Salvador Dali: The Spellbinding Relationship Between Mental Illness and Creativity
Have you ever wondered what affected an artist to create some of their dark piece of work? I’m fascinated with art, the various media used to make it, and what inspired a particular piece. I’m especially intrigued by Dali.
Depression, obsession, anxiety, and bipolar disorder are associated with creativity. Certain mood disorders appear to have stronger links to creativity and self-destruction than others.
It’s commonly known that Vincent Van Gogh, who famously cut off his ear and ultimately took his life in 1890, documented the event in a painting titled Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.
Sylvia Plath, author of the semi-autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar,” died by suicide in 1963. In the book, she wrote, “I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely, the tears would fly out of my eyes, and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I’d cry for a week.”
Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Frida Kahlo, Edvard Munch, and Michelangelo are also said to have suffered from depression.
Salvador Dali is an illustration of how genius and madness are related.
Dali was a narcissist — altogether absorbed in a love affair with himself. He was a surrealistic icon along with Pablo Picasso. He claimed that Picasso was a “destroyer” of art, concerned with ugliness, while Dali embraced beauty.
The Surrealist seeks to explore the unconscious mind as a way of creating art, resulting in dreamlike, sometimes bizarre imagery across endless mediums. These artists do not conform to society because Surrealism is a rebellion against the very idea of what is and isn’t depraved or wrong.
Dali maintained an amicable relationship with the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and admired Hitler. Continually affirming his apolitical stance, Dali’s Hitlerian fascism paintings and actions did not match his statements. George Orwell wrote a piece on him and called Dali “a disgusting human being” and an artist of “undeniably exceptional gifts.”
Salvador Dali was reputed to be a sexual deviant, developed a penchant for sadomasochism, was a serial masturbator and a cuckold. In and around the 1920s, societal norms deemed them degenerate acts.
The artist was obsessed and addicted to masturbation to where he did it over four times per day, reportedly in front of the mirror. According to the artist, masturbation served as a tool for inspiration. He painted Hitler Masturbating. He photographed a famous English art critic, Brian Sewell, masturbating. In one of Sewell’s presentations, Dirty Dalí: A Private View, the critic recounted the particulars of the incident.
Dali suffered his whole life from a lack of acceptance surrounding his sexuality. His father stressed the evil that arose from experimentation. The father forced his son to look at a book filled with images of terrible STI’s, sexually transmitted infections and disfigured sexual organs in a state of decomposition. The exposure to this material caused him such trauma, that the younger Dali grew up convinced that sexual acts were denigrating and decadent. His painting, a deformed woman performing fellatio on a man whose knees are bleeding, reflected this belief.
Salvador Dali has stressed that he was impotent (maybe rightly so) and had a lifelong attachment to his Russian wife, Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, also known as Gala. Critics described her as so sexually rapacious, she had no respect for other people’s relationships. Dali went to their marriage bed a virgin.
One of Dalí’s art dealers referred to Gala as an “ancient harridan,” “an authentically Sadean monster,” a “demonic dominatrix,” and a “scarlet woman,” who had “an appetizing little body, and the libido of an electric eel.”
The artist’s passions included voyeurism — he reveled in watching couples having sex. He asked his wife, Gala if he could watch her cuckold him and chronicled the adventures of the orgies.
The artist was a close follower of Sigmund Freud, author of The Interpretation of Dreams and founder of modern psychology. Dali began pulling visuals from his subconscious, ruthlessly pushing the boundaries of art with otherworldly, often unnerving, works that have stood the test of time, and continue to inspire artists today.
One of the visuals was The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, his surreal depiction of a person so beautiful and obsessed with his beauty that when he could not tear himself away from his reflection in a pool of water, he drowned.
Despite the albatross of mental illness, creativity and artistic expression engenders a significant benefit, a sense of relief.
