Salvador Dali

[Parth]

I just came upon this article with a woman who claims to be Salvador Dali's lovechild.

The article shows Dali as asexual, although he was a pretty big voyeur.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-...t-daughter.html

All night the beach below the house heaved with sleepless young people strumming guitars and singing flamenco songs sustained by the cheap local brandy, Fundador.

Behind them, a swimming pool - shaped, notoriously, like an erect phallus - glistened in the moonlight. Next to it, beautiful young things would lounge on a plump red sofa, formed in the shape of Mae West's lips.

In the distance lay a hotch-potch of unassuming fisherman's houses, which together made up the unlikely home and workshop of surrealist painter Salvador Dali.

The prospect of seeing these legendary objects and meeting some of the visitors who were invited to the estate by its celebrated owner, drew young people from all over the world in the Sixties, including myself.

Beatle George Harrison was a visitor, too, as were actors Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner and the long-legged model, Verushka.

In the centre of this celebrity whirlwind was the master himself.

Tall and thin with his iconic moustache, and always accompanied by his dragon-like Russian wife, Gala, he had changed the way the world perceived itself with his extraordinary pictures of melting watches and telephones in the shape of lobsters.

Today, the tiny village of Port Lligat, near Cadaques on Spain's north-eastern coast, is still a favourite holiday destination and Dali's house has become a museum.

But when its most famous resident was alive, it was the object of a veritable pilgrimage. If you were lucky you would be invited in to look around, as I was. You might even be asked to pose for him.

There was always an aura of danger in Dali's presence - but there was rarely any physical contact with him.

The etiolated painter was only middle-aged when I met him, and in full physical health.

Yet, so the story went, Dali had such a horror of women's anatomy, he had only slept once with the wife he loved. Despite this they were married for 48 years, a union only ending in Gala's death in 1982.

And though he was intrigued by the male figure, he did not have much success with men, either.

Art critic Brian Sewell revealed that Dali once asked him to curl up like a foetus and masturbate. Sewell agreed - but later said Dali himself declined to participate and would only take photographs.

In short, Dali was a voyeur, not a legendary lover and so he would have remained in history - except that now, nearly 20 years after the master's death, a 52-year-old Spanish woman is claiming to be his secret love-child.

According to Pilar A, as she has been designated by her lawyer, her mother worked as a maid in the mid-Fifties for a family who spent summers in nearby Cadaques and was one of the lucky few invited back to the Dali house.

So confident is Pilar A of her origins that she has demanded the master's body be exhumed from its tomb in the town of Figueras so DNA samples can be taken as proof.

She also says that when she met one of Dali's lifelong friends in Paris last year he was so taken by her resemblance to her 'father', that he said she needed only the moustache to make it complete.

The news would be a huge surprise to Dali's friends, who long deemed the painter physically incapable of having sex.

And Gala, Dali's lifelong muse, would be turning in her grave. After all, she had so little interest in children she had abandoned her young daughter by her first husband so she could begin an affair with Dali.

Then, shortly after her marriage to the painter, Gala had a hysterectomy. Children, it seemed, were never on the cards.

But that did not stop Gala sleeping around - and she usually did it with Dali's blessing. She even went back to her first husband for a fling. Dali was also, the story goes, keen on procuring sailors for his wife - and watching them all perform from a distance.

And he particularly enjoyed being humiliated by the feisty Gala who was cruel to him, performing unmentionable sex acts on him.

It was all too much for some of his distinguished contemporaries including George Orwell, who advised that the only way to look at Dali was to see him as two characters - one an admittedly good draughtsman, the other a disgusting human being.

The root of Dali's perversity can be traced back to his unconventional upbringing. His extraordinary imagination may have been the inspiration for Andy Warhol, and hence most of post-modern art, but he certainly did not have the easiest start in life.

Born in Figueras, 30 miles south of Port Lligat, nine months after his three-year-old brother died of gastroenteritis, Dali was only five when his parents took him to the infant's grave and told him he was the reincarnation of the dead child.

But they also encouraged his budding artistic talents and his devoted lawyer father organised an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in the local town when he was only 16.

Two years later, his mother died of breast cancer. Dali was inconsolable, 'I worshipped her,' he recorded. And instead of resenting it, he was quite reassured when his father married his dead wife's sister.

Indeed, Dali was already proving most unusual. By the time he left home in 1922 to study painting in Madrid, he was already dressing in the style of an 19th-century English gentleman, complete with knee breeches, long hair and sideburns.

He was also distant and haughty - so much so that he was expelled from school just before his exams for saying there was no one on the staff competent enough to examine him.

He did make some good friends at school - including film-maker Luis Bunuel, with whom he would later collaborate, and gay poet Federico Garcia Lorca. But the repressed young Dali could never bring himself to respond to Lorca's homosexual advances.

Proud, ambitious and confused, his emotional life seemed to consist only of a series of crushes. Then, in 1929, he met Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, always known as Gala.

Born to an intellectual Russian family, as a young girl Gala had been sent to Switzerland to be treated for tuberculosis. There she met the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, whom she married.

Their relationship was a fluid arrangement - they had already lived in a menage a trois with German painter Max Ernst - and when they travelled to Spain together and met Dali, Eluard was unconcerned.

Eleven years older than Dali, Gala immediately spotted the young man's money-making potential and moved in with him, abandoning Eluard and their poor daughter without a backward glance.

And though friends of the couple believe Dali was a virgin when they met and they had virtually no sex life, the pair were inseparable.

In 1934 they were married. That same year Dali visited America where he created an immediate sensation under Gala's tutelage, which encouraged him to become increasingly eccentric.

At one lecture he later gave in London, the painter arrived leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds and sporting a full deep-sea diving outfit - including a helmet which had to be hastily unscrewed when he started gasping for breath.

Dali's antics were becoming so exhibitionist that fellow surrealists considered them too commercial. Indeed around this time, the founder of the surrealist movement, Andre Breton, famously used the words 'Salvador Dali' to make the anagram 'Avida Dollars' - 'hungry for dollars' in Spanish.

After nine years in America, Dali and Gala moved back to Spain to the little town of Port Lligat, just a few miles from where he was born.

There he designed the phallic swimming pool, a shape Dali favoured according to friends in an attempt to overcompensate for his own deficiencies. Many speculate it was because Dali was not well endowed that led to his phobia of sexual liaisons.

Around this time Dali also became a passionate Roman Catholic. And in 1958 he married Gala again, in a Catholic ceremony.

He even obtained special dispensation from the Pope to do so, because of Gala's previous marriage to Eluard. His putative daughter Pilar A would have been around two years old at this time.

This is all most interesting. Perhaps Dali's resurgent Catholicism is connected to the infidelity which is claimed to have produced Pilar A. Could his guilt over an affair have driven him to renew his vows with Gala?

For Dali to have been caught out by fatherhood would have been quite a shock, particularly as at the time he was obsessed by the concepts of chastity and virginity.

We know this because of his prolific paintings of rhinoceroses, which he, bizarrely, saw as symbolising the Virgin Mary.

As well as being intellectually obsessed with purity (the artist seems to have had a phobic aversion to the act of 'breeding'), Dali was simply too self-obsessed to even consider having children. Life in Port Lligat revolved around Dali - despite his apparently laissez faire attitudes - certainly not a new baby.

The artist would rise at the same time every day and would go to bed on the dot of 11pm - even if he took his whole entourage out to dinner.

After the main course he was known to decline coffee on behalf of everyone at the table and simply leave. He was also working furiously hard - and in 1960 started creating the Dali museum in Figueres.

In his introverted, solipsistic world, women often passed through. And not one of Dali's female companions was in the least maternal. He was never confronted with the messy world of childrearing.

One friend was French-born Isabelle Dufresne, better known as Ultra Violet, who became Andy Warhol's first superstar muse. There was also exotic party girl Amanda Lear, who you could not help but bump into on the Sixties scene.

Later she became better known for going out with David Bowie, but it was Dali who made her famous after meeting her in a French nightclub. He was transfixed by her ambiguous sexuality.

Lear was a mannish blonde, who said she was born in Hong Kong and was the daughter of a British naval officer. One of her friends claims Lear was born a man and Dali paid for her sex-change surgery.

Lear, though, claims Dali was so taken by her, he managed to overcome his reticence about the sexual act. She said they would perform 'the sewing machine' - Dali's graphic description of coupling - while his wife went out to the theatre with her young boyfriends.

According to Lear, they also conducted a spiritual 'marriage' ceremony together on a mountain top. When she later married someone else, Dali was so upset he sent her a funeral wreath.

It is interesting to note that Dali complimented Lear by saying she was not like other women who were 'simply made to produce embryos'.

Was this a sign he had been caught out by one of those fecund women - perhaps Pilar's mother whom he had met a few years earlier? Or was he just referring to Lear's supposed indeterminate gender?

According to one observer of life in Port Lligat at this time, there were countless women who flitted around Dali - and countless boys. Indeed, the artist regarded other people as mere playthings and would discard them as soon as he had done with them.

Dali's technique was simple. He was charismatic and used flattery to ensnare young people. Sometimes he would help them further themselves - he got one young man from San Francisco a part in the musical Hair in return for a perverse sexual favour.

This man says he believes Dali had full sex only two or three times in his life - but was one of those then enough to conceive a daughter?

Undoubtedly women were happy to be flattered by him - then he would ask them to take off their clothes.

They usually did it, too, hoping he would do a drawing of them and give it to them in return for disrobing. Instead, a male 'model' would usually appear from the depths of the house.

Before the girl knew what was happening she would be having sex with a complete stranger. Dali, of course, would watch, eagerly.

But throughout these perverse dalliances, there was only one woman who stayed the course - Gala, the wife who had turned him from a struggling eccentric into a legend.

Visitors witnessed some dramatic arguments, especially as she grew older. Once, when Gala announced her intention to run away to America with a young lover, Dali kicked her out of bed and she broke a rib. Gala retaliated by beating Dali around the head with a walking stick.

By 1980, the 87-year-old Gala, who was becoming increasingly dotty, was dosing him with various 'medicines' which provoked tremors like Parkinson's disease. Eventually, his health detoriated so much he could no longer draw.

When his wife did die, Dali suffered a dramatic emotional blow - just as he had after the death of his mother. This time he was pushing 80 and lost the will to live.

At first, he refused to drink, nearly dying of dehydration. Two years later he all but perished in a bedroom fire which had all the marks of a suicide attempt. He was rescued by his staff and taken to Figueres where in 1988 he was hospitalised with heart failure. He was still so famous, he was visited by the Spanish king.

Dali died in hospital a year later while listening to a recording of his favourite music, Wagner's Tristan And Isolde.

And that would have been that but for the emergence of Pilar A. If the DNA tests prove her case - and she does bear a remarkable resemblance to the master - the life of Salvador Dali could have the most unexpected footnote of all.

[potentialsurvivor]

All the more reason for Dali to be a personal hero, I hadn't read anything of his personal life before really... I should look into that more, especially with such an interesting, seemingly asexy vibe.

Who wants to be my Gala? *kidding!*

[iff]

All the more reason for Dali to be a personal hero, I hadn't read anything of his personal life before really... I should look into that more, especially with such an interesting, seemingly asexy vibe.

Who wants to be my Gala? *kidding!*

i wouldn't be claiming dali to be a personal hero anytime soon after all he was vigorous in his support of general franco in spain

sure he was a great artist but the fascism part would stop him from being a hero anytime soon

[Haunter]

Very, very interesting. I did not know many of these things about him. Thanks for the link.

I think this should be made into a "This is what an asexual looks like" T-shirt or something... :lol:

[fonfeluch]

Very, very interesting. I did not know many of these things about him. Thanks for the link.

I think this should be made into a "This is what an asexual looks like" T-shirt or something... :lol:

yes, why not making such shirt:)