Salvador Dalí
While I was visiting Salvador Dalí in Port Lligat on the Costa Brava in 1957, I hoped and expected to accomplish interesting and truly astonishing pictures. I knew Dalí was cooperative and extravagant enough to create situations a photographer would appreciate. I was not disappointed. Dalí welcomed me and politely led me around his beautiful house. He introduced his Russian-born wife, Gala, posed beside the big polar bear in the entrance hall, and showed the water gun he used to shoot octopus ink on sheets of paper to create a background. In his studio, he also let me look at a giant painting of a horse that he had already been working on for three months.
Most of all Dalí wanted to demonstrate his newest discovery. He dressed up for the event, putting on a fancy jacket and a dwarf hat. Later, he introduced the sea urchin he called Sputnik and showed how it composed a painting. He inserted a very light feather of a swan into the sea urchin’s mouth. The mouth, with its five teeth, worked like a hand and clenched the feather. Then he placed the sea urchin in front of a sheet of paper, which was blackened with octopus ink, and the sea urchin marked the paper with decorative lines in “cosmically controlled movements”, as Dalí explained. The sea urchin repeated the movements with a dried flower. Dalí insisted that some sea urchins are more talented than others. It was a very memorable day and I was highly satisfied with the photographs. The English newspaper Sunday Graphic published the reportage under the title “Last Night…A Cosmic Sensation”.
