“When You’ve Got It, Flaunt It”: Salvador Dali’s Success in Commercial America
“Some day perhaps one will discover a truth as strange this mustache — namely that Salvador Dali was possibly also a painter.”
Salvador Dali, 1954
The American art scene during the 1950s scoffed at commercial artists. A serious artist, the Abstract Expressionists maintained, must be rigid in his or her beliefs, sacrificing comfort to uphold artistic values. Andy Warhol was too “swish”[1]; Roy Lichtenstein was an unoriginal plagiarist, they thought. A serious artist would stoop to designing window displays as a last resort, not to win prizes for the work. He collected money for these commercial jobs under pseudonyms, not out of shame for his poverty, but because respected artists simply did not do window painting.
Spanish artist Salvador Dali would have none of that.
He wanted a decadent lifestyle, an adoring nation of followers, and a cache of money to solve all his problems. Deaf to accusations of his alleged selling-out, he turned his attention to commercial art. Though he had garnered fame with his 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, his 1940 move to New York established his notoriety as a celebrity with an outrageous mustache.
The waning popularity of Surrealism in America prevented him from marketing the paintings that had made him famous [2], forcing him to manufacture his celebrity through new means: designing department store window displays, appearing in commercials, and branding his outrageous lifestyle, all with the same Dalinian flair. By the sixties, his trademark mustache was one of the most identifiable symbols in America. By embracing consumer values and becoming a commercial success, he engineered a fresh public face, shedding the image of old Surrealist painter in favor of a delirious mustachioed celebrity. He took advantage of the culture of the mid-fifties and sixties, which were characterized by the decline of stability and ascension of individualism, to foster his success as a celebrity.
Due to the uncertain and repressive nature of the previous decade, this new era featured a vibrant culture focused on radical progress, individual expression, and rampant consumerism. He embraced American commercial values and thwarted the popular trope of a starving, serious artist in order to feed his commercial success. Largely circumstantial, Dali’s success as a celebrity depended on the cultural climate of the time and his ability to cater to the wants of the American public.
In order to examine the postwar success of Salvador Dali, we must first understand the mentality of the country that made his achievements possible. After the calamity of World War II, America was a place of radical change. In response to the waste-not, want-not lifestyle of the war, Americans spent a decade from 1945 to 1955 uncertain about the revival of free market capitalism.
However, dresses were soon adorned with little embellishments again, women purchased nylons rather than going without, and metal could finally go back to automobile production rather than toward the war effort. Once more, the American people could finally afford to be consumers, to freely live their American dreams. The fifties fostered proud “exceptionalism”[3] and nostalgia for “the good days before the War and the Depression”[4], and ultimately revived the people’s faith in an “acquisition based lifestyle”[5], highlighting the renewed prevalence of material goods in everyday life. The stability of the American Dream ideal set the stage for the rampant ads and consumerism that emerged in the mid-fifties.
By the time the sixties rolled around, gone were the “comfortable”[6] designs of the prior decade. In its place were radicalism and change, a public starved for a fresh style that screamed “‘What the Hell’”[7], a country united by its collective desire for individualism. At the center of it all was New York, home to Pop Art and wild parties, celebrities and crass commercialism.
America was ready for the reemergence of a cultural icon: Salvador Dali.
Dali’s eccentric persona fit neatly into the 1960s American culture, which enjoyed experimenting with complementary opposites. As a “display window for a national consumer culture”[8], advertisements reveal the radicalism of the sixties, which opted for “anything to provide an excuse for color, variety, shock, and attention.”[9] Naturally brilliant in all four of these areas, Dali found a home in advertising: he appeared in commercials and print advertisements, and even used his artistry to design his own.
His advertisements blend two unlikely concepts, be it using art to sell pain reliever or insanity to sell chocolates, calling attention to both himself and the product. As the man who had previously paired a lobster and telephone in an art piece, Dali was a genius at the zany ideas which embodied the model of “enormously creative and idiosyncratic advertising”[10]. This brand of idiosyncrasy prevailed whenever Dali himself appeared in commercials “not to endorse a product but to create unlikely juxtapositions that seize the reader’s attention”[11].
In the star-studded 1971 television and print ad campaign for Braniff Airlines, art director George Lois pairs Dali and baseball player Whitey Ford as seatmates. Dali has the last word: at the advertisement’s end, he exclaims the campaign’s catchphrase, “When you got it, flaunt it!”[12] This could not have been truer for Dali, as his ability to fit his brandish his eccentricity in order to follow the trends of the time contributed to his celebrity success.
In an era where everyone wanted to stand out, Dali’s ability to strongly establish his individualism was crucial to his commercial success. Proud to hail from Catalan, Dali especially adored emphasizing his heritage. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Dali claimed to be “’most representative of post-war Europe’”[13], not only identifying himself with Europe but also calling attention to his distinctive heritage while in a country of Americans.
Commercials featuring Dali were less about the product than they were about eclectic lifestyle of an artistic genius. His 1974 Alka-Seltzer commercial takes an artistic approach, with wild-haired Dali explaining how the “fizzy” works while using a model’s white clothed body as a canvas. There is no musical overlay, drawing focus to Dali and his thick hallmark accent. He states, “Alka-Seltzer: It’s a work of art, one of a kind, like Dali,” asserting his individuality to a point where he is no longer human, but art. Once more, Dali has the last word — the final utterance is his own name, rather than the name of the product in question, Alka-Seltzer. A genius at establishing himself as unique from everyone else, Dali won the laud of the American people.
During the late fifties, a vast wave of branding took place as companies attempted to distinguish their products from that of their competitors’. Dali was shrewd at self-branding: he created a madman capable of harnessing his own insanity and bolstered his trademark mustache. To many people of the sixties, simply seeing the upturned silhouette of a long, tapering mustache would be enough to recognize the famous face.
In Soft Self Portrait With Bacon (1941), his features are nearly unidentifiable, with only the figure’s upturned mustache a clue that the blob is indeed Dali. Just as Liberace had his candelabra and flamboyant outfits to sell piano records, Dali used his mustache and the eccentric lifestyle it stood for to sell himself and his art. In 1954 he expressed that “some day perhaps one will discover a truth as strange this mustache — namely that Salvador Dali was possibly also a painter,”[14] marking his departure from being known as a painter to being known as a celebrity. As Dali expert Elliot King notes, the gradual thickening and complicating of Dali’s mustache over the two postwar decades parallels “the growing prosperity he achieved in the new world”[15], as America embraced his outrageous antics and his notoriety and fortune multiplied.
Photographer Phillipe Halsman conducted a photographic interview entitled Dali’s Mustache in 1954, prominently presenting the mustache in such a way that it represents Dali and his values: in one image, the mustache is shaped like a dollar sign; in another, Dali uses it as a paintbrush; another features a sliver of Dali’s face yet a full-fledged mustache, with the focus evidently on his facial hair. Just as the Cheshire Cat is known for its smile, Americans identified Dali by his mustache alone. The focus was no longer on his artwork; instead, his eccentricity reigned.
Dali’s brand of creative insanity was used to sell anything from chocolates to cars to liquor. The use of celebrity notoriety was prevalent in the sixties and seventies to market products to the masses. In Dali’s television commercial for Lanvin chocolates, big and bold were the names of the game. With brash music in the background, the commercial opens with Dali holding a bar of Lanvin chocolate, made large by its proximity to the camera. The next shot shows wild eyed Dali decisively breaking off and consuming a chunk, proclaiming, “I am crazy about Lanvin Chocolates!” The commercial highlights his bizarreness through his wild hair, absurd mobile mustache, and special emphasis on the word “crazy.” The construct of a madman in control of his madness highlights his nearly inhuman discipline in a way unachievable to other people.
Dali’s symbiotic relationship with the American people was integral to his monetary success in America. He wanted to collect his dues as easily as the ad men could persuade the people to part with their pennies. The emergence of fresh consumer culture indoctrinated Americans in the language of consumerism[16], much to the delight of Dali. He illustrated everything — including a collection of Chairman Mao Zedong’s poetry — in exchange for money and publicity, regardless of his interest in the project.
This was a good strategy to secure funds, as people were very willing to throw money at his projects so long as they bore the scribbled Dali signature. By 1970, his yearly income had surpassed $500,000 and his accumulated wealth over $10 million. [17] In his willingness to buy into commercialism, Dali bucks the starving artist trope, which didn’t come without its consequences. While Dali’s “persistent desire to make money by all available means”[18] served to enhance the reputation of Dali the celebrity, it did ample harm to Dali the artist, raising “considerable problems for his artistic reputation.”[19]
Some critiques call Dali’s late work worst pieces of his career, though his stunts were certainly the most inventive and engineered so a “good story would be available to the press in time for a forthcoming exhibition”[20], indicating Dali’s shrewd strategy for maximizing publicity and profits by using his celebrity persona to market artwork. So long as he and his wife Gala managed to afford to maintain their extravagant lifestyles between New York and Paris, he was satisfied. With advertisements, Dali found himself “amazed to discover that he could be paid $10,000 for a fifteen second commercial — what more evidence was needed of the absurdity of money?”[21]
Dali was so fond of money that the Surrealist Andre Breton bestowed on Dali the biting nickname Avida Dollars, an anagram of Dali’s name that meant “hunger for dollars”[22]. Dali embraced the name as another form of publicity, later thanking Breton for the “beneficent distinguished image”[23] which further contributed to his fame. In large part, America’s postwar revival of consumer capitalism set the stage for Dali to mass produce his work and earn money.
Dali’s relationship with postwar America was one of mutual fascination — Dali with New York’s seductive and rampant commercialism; the American public with Dali’s brand of eccentricity and the celebrity status that he carefully crafted for himself. The American public embraced Dali’s rogue individualism and his bold personality, which the culture particularly valued during the two postwar decades. American commercial values, an intrinsic piece of consumer culture, are an apt metaphor for the eclectic Salvador. Advertisements in the sixties became a mixture of entertainment and marketing, seeing the rise of product placement and celebrity endorsements. Likewise, Dali creations were often a hybrid of shocking entertainment intended to promote his artwork. Both enjoyed a warm reception, and both learned to strategically adapt to maximize fortune based on the responses of the American people. For all he boasted of being different, Dali fit neatly into the mold of an individual American.
Works Cited
Dali, Salvador and Philippe Halsman. Dali’s Mustache: A Photographic Interview. New York: Simon Schuster, 1954.
Goodrum, Charles A., and Helen Dalrymple. Advertising in America: The First 200 Years. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990.
King, Elliott H. Salvador Dalí: The Late Work. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2010.
Samuel, Lawrence R. Brought To You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
Radford, Robert. Dalí. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001.
Warhol, Andy and Pat Hackett. POPism: The Warhol ’60s. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.
[1] Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 15.
[2] Robert Radford, Dalí (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001), 221.
[3] Lawrence R. Samuel, Brought To You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), xi.
[4] Charles A. Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple, Advertising in America: The First 200 Years (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 215.
[5] Samuel, Post War Advertising, xii.
[6] Goodrum, Advertising in America, 215.
[7] Ibid., 218.
[8] Samuel, Post War Advertising, xviii.
[9] Goodrum, Advertising in America, 218.
[10] Ibid., 219.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Elliott H. King, Salvador Dalí: The Late Work (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2010), 124.
[14] Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsman, Dali’s Mustache: A Photographic Interview (New York: Simon Schuster, 1954).
[15] King, Salvador Dali: The Late Work, 127.
[16] Samuel, Postwar Television Advertising, 13.
[17] Radford, Dali, 281.
[18] Ibid., 282.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., 221.
[21] Ibid.
[22] King, Salvador Dalí: The Late Work, 24.
[23] Ibid.
