Dali’s appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1970 was definitely memorable. Straight from the start,
Dali enters the set with an anteater, throws it on the floor and later picks it back up,
throws it on the table to finally throw it on the actress Lillian Gish.
The interview is, of course, chaotic, but one moment really stood out to me.
Dali is extremely poetic about his mustache, or just mustaches in general, calling them the
constant tragical and most violent element in one’s face. He calls it a capillary explosion
of personality. Not only is he poetic about it, he also seems to give it feelings.
Dali’s facial features seem to be very important
to him. What can Dali’s mustache tell us about him and surrealism?
As I watched interviews with Dali, one thing was often brought up. His mustache.
Even on the game show “The Name’s the Same”, a participant questions Dali.
So his mustache is the most serious part of his personality. Dali is
avoiding the question here. Saying that his mustache is the most serious part of
his personality doesn’t necessarily mean that his mustache is serious,
it just means that his mustache is more serious than the rest of his personality.
Here he’s saying, in an interview with French journalist Jacques Chancel,
that he’s doing everything he can to be ridiculous. Later in the same interview,
Chancel would ask him if he took himself seriously.
Dali in a way admits the fact that sometimes, he doesn’t necessarily believe in what he says,
that he’s kind of doing it for the show. In another interview with the
Quebec journalist Wilfrid Lemoyne, Dali talks about his mustache,
relating it to the fact that, sometimes, he says things he doesn’t believe in.
Lemoyne is making reference to a book about Dali’s mustache and, of course,
for the sake of this video and determining what his mustache says about him, I ordered it.
It’s an amazing book made by both Dali and the photographer Philippe Halsman. Just a couple
of years before publishing this book, Halsman made this astonishing portrait of Dali titled
Atomicus. It took them 28 tries to achieve this scene. The project Dali’s Mustache is
much more ambitious as it’s a collection of 36 imaginative views of Dali’s facial hair.
The format of the book is also pretty uncommon. It’s a photographic interview. Every picture
of Dali’s face answers a question. For example: Why do you paint? The answer
is a portrait of Dali with, more often than not, a caption. And how’s business?
For our inquiry though, the first few answers are the most interesting. May I
ask a few questions? Yes, but don’t try to uncover my secret. Why do you wear a
mustache? In order to pass unobserved. As usual, I don’t follow you. What do you mean?
Like two erect sentries, my mustache defends the entrance to my real self.
Dali is playing a character and his mustache is the ultimate symbol of this character. Dali’s
first answer is an order: don’t try to uncover my secret. He has a secret and one could guess
that this secret is his true personality. His mustache, the object of this interview,
is a way to keep intruders away from Dali’s true self. It’s just like a lightning rod,
it absorbs all incoming attention, making the real Dali invisible.
In fact, in the postface of the book, Halsman quoted Dali saying:
“Many American tourists visited me this summer in Spain. Did they want to see
my paintings? Not at all! They were only interested in my mustache. The
public does not need great painting. What it needs is a better mustache.”
Alright so let’s assume that Dali’s mustache is the pure expression of his persona,
a created character; what would that mean?
In his interview with Lemoyne, Dali says this.
Dali doesn’t allow us to see much of his true self,
but what he does allow us to see, his created persona,
he seems pretty proud of it. He puts it above any other kinds of Dalis, even the Dali painter.
Philippe Halsman recalls, again in the postface of Dali’s Mustache,
a conversation he had with a young actress to whom he explains surrealism:
“Most people don’t understand surrealism. They confuse it with symbolism or they
think it’s an art style, like, for instance, impressionism. But surrealism is not a style,
it is a method of creating. There cannot be such a thing as an impressionistic bathtub. But
Dali’s famous fur-lined bathtub in Bonwit Teller’s window was a surrealistic object par excellence.”
Halsman then answers the question “Is Dali crazy?”:
“Dali is a surrealist. […] The most surrealistic of all his creations, however, is himself.
I don’t know which made him more famous: his paintings or the legend he helped to create.”
So here it is. Dali’s mustache is a capillary explosion of a personality, a personality
created by Dali: a persona. It’s perhaps one of his most famous, successful and creative works
of art he’s ever made. He created a surrealist character. There cannot be such a thing as an
impressionistic Dali, but there can definitely be a surrealist Dali. And this creation,
this masterpiece, is best conveyed and represented through a handful of hairs: Dali’s mustache.