Salvador Dalí was sitting on a throne, wearing a red Catalan cap and dressed in white silk, and about to make a literary revelation.
He had summoned Ian Gibson, his distinguished biographer, to his giant egg-surmounted palace in Figueras, northern Spain, for what would be the artist’s last interview.
“I reached the end of the red carpet and approached the throne and he was a skeleton, trembling with Parkinson’s, full of tubes,” Gibson said. “He wanted me to know that [the poet and playwright Federico García] Lorca had felt an intense physical love for him and that although he would have liked to reciprocate, he was unable to do so.”
Dalí, right, said Lorca, left, felt “an intense physical love for him”
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The disclosure in January 1986, three years before Dalí’s death aged 84, incensed Lorca’s family, who were reluctant to reveal his homosexuality. It also enriched Gibson’s biography, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, which was published to acclaim a decade later.
A comic book adaptation of the biography has now been published in Spain to “educate a younger generation of Spaniards who know nothing about their history”, in the author’s words.
“This format is important to inform young Spanish people about an essential figure of their culture,” Gibson, 86, said. “My 1997 biography is a thousand pages long but with the fast pace of life now it’s very difficult for people to find the time to read and so this comic will help them get closer to Dalí’s fascinating life more easily.”
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The comic book, titled La Vida Incombustible de Salvador Dalí, which he produced with the illustrator Quique Palomo, offers a fresh look at an artist who was as much a performer and provocateur as he was a painter. “His exhibitionism is very interesting and relevant today because everybody’s exhibiting nowadays,” Gibson said. “We’re living in a totally narcissistic age. Everybody wants to be famous. Dalí was a forerunner.”
Dalí’s relentless quest for attention began early in his life. As a young man, he already imagined the fame that he would later win. “When I return to Spain, I’ll be recognised as a genius,” he wrote.
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Gibson believes the root of his craving for acclaim was that Dalí had an older brother, also called Salvador, who died young. “The older brother became a total obsession for his parents and Salvador too. They gave him the same name, and in his parents’ bedroom, there was a photograph of the dead brother, who was beautiful in a way that Dalí wasn’t,” Gibson said.
A page from the biography, showing Gibson being summoned to Dalí’s house in Figueras
The original title, he added, was intended to convey that underlying Dalí’s exhibitionism was an intense feeling of shame. “He was very complex. His exhibitionism was a challenge against shyness,” Gibson said. “I came to the conclusion that his major problem as a young man was pathological shyness, a character flaw that almost drove him to suicide.”
The comic book also dwells on his studies at Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, an elite college where he met his friends Lorca and the film director Luis Buñuel, and where he transitioned from bohemian attire to markedly eccentric elegance.
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“Dalí was terrified that he might be gay, and Lorca obviously was, and the poet fell in love with him,” Gibson said. “That caused tremendous friction. On Monday they hated and were jealous of each other but they made up on Tuesday morning.”
As well as graphic scenes showing his amorous relationship with his wife Gala, whose death cast him into a deep depression, the book seeks to explain Dalí’s high regard for the dictator Francisco Franco.
“Dalí was in exile and homesick for his beloved Emporda region in Catalonia. He didn’t give a damn for Franco,” Gibson said. “He pretended he returned to Catholicism and he came back as a sort of court painter. He didn’t give a damn what, as long as he was back to his home territory.”