Salvador Dalí (1904 to 1989) was the Spanish Surrealist painter who turned his own life into his largest work, and the most surprising fact about him is that he once gave a lecture in London wearing a diving suit and nearly suffocated inside it.
With Dalí, the hard part is telling what happened from what he said happened. The facts below all left a record somewhere: a history magazine, a Time report, the Dalí Foundation's own catalogue and a foundation press statement.
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The diving suit was not the only problem that evening. It made the speech almost inaudible, and Dalí made things worse by insisting on showing his slides upside down. Somewhere under the helmet, he was running out of air.
One man in the room understood what was happening, and he had to go and find a tool before anyone could help.
That is the trouble with Dalí. He spent a career making people unable to tell the performance from the real thing, so every story about him gets doubted, the true ones included. I went through the best known and kept only the ones that left a paper trail.
Who got Dalí out of the helmet?
The poet David Gascoyne, then a young man with a passion for Surrealism…
What You'll Discover
What he brought to the Sorbonne.
Which candy carries his drawing.
Whose name he was given.
What was found in his grave.