When Salvador Dalí drove half a tonne of cauliflower to Paris in a Rolls-Royce
In a lot of ways, Salvador Dalí‘s relentless self-promotion didn’t make sense.
His surrealist vision had already swept the art world; his melting clocks and play with proportion were strange enough, but he was determined to make a name for himself as one of art’s most eccentric characters, which is no easy task, given peers like Gustav Klimt thrived on allowing his ten cats to freely roam and urinate on his work.
Alas, Dalí was renowned for his one-upmanship. As a child, his penchant for attention-seeking resulted in violent episodes, but that was too base level for the now prodigious artist. He needed something weird, nonsensical, and strange enough to mystify the public. He needed 500kg of cauliflower.
Before setting off to speak at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1955, Dalí enlisted a friend’s white Rolls Royce Phantom to make a big entrance. The vehicle would’ve cost around £200,000 in today’s money. Dalí didn’t flinch at that. He filled it to the roof with endless florets of cauliflower and went careening around the streets in his vegetable car.
As he stepped out onto the pavement to deliver his lecture on ‘Phenomenological Aspects of the Paranoiac Critical Method’, they tumbled out of the car doors. Onlookers were puzzled. Dalí had arrived.
His keen self-awareness overtook him, and he decided simply turning up with his cauliflower cargo wasn’t enough. What if the people inside the university missed out on the spectacle? What if these onlookers were mere members of the proletariat? How would they know what an avant-garde genius he was?
Ramping it up again, he turned to the 2,000-strong university audience to exclaim: “Everything departs from the rhinoceros horn! Everything departs from Jan Vermeer’s The Lacemaker! Everything ends up in the cauliflower!”
His odd outburst has the desired effect almost immediately, and his calculated nonsense made it to the pages of Time Magazine soon after. “With bedlam in his mind and a quaint profusion of fresh cauliflower in his Rolls-Royce limousine, Spanish-born Surrealist Painter Salvador Dalí arrived at Paris’ Sorbonne University to unburden himself of some gibberish,” they wrote.
Adding: “Some 2,000 ecstatic listeners were soon sharing Salvador’s Delirium. Planting his elbows on a lecture table strewn with bread crumbs, Dali blandly explained: ‘All emotion comes to me through the elbow.'” Many questions arose. Why the Rolls Royce, and why cauliflower? Dalí, of course, had yet more non-sequitur babble left in the tank, reportedly telling a journalist he enjoyed their “logarithmic curve”.
What did he mean? Was there any point to this brassica bonanza? Well, time would soon edge the world closer to figuring out the latter.
At a certain point, Dalí’s antics became completely unsurprising. After all, this was the same man who once proclaimed: “I don’t take drugs, I am a drug”. He doggedly continued on his path to the strangest man in art, but it had the unfortunate side-effect of eclipsing his work and eroding any sense of a ‘point’ to be found.
In 1979, he was elected to the French Academy of Fine Arts, and his academic peers sighed, wishing he would abandon his “clowneries”. The cauliflower caper was a forgotten portent of what lay ahead at this point.
Even the progressives at the Museum of Modern Art grew tired of him. In 1941, the Director of Exhibitions wrote that while Dalí was often irritatingly eccentric, “the greater part of his art is a matter of dead earnest”. The cauliflowers were one in a series of earnest attempts to capture the minds of the art world, with fairly debatable results.
Yet, you can’t deny, that there is also something comic and quirky about the image of a luxury car packed to the rafters with a vegetable growing stinkier by the second. In the end, we must note that we’re dealing with a man who once proclaimed: “Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy – the joy of being Salvador Dalí – and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?”
