Salvador Dal’s Art Debuts in India: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Exhibition

Getty Images Salvador Dal is one of the most famous proponents of Surrealist art Although the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dal never visited India, an exhibition of his artworks is being held in the country for the first time. Starting Friday, an exhibition in the capital Delhi will showcase an expansive collection of more than 200 of his original sketches, etchings and watercolour paintings. The collection has been curated by Christine Argillet, daughter of Pierre Argillet, a French collector who was also Dal’s friend and publisher.

“Dal was fascinated by India, especially the West’s fascination with Indian mysticism in the 1960s and 1970s,” Ms Argillet told the BBC. Some of the sketches in the collection are based on photographs her father had taken during a trip to India in the 1970s, when the hippie movement was at its peak and young guitar-toting Americans visited India on spiritual quests.

Dal’s India features elephants and temples but, as with all his artwork, they’re not always easy to spot, having been rendered in the artist’s trademark surrealist style. In his works, human bodies sprout flowers from their heads; eyeballs dance in a matrix of squiggles and strokes and dismembered body parts interact animatedly with the world around them. Stare for longer than a minute and these disconnected shapes begin to form new connections and meanings in the mind’s eye.

“Appreciating Dal’s art is like peeling back the layers of an onion; you can keep finding something new to marvel at,” Ms Argillet says. Bruno Art Gallery/Road Show Company Flower Woman at the Piano, one of the sketches in the collection Bringing Dal’s work to India was a long and arduous endeavour, says Akshitta Aggarwal of Bruno Art Group, the international art gallery presenting the exhibition.

“The project took five years; every sketch and artwork had to be checked for its authenticity,” Ms Aggarwal says. Strictly speaking, this isn’t the first time Dal’s creations have come to India. The Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata city holds two colour etchings of the artist. In 1967, Dal famously designed a set of whimsical ashtrays for Air India – the country’s national airline back then – which were handed out to first class passengers.

In return, Dal demanded not money but a baby elephant. Uttara Parikh, the then deputy commercial director of Air India, recounted to Times of India newspaper how she initially went shopping for one in a zoo in Mumbai city but returned empty-handed. She finally procured the baby elephant from a zoo in Bangalore city (now Bengaluru) and Air India flew the animal to Spain, where it was kept in a zoo until its death in 2018.

(Dal had exciting plans for the elephant, such as undertaking a journey across Europe on two wheels, but these never came to fruition.)

Getty Images The artist’s outward persona reflected his colourful take on life. He dressed in flamboyant suits and sported a moustache that pointed upward so severely it seemed in danger of piercing his eyes.

In a 1955 interview with the BBC , Dal revealed the origins of his famous upturned moustache: “Dates, you know the fruit? In the last moment of dinner, I [did] not clean my finger and I put a little in my moustache and it remains for all afternoon very efficiently,” he said but later revealed that he used a strong wax to shape his moustache.

In the same interview, he described his moustache as being “very gay, very pointed, very aggressive”. Bruno Art Gallery/Road Show Company The Bust by Dal is part of the collection which goes on display in Delhi Ms Argillet, who knew Dal intimately through her childhood and teenage years and often spent her summers in Spain with her father, recollects Dal being a humorous person who loved playing pranks and “shocking the bourgeois”.

He once encouraged her to take some sweets from his bedroom and throw them at fishermen at a nearby beach. Only the sweets turned out to be cherry bombs, annoying the fishermen and forcing a young Ms Argillet to run for cover.

“At one of his parties, he had a tortoise carry around an ashtray on its shell,” Ms Argillet says. But she adds that he was also a shy, intuitive, observant person who had a knack for reading people’s minds. He painted in his studio in short pants and slippers and according to Ms Argillet, it was Dal’s shyness that made him over-perform in public.

“He was misunderstood by many. There were many layers to Dal, just like his paintings,” Ms Argillet says. “The closer you look at his paintings, the more you understand Dal.”

Art India