud, who discovered that the human body, which was purely neo-platonic at the time of the Greeks, is now full of secret drawers that only psychoanalysis is able to open.

“It is necessary to put all the drawers into a body that is large enough and has not yet known the Christian invention of remorse of conscience. This sculpture can cure us of psychoanalysis.”

Various editions of “Venus de Milo aux Tiroirs” keep popping up for sale. In 2008 Sotheby’s sold a 15-inch-tall bronze with three removable drawers for $19,000. A few weeks later the statuette that Dali had kept for himself out of a 1964 casting of his 1936 original was going for around $800,000.

In that variation, for which Marcel Duchamp had supervised the foundry work on his behalf, the addition of fluffy pompoms heaps scorn on the the idealisation of perfect beauty, and on Venus de Milo too.

These editions are usually painted white, as if to simulate marble, but another, later version, sometimes called “Venus Traversée par les Longs Tiroirs”, is green.

Seen below, “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” from about 1969, with its mirrored images of Venus de Milo gazing out from a swarm of flies and spheres, is also discussed in this post.

Also worth noting are the paintings “Woman with Drawers” from 1936 and “The Burning Giraffe”, which came a year later.

Also ubiquitous at auction sales is “Space Venus” from 1980. Here the goddess is sliced in two (as was the original statue when found), and embellished with selections from the Dali motif collection — a soft watch, an egg and two ants.

In both 1967 and ‘69, separate film treatments revived interest in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s kinky 1870 novella “Venus in Furs”. The Austrian author from whose name the word “masochism” derives ended up inspiring Dali’s own Venus in Furs suite of prints in 1969, a few years before Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground released a song of the same title.

Dali’s series had titles like “Whips Alley”, “Man Kissing Shoe” and, for the one shown below, “Woman with Whip”.

Venus was reincarnated once again in his Mythology suite. Seen here are “The Birth of Venus” from Mythology with “Kneeling Woman” from Venus in Furs.

And then there’s the tuxedo fitted with drawers in 2008 by Louis Markoya, who was Dali’s protegé in the early 1970s. You can see it in this post and in another, more extensive, here at Dali House.

Germany’s Heidelberg Castle, still largely wrecked from assaults in the 17th century, hosted a Dali retrospective in 1981, one of many honours coming the ageing artist’s way. The king and queen of Spain visited him and Gala in Port-Lligat, and Catalonia bestowed on him a Gold Medal.

Shown here is “The Hallucinogenic Toreador”, painted between 1968 and 1970 at now on view at the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida. Click on the image for a larger view.

A tribute to feminity in the form of Venus and masculinity in the matador, the painting took 15 months to complete.

Repeated images of the Venus de Milo, who Dali long before turned into a chest of drawers, mingle with dots and flies, which in legend swarmed from the tomb of St Narrciso to repel foreign invasions of Spain, to form a bullfighter in his suit of lights. Read more about St Narcissus (to use the English spelling) in this post.

It’s been said that Dali acknowledged the ultimate victory of the French “invasion” by including a picturesque bay in which a woman in a bikini floats on a raft — she represents French tourists at a Club Med in Catalonia.

I have read that “Hallucinogenic Toreador” was painted in 12 “panels”, with the depiction of the bullfighter being “a secret 13th panel”. Actually his portrait isn’t so hidden once you recognise the green area in the centre as his necktie against the white of his shirt. The left breast of the central Venus forms his nose, her abdomen his mouth and chin, and thus the red robe of the Venus on the right becomes his cape, as if slung across a shoulder.

A dying bull is shaped by the rocks of Cape Creus. Gala frowns in one corner because she disliked bullfights. Catalan culture, religion and other elements of Dali’s life merge in an autobiographical jigsaw puzzle in which spotting all the ticks and tricks can occupy hours.

Commentators have suggested that Dali deliberately incorporated several different styles of modern art to demonstrate his mastery of them all: pop art in the solarised face of Venus at the upper left, cubism in the Venus at lower left, and op art in the dots of the toreador’s cape.

According to Louis Markoya, Dali’s protegé in the early 1970s, Dali got a kick out of rendering the “chair” at the lower left in the cubist manner show he could show off his supremacy over Picasso and Gris. Louis also points out references to other Dali icons, including the Angelus (in the same jumble of faces at lower left) and the holes in the Venuses with their backs turned, recalling his “Weaning Furniture”, as well as the colours of the Spanish flag.

Another member of the Collect Dali group and a docent at the Florida Dali museum, Janice Embry, says the docents use a manual written by Reynolds Morse to help them guide and educate visitors.

It suggests that the numeral 5 circling the eye of the pop-art Venus alludes to Dali’s study of numerology and Garcia Lorca’s ode to a bullfighter, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”, with its repeated phrase “five in the afternoon”.

The manual also notes that the dark areas of the three small Venuses above the dog at bottom centre mimic the shape of the bullfighter “waving his hat and cape at Gala to pay tribute”.

It points out the petals of the rose, a symbol of feminine beauty, enfolding what could be a lion’s head, suggesting desire.

And evidently, if no children are present, the manual sanctions tour guides telling visitors about the shadow cast by the bone held by the little boy in the sailor suit at the bottom right.

The suggestion is that the shadow isn’t that of the bone used by the boy to propel his hoop, but of his erect penis.

(These are only suggestions, the manual indicates.)

Enrique Zepeda, yet another Dali collector, offers perhaps the most definitive clues in citing the book “Todo Dali en un Rostro”, written by Luis Romero following many interviews with Dali while he was actually working on the painting.

Romero learned that Dali was paying tribute to his old friend Garcia Lorca in many ways with this picture, most clearly in evoking Sanchez Mejias, who was also well known as a patron of the arts and the originator of the term “the generation of ‘27″, referring to Dali and his Student Residence classmates Lorca, Buñuel, Alberti, Ochoa and others who offered such a contrast to the dominant “generation of ‘97″.

Sanchez Mejias was killed in the bullring on August 13, 1934, Enrique reports. Lorca read the poem in public for the first time in March 1936, three months before the civil war began and four months before he was executed.

The Venus of Milo appeared in another Lorca poem, as did the slain bull, Romero noted, and the rose recalls the stanza from his “Ode to Salvador Dali”:

Yet the rose too in the garden where you live.
Ever the rose, ever, our north and south!
Calm, intense like an eyeless statue,
blind to the underground struggle it causes.

And the dog in the painting is a famous image in itself.

It’s a photograph of a Dalmatian by RC James that’s a popular optical illusion but, more scientifically, demonstrates emergence in perception, by which complex patterns arise from multiple but relatively simple interactions.

Louis Markoya says the maestro copied his Venus for “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” directly from the image of her that appeared on boxes of Venus brand artists’ pencils made by the American Pencil Company from 1905 to 1973.

Louis said he was even shown the original Venus Pencil box, several years after it was put to good use.

Below, Dali in the 1970s with a sculpture-assemblage that’s been referred to as “The Hallucinogenic Toreador”, but certainly a crazed and completely different perspective, with bullfighter’s cap, spoons, scissors and a bassoon and drum.

The bullfighter returns in “The Face”, 1972.

In 2008 “Hallucinogenic Toreador” took to the stage, in the form of a play by the same name, written by John Flores of Dallas and presented by that city’s Project X: Theatre.

It was well-received in May at the Prague International Fringe Festival, and then in December was mounted in Dallas, being billed as “an exploration of Dali’s most autobiographical painting”.

“It is a spontaneous, irrational, systematic performance that combines images, text and action in an effort to express but never explain Dali’s persona and the ongoing manifestations of his own creative process as fractured and fragmented through the many facets of dadaism, cubism, Freudian theory, surrealism and ultimately, Dali-ism.”

Blogger Jehara reported that she was involved in Flores’ play and said he’d told the cast that a section of his script was actually Dali’s own work.

Of Dali’s “The Unplayable Play”, Jehara said, “he truly believed that it was not performable yet fervently wished it to be. It is extremely difficult to find, and our playwright not only found it but included it in the script in its entirety. He believes that Dali would be pleased.”

And this is what she presented:

In the heart of my deep dark night
The flame refuses to burn
It embraces my arid heart
But it’s impossible to consume
My divine burn to white heat
All my flesh liquefies
My night is always a white night
It’s white jism so far from me
It runs mixed with my tears.
Smell and taste don’t lie
It hangs like a candle from my nose
Generous mucous saliva
I’ve consumed everything constantly
My body so dry my ass ground up
Oh its whiteness is shadowy
I swallow it like milk
Let it penetrate into my veins
Into my finest vessels
Let each pore receive it
Till my black hair turns white.

From a review in the Dallas Morning Herald:

The show “begins alarmingly with the three performers bursting onto the stage yelling the same phrase over and over. Over the course of the short play, they strike poses, take off most of their clothing, climb scaffolding and re-enact a TV game show. We learn of Dali’s obsessions and his idealisation of his wife and muse, Gala. It’s all pretty weird. But then Salvador Dali was self-consciously weird. Surrealism rules.”