Strange Feast

Salvador Dalí

This is not a story of moral clarity. This is a descent into theater, distortion, obsession, and fame. In this week’s Madmen of Art: Living On The Edge, we follow the arc of a man who dreams with his eyes open, who breaks with family, with nation, with love, and finally with reason. He does not warn of danger, he turns it into a canvas. He invites you to look.

Birth in the Mirror

Strange days have found us.¹

The clocks toll too slowly in the provincial town of Figueres, Catalonia on the day he is born, May 11, 1904. Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech enters the world not as a blank slate but as consolation, arriving to a home already haunted. Just nine months earlier, another Salvador Dalí had died of gastroenteritis. His older brother was already buried before the child now entering the world would replace him. Not simply born into a family, he is born as someone else. The grief has not passed; it is transmuted. His parents name the new child Salvador as both an act of resurrection and burden.²

With the same name came the same expectations. When taken to his brother’s grave at age five he is told, “You are him.” His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, is a strict, ambitiously rationalist notary with an iron belief in law and order. His mother, Felipa Domènech Ferrés, is a devout Catholic with artistic leanings, imaginative and indulgent of her son’s eccentricities. From the beginning, Dalí is torn between these poles: Logic and dream, authority and imagination, repression and release. His mother believes he is special, destined for greatness. His father believes he must be disciplined into it. The boy takes both beliefs and twists them inside.³

Dalí never forgives this confusion of identity. It marks the beginning of a lifelong obsession with duality, resurrection, and the ghost-self shadowing all his work. This is not metaphor—it is foundational trauma. In his Diaries of a Genius, he later proclaims: “There was a first version of myself, but I am the improved one.”⁴

In the year of Dalí’s birth, a headline from La Vanguardia reads:

“La Revolución no es ya una amenaza lejana; se encuentra entre nosotros.”
Revolution is no longer a distant threat; it is among us.⁵

Outside the womb, Spain is lurching through its own identity crisis. The monarchy of Alfonso XIII rules shakily over a country still licking wounds from the 1898 Spanish-American War, in which it lost Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The so-called “Disaster of '98” has left the Spanish psyche bruised and uncertain. Writers of the Generation of ’98 lament the collapse of empire. A monarchy clings to power while liberalism and anarchism surge through the cracks. Intellectuals argue over national renewal. Industrial Catalonia surges forward with a separate identity, restless under Madrid’s rule while rural Spain stagnates.⁶

These tensions will shape the landscape Dalí both inhabits and later subverts.

Strange Days Begin

Strange days have tracked us down

Young Salvador is a contradiction from the start: Effeminate, spoiled, prone to rages. He wears extravagant clothes to school and throws tantrums when challenged. At home, he learns to paint before he can fully write. At six, he is drawing funerals and landscapes in equal measure. At ten, he is reading Voltaire, and asking to be dressed in eccentric costumes as he copies the Dutch masters with obsessive precision. His sister, Ana Maria, becomes both companion and first subject—though later, after his fame, she will write her own account without his surrealist filter; they will part bitterly.⁷

Figueres, though modest in size, sits at a cultural crossroads as Catalan identity simmers against Castilian control. In 1910, Spain sees a surge in anarchist activity in Catalonia—bombings, assassinations, labor strikes. The world tightens. Freud publishes Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Picasso finishes Woman with Mandolin. The edges of Europe start to hum with a dissonant energy. Meanwhile, Dalí draws exploding giraffes in his notebook encouraged by a mother who introduces him to the dream world of storytelling through imagery and religious mysticism. This provides a counterforce to his father’s strict discipline and belief in reason, law and civic progress. For Salvador, these two forces will never harmonize, only oscillate: Law and dream, structure and delirium.⁸

By 1916, Dalí is sent to drawing school under Juan Núñez, a teacher who notes his precocious line work and sensitivity to color. His parents send him to a summer vacation with the Pichot family in Cadaqués.There, he is introduced to modern painting for the first time: Impressionism, Cubism. The light is different. The mind stretches. His mother is thrilled. His father grows anxious. This combination of exposure and early discipline sets a foundation later to be unhinged by Surrealism, not because he lacks technique, but because he exceeds it. His childhood diary from this period (later quoted in Diaries of a Genius) reveals a boy already aware of the performance of self—
“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”⁹

News from the outside world cracks the stillness of provincial Catalonia. 1917: The Russian Revolution. 1919: The Treaty of Versailles. The Spanish flu leaves black bunting on neighborhood balconies.¹⁰

In 1921, Dalí’s mother Felipa dies of uterine cancer when he is sixteen. The loss devastates him. He later writes it was, “the greatest blow I had experienced in my life.” His father marries Felipa’s sister shortly afterward, a decision Dalí views as a betrayal, deepening an emotional fissure which will never fully close—something Dalí never forgives.¹¹

From this point forward, we enter the house of mirrors. Each room—a new distortion of self, fame, desire, loss.

The School of Mirrors

We shall go on playing / Or find a new town

In 1921, Dalí is accepted into the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. He enters not just a school but a stage. Here is where Dalí meets the twin forces to shape his early adulthood: Luis Buñuel, the future surrealist filmmaker and Federico García Lorca, the magnetic poet who will become both muse and intimate companion. These are not mere friendships, but crucibles of identity. Buñuel introduces him to cutting film and symbolic violence. Lorca is the one who sees the level of Dalí’s brilliance early, awakening both emotional and aesthetic dimensions along with something else beneath: A fragility masked by provocation. Their relationship is intense, becoming one of the central tensions in Dalí’s formational years, destined to remain unresolved.

Meanwhile, as the world continues to slide toward fracture, the capital is roiling with new ideas. In 1923, Miguel Primo de Rivera seizes power in a military coup, establishing a dictatorship in Spain. At the academy, Dalí is suspended briefly for insubordination then is briefly jailed for political agitation, though his actual stance remains slippery. He loathes conformity, but also fears the incoherence of mass movements. He begins drawing writhing bodies, melting timepieces, soft architecture. The subconscious is becoming his palette. From this point on, Dalí self-mythologizes with increasing precision. His identity is no longer inherited, rather it is sculpted, curated, distorted at will.

The Liminal Spaces

They’re going to destroy / Our casual joys

In 1924 ABC runs a headline:
“General Primo de Rivera Signs National Pact—Monarchy Supports Military Dictatorship.”¹²
While a new Spain is being sculpted by force promising order through obedience, young artists begin muttering a different creed, one of chaos through creation.

Back in Figueres on break after his suspension from the Academia, Dalí will not retreat. During this period he is in an in-between space: Not yet fully expelled, not yet in Paris, not yet a Surrealist—but all are becoming. Salvador finds himself between disobedience, desire and his own dance of shadows. He paints obsessively, devours Freud, writes wild letters about himself—to himself. He is already creating his own myth. As a middle class, conservative family the Dalí’s are extremely status-conscious, so of course, his father disapproves of watching his son grow his hair longer, wearing capes and declaring impossible theories about rhinoceros horns and mathematical spirals. For Salvador, art is no longer imitation, it becomes provocation.¹³

Soon, he rejoins intellectual life through the Residencia de Estudiantes back at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, where Lorca is still a dominant presence. The two rekindle their complicated bond. Dalí adores Lorca’s elegance of thought, his Andalusian depth. Lorca is drawn to Dalí’s strange magnetism and refuses to name it only friendship. They find themselves talking late into the nights of metaphysics, masks, memory. Dalí listens and contributed intently; then pulls away, afraid of intimacy but addicted to its gravity.¹⁴

Not unexpectedly in 1926, Dalí is expelled again, this time permanently, from the Academia after insulting one of his examiners. He declares no professor there is qualified to judge his genius. Others take note: Dalí is not simply ambitious, he is performing ambition as art. He has outgrown the classroom. While the gesture may have shocked the institution, it feels inevitable to those watching closely. At home in Figueres, tensions thicken. His father, Don Salvador Dalí i Cusí, is both furious and reluctantly intrigued. The son he once hoped would become a respectable artist now speaks only of Freud, Lorca, spirals and subconscious time. Still, he bankrolls the boy’s ambitions, hoping perhaps Paris might correct him.¹⁵

The Grand Delusion

Strange eyes fill strange rooms

By the mid-1920s, Spain is gripped by a growing tension between conservatism and modernism, a fault line running through every salon, café and lecture hall. In Madrid, the Residencia de Estudiantes has become a crucible for the avant-garde. With or without Dalí, voices of Lorca and Buñuel begin to unsettle the cultural order. Lorca’s Mariana Pineda edges toward allegory, threading themes of female resistance and civic martyrdom beneath the veil of historical drama. Buñuel, steeped in Freud and newly returned from Paris, is preparing to turn the grammar of cinema inside out. His Manifesto of 1924 has caused reverberations which cannot be ignored. Their circle, including Dalí, is no longer whispering against tradition—it is daring to speak in tongues of surrealism, symbolism and satire.¹⁶ Newspapers and street pamphlets take note, some praising a “new golden age of Spanish creativity,” others warning of moral decay and foreign infection.¹⁷

For Dalí, the world is cracking open not only in Spain’s politics, but in art’s very language. He watches closely, listens attentively. Then, sketchbook in hand, he moves toward the rupture. With the small stipend from his father, Salvador boards the train. He carries two things with him: A head full of dreams and a letter of introduction to Pablo Picasso, arranged most likely through the family acquaintance of muralist Josep Maria Sert, a prominent Catalan painter then favored by Spanish and French aristocracy. Sert has connections within the Parisian art world certain to help facilitate Dalí’s entrée into Picasso’s circle.¹⁸

Dalí arrives in Paris in 1926 determined to announce himself. Without delay, his first pilgrimage is to the rue la Boétie, where Pablo Picasso keeps his studio. Dalí has prepared for this moment obsessively. He steps into the studio with a portfolio of sketches tucked under his arm and fire in his eyes. Picasso, older by more than two decades, receives him with a kind of reserved curiosity and mild amusement. He is already a towering figure, having passed through Cubism, having shattered form and rebuilt it. He sees in Dalí something familiar—perhaps a version of himself before the fame—but also something unhinged.¹⁹

Picasso flips through the drawings. He says little. A nod here, a raised eyebrow there. Perhaps a smirk. Dalí is both awestruck and defiant, watching for every flicker, every cue, desperate for recognition but equally prepared to duel. Later, he will recount the visit with dramatic flourish: “When I met Picasso I wanted to be Picasso. I admired him more than anyone, until I began to admire myself more.” He does not remember the silence; he fills it with projection, with prophecy. In truth, Picasso likely saw in him a gifted technician—sharp, strange and useful to the Surrealists but not yet dangerous.²⁰

Dalí leaves the studio both emboldened and irritated. This meeting marks a psychic handoff in Dalí’s myth. He does not wish to follow in Picasso’s shadow. He intends to swallow it. The encounter does not humble him. It feeds him. From this day forward, he begins to borrow Picasso’s precision, then twist it, distort it, make it tremble. It is not imitation—it is transfiguration. He sketches furiously, obsessed now with the fusion of hyper-real detail and irrational forms.²¹ In this way, Paris does not baptize him, it merely confirms what he already suspects: The world is ready for his grand delusion.

The Double Body

Voices will signal their tired end

Back in Spain, the atmosphere worsens. El Sol, March 1927:
“Strikes and Executions Mount in Barcelona; Political Dissent Met with Martial Law.”²²

In the summer of 1928, Dalí and Luis Buñuel walk the jagged coastlines of Cadaqués, exchanging fragments of dreams. Buñuel describes a vision—razor to eyeball, no context, no logic. Dalí counters with ants pouring from a hole in a hand. They laugh, then take it seriously. It will be a film, they decide. Not a narrative, not even symbolism—but the subconscious, raw and unfiltered. They are not scripting in any traditional sense, but are mining the subconscious, each offering dreams, obsessions, fragments. They agree no idea be explained, no symbolism stabilized. Their goal is rupture.²³

By the end of 1928, Dalí stands at a threshold. His letters to Lorca become strained. His imagery turns grotesque. He is a man standing between two countries. The repression outside mirrors the confusion within. He is ready to leave Spain again—this time, not as a student, not as a provincial. He will enter Paris as the man who already believes in his own myth. Dalí paints The First Days of Spring (1929), a canvas strewn with disconnected forms and barren light. In it, the body is no longer whole, it fragments, then dissolves. Time folds. The work reflects Dalí’s transition into full Surrealist symbolism: Bleak plains, erotic decay, haunting fragments of figures, personal mythologies rendered in desert light.²⁴ Though he will soon join the Surrealist circle in Paris, this painting captures the final moment before his absorption—still rooted in the Catalan landscape, but already opening drawers from his subconscious.

All masks come off in Paris. André Breton has already assumed the role of spiritual general. He believes in revolution of the psyche and of the state through Freud, Marx and dreams.²⁵ Dalí, in contrast, arrives intoxicated by the dream alone. Both are interested in the dismantling of narrative, in breaking the spell of bourgeois perception, yet Dalí is considered a bold outsider—eccentric, promising and a little dangerous.²⁶ Buñuel raises money—his mother unknowingly funds the madness. Dalí and Buñuel begin shooting the film on a tight budget in early 1929. Un Chien Andalou premieres June at the Studio des Ursulines. A crowd of avant-garde royalty gathers: Breton, Man Ray, Aragon, Cocteau. The opening scene slices through the screen—literally, an eyeball bisected by a razor—and the room goes silent. Then cheers. Laughter. Shock. The Surrealists are transfixed.²⁷ No metaphor is safe from being literalized. The Surrealists watch him carefully.

Premonition

And through their strange hours / We linger alone

In Paris, André Breton publishes the Second Surrealist Manifesto in 1930, deepening the link between Surrealism and revolutionary politics, particularly communism, a tension destined to fracture the group. This marks a turning point in the movement—more militant in tone and aimed at consolidating Surrealism's identity. Dalí, younger, more flamboyant and more theatrical than the others, enters their circle not as a disciple but as a spectacle. His film has marked his initiation. Breton, now assembling his court in Paris, sees in Dalí someone volatile and thrilling—more flamboyant than Artaud, even more calculating than Buñuel, and more willing to play madman than martyr. Dalí, still new to their circle, is already beginning to reshape it just as it begins to organize itself with fervor. The doors of Paris open wide as he steps through with the gaze of someone who already believes the world is his to distort.²⁸

From Spain, Lorca is not watching. Spain has begun to bleed. The 1930s arrive with ominous rhythm—economic collapse, mass polarization, the Second Republic teetering. The friendship between the two has already been torn at the seams. Lorca, the poet of duende and inner darkness,²⁹ wanted something tender from Dalí—perhaps love, or acknowledgment of what passed between them in Madrid.

“I think of you, and I never thought more intensely than now; it’s already the last straw. I always remember you, I remember you too much.”³⁰

Dalí refuses. He later writes in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí Lorca’s affection was “too persistent” and he lacked the courage to face it honestly. The distance grows and letters fade as the poet walks into history. Dalí turns away. "When Dalí later refuses to publicly acknowledge it, their bond breaks. Lorca will call it a betrayal and Dalí will never fully recover from the estrangement."³¹

This moment marks a critical turning point in Dalí’s emotional and ideological isolation—a key step on his descent toward The Edge.

In 1936, civil war erupts. Lorca is shot in August, his body dumped in an unmarked grave. When Dalí hears of it, he offers no public response, yet something roils inside him. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans was already underway before the first shots had been fired. Dalí will later claim he foresaw the violence. The painting shows a monstrous, tortured body tearing itself apart, jaw locked in eternal scream. It is self-devouring, breast clawing at face, fingers ripping at spine. A Catalan sky glows dim behind it. Beans—soft and flesh-like—litter the foreground.³²

He titles it Premonition. It is also his confession.

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Boiled Beans

Bodies confused / Memories misused

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans by Salvador Dalí in 1936 is an oil on canvas measuring approximately one meter square. Dalí began its first studies in 1934–35, the skeletal dragging figure fought by its own limbs while fleeing the rising tension of rebellion in Catalonia. The painting reaches its full, horrific form by early 1936, finished only six months before the Spanish Civil War erupts. It debuts in London’s Julien Levy Gallery in December of the same year, initially titled “Soft Construction with Boiled Apricots” which is later corrected to “Beans” in the 1936 Minotaure review, when it is subtitled Premonition of Civil War.³³

This is not symbolism, but visceral prophecy: A single colossal body splits in mid-tear, limbs gnawing at torso, face locked in silent scream, breast and groin exposed yet rigid.

“I painted a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of auto‑strangulation. The soft structure of that great mass of flesh… I embellished with a few boiled beans, for one could not imagine swallowing all that unconscious meat without the presence of some mealy and melancholy vegetable.”³⁴

The beans are both grotesque humor and grim sustenance, an ordinary food bearing witness to collapse. Critics recognize echoes of Goya’s Disasters of War in the tormented figure, and some note how the limbs approximated the shape of Spain torn in pieces.³⁵ Art historian Robert Hughes later declares it “the finest single work of visual art inspired by the Spanish Civil War,” outranking even Picasso’s Guernica.³⁶

Technically, Dalí uses his characteristic paranoic-critical method, combining hyper-real detail with dream-logic rupture to present a body as both horror and sculpture. The background sky, a sunless Catalan plane, contrasts sharply with the heap of madness in foreground shadow.³⁷

At its exhibition in London, the painting shocks audiences, its titanic self-mutilation impossible to ignore. Dalí insists the subtitle Premonition of Civil War is no marketing strategy. The idea his subconscious has "prophesied" is not a boast he is ashamed of, but rather a confession of psychic attunement.³⁸

Nearly a year later, Spain would tear itself apart. Soft Construction stands today in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a monument of rupture: A body turned inside out, a nation seen in the flesh, a dream of division laid bare.

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Strange Feast

The hostess is grinning / Her guests sleep from sinning

With compositional precision and unrelenting theatricality, Dalí welcomed us in; his canvas served up the horrors and ecstasies of humanity like courses in a mad feast. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans was the centerpiece: A dish both appalling and irresistible, carved from his Catalan nightmares and premonitory dread of Spain consuming itself. Behind it gleamed his code—a personal lexicon of ants, drawers, decay and distorted flesh—all recorded and carefully constructed in his diaries, the secret recipes of a surrealist banquet.

In those pages, Dalí not only cataloged images, he orchestrated their arrangement—spoons of symbolism, bowls of autobiography, glasses of political premonition. His writings present his method: The paranoic-critical technique and a strategically sharpened detachment turning hallucination into art. What at first seemed like expression became exhibition. The diaries become his cookbook, loaded with archetypes he would later refine through collaborations, interviews, even TV appearances.

Out of this moment came a brand of Surrealism able to cross borders. The spectacle Salvador Dalí perfected on the edge prepared him to move to America, where nothing would remain sacred. He arrived in the 1940s with a capitalist sensibility to cultivate and a belly full of beans, ready to translate European shock into Hollywood opulence through collaborations with Walt Disney while distilling Monroe-era glitz into commercial commissions. The grotesque had been refined, the taboo made marketable. Dalí never actually abandoned his edge; he merely repackaged it as performance, as product, as cultural currency. This is probably the most disturbing, yet triumphant action always leaving a bad taste left over: The fundamental disquiet which never dissolves in the gut, cold and hard as stone.

The feast continues. The pulse of Surrealism with its appetite, absurdity and yes—strangeness—remains. In his final decades, Dalí may have landscaped his legacy in sunshine, opulence and kitsch, but the banquet’s centerpiece always stayed the same: Our own reflection in a world content with devouring itself. Indeed, the hostess is still grinning, the guests still sleep from sinning.

As we run from the day / To a strange night of stone

All lyrics presented are by Jim Morrison from Strange Days track 1 on Strange Days, Elektra Records, released September 25, 1967, vinyl.

Strange Days by The Doors music video

The Surreal World of Salvador Dalí provides the Thumbnail portrait by Carl Van Vechten from an interesting article.

Soft Construction With Boiled Beans by Salvador Dali currently resides at the Philadelphia Museum.

Prior Posts of the Living On The Edge series:

Introduction

Knowing Picasso

Kafka’s Mirror

Aldous Huxley Comfortably Numb

George Orwell Fade Out Again

If you are enjoying Living On The Edge as part of Madmen of Art Monday consider fueling my next!

Bibliography

Ades, Dawn. Dalí. London: Thames & Hudson, 1995.

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.

Buñuel, Luis. My Last Sigh. Translated by Abigail Israel. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

Carr, Raymond. Spain, 1808–1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Chipp, Herschel B., ed. Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

Dalí, Ana María. Salvador Dalí as Seen by His Sister. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Viking Press, 1949.

Dalí, Salvador. Diary of a Genius. Translated by Haakon M. Chevalier. London: Hutchinson, 1965.

Dalí, Salvador. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. Translated by Haakon M. Chevalier. New York: Dial Press, 1942.

Etherington-Smith, Meredith. The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dalí. London: HarperCollins, 1992.

Farrar, Felicia W. Salvador Dalí and the Surrealists: Their Lives and Ideas, 21 Activities. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003.

Gale, Matthew. Dalí & Film. London: Tate Publishing, 2007.

García Lorca, Federico. In Search of Duende, translated by Christopher Maurer. New York: New Directions, 1998.

García Lorca, Federico. Selected Letters. Edited and translated by David Johnston. New York: New Directions, 1983.

Gibson, Ian. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí. London: Faber & Faber, 1997.

Gibson, Ian. Federico García Lorca: A Life. London: Faber & Faber, 1989.

Gonzàlez, Estefanía. “Catalonia and the World: Provincial Modernity, 1900–1930.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies12, no. 2, 2005.

Graham, Helen, and Jo Labanyi, eds. Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Hughes, Robert. Goya. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Kamen, Henry. Spain: A History. London: Penguin Books, 2005.

King, Elliott H. Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema. Eastbourne: Kamera Books, 2007.

Levy, Julien. Memoir of an Art Gallery. New York: Putnam, 1977.

Preston, Paul. A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. London: Fontana Press, 1996.

Radford, Robert. Dalí. London: Phaidon, 1997.

Stainton, Leslie. Lorca: A Dream of Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

Spinney, Laura. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. New York: PublicAffairs, 2017.

Taylor, Brandon. Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now. London: Oxford University Press, 2005.

1. The Doors, Strange Days, track 1 on Strange Days, Elektra Records, released September 25, 1967, vinyl. Lyrics by Jim Morrison.

2. Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 3–5.

3. Meredith Etherington-Smith, The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dalí (New York: Random House, 1992), 15–18.

4. Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, trans. Haakon M. Chevalier (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 17.

5. Ibid., 17.

6. Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 528–534.

7. Ana María Dalí, Salvador Dalí as Seen by His Sister, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Viking Press, 1949), 12–23.

8. Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 528–534.

9. Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Dial Press, 1942), 17.

10. For international context affecting Catalonia during Dalí’s youth, see Paul Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (London: Fontana Press, 1996), 15–18. On the local impact of the 1918 flu pandemic, see Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017), 89–92. For the influence of global upheavals on Catalan provincial life, see Estefanía Gonzàlez, “Catalonia and the World: Provincial Modernity, 1900–1930,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (2005): 101–116.

11. Meredith Etherington-Smith, The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dalí (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 73–75.

12. ABC (Madrid), “El General Primo de Rivera firma el Pacto Nacional—La Monarquía apoya la dictadura militar,” September 15, 1924.

13. Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 139–146. See also Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Dial Press, 1942), 115–120.

14. Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 158–170; Leslie Stainton, Lorca: A Dream of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 156–164.

15. Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 202–206; Meredith Etherington-Smith, The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dali (New York: Random House, 1992), 77–80.

16. Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 110–122.

17. For context on the cultural tensions of the period, see Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds., Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 55–60.

18. Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 219–221; Felicia W. Farrar, Salvador Dalí and the Surrealists: Their Lives and Ideas, 21 Activities (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003), 43.

19. Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Dial Press, 1942), 250–255; Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 222–228.

20. Ibid., 253–254; Ibid., 222–225.

21. Ibid., 254; Ibid., 222–227.

22. El Sol (Madrid), “Huelgas y ejecuciones aumentan en Barcelona; la disidencia política se enfrenta a la ley marcial,” March 1927.

23. Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 106–108; and Agustín Sánchez Vidal, Buñuel, Lorca, Dalí: The Secrets of an Untold Friendship (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 215–219.

24. Dawn Adès, Dalí (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), 108–110.

25. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 1–47.

26. Dawn Ades, Dalí and Surrealism (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 52–59.

27. Elliott H. King, Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema (Eastbourne: Kamera Books, 2007), 34–39.

28. Matthew Gale, Dalí & Film (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), 49–53.

29. Duende is the haunting, elemental force arising from deep emotional pain and creative struggle—a “black sound” saturating art with authenticity and danger. It is the haunted edge on which passion and suffering collide. So when Lorca reached toward Dalí, yearning for tenderness amidst his own creation, he invoked duende, seeking not mere warmth, but the electric vulnerability that accompanies true creative and emotional risk. Dalí, absorbed in his self-curated mythology and his drive toward spectacle, refused that intimate meeting of souls. It was a choice that left their relationship—and Lorca’s emotional longing—eventually severed. See Federico García Lorca, “Play and Theory of the Duende,” in In Search of Duende, trans. Christopher Maurer (New York: New Directions, 1998), 48–50.

30. Federico García Lorca, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. David Johnston (New York: New Directions, 1983), 115.

31. Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Dial Press, 1942), 258–260.

32. Ibid., 284–285.

33. Minotaure, no. 8 (June 1936): 45. See also Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: Putnam, 1977), 186.

34. Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (New York: Dial Press, 1942), 317.

35. Robert Radford, Dalí (London: Phaidon, 1997), 88.

36. Robert Hughes, Goya (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 394.

37. Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Dial Press, 1942), 315–320.

38. Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 345.