Why did Salvador Dalí believe he was his own dead brother?
The life of Salvador Dalí was far more surreal than his paintings. And for the cynics who would argue that his wild ways were merely a show to help spin the yarn of his art, you’ll find that the weirdness began a long time before he had the chance to engineer a bizarre moustachioed façade. After all, if your son was nursing an ailing bat back to health and suddenly bit its head off, would you think he was just putting on a peculiar front for the public?
It almost seems as though surrealism was fated from the get-go with Dalí. The artist had an older brother – also named Salvador – who died as the result of a infectious stomach inflammation almost exactly nine months before the eponymous surrealist abseiled from the mother cave into chaotic existence on May 11th, 1904. The tragedy of his brother’s passing was profound, and the birth of Salvador II offered deliverance to his grieving parents.
In the case of the Dalí family, however, the deliverance was imbued with a spiritual mysticism and owing to the coincidental dates between his brothers passing and his birth, he was raised in the ghostly shadow of his late predecessor as his mother and father informed him that he was a literal reincarnation—his brother died, and the gestation period immediately followed.
Naturally, this was a strange thing to be informed of as a child. Dalí often spoke at length about the profound effects that this duality, embodying both life and death simultaneously, had on him from an early age. It was his belief that this was the genesis of his obsession with decay and putrefaction—it was as though he saw one half of himself rotting in the earth. Dalí would later paint a portrait of his brother and refer to him as, “The first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute.” This may be also why Dalí sought surreal subversions of reality and penchant for debasing perversity.
When viewed in retrospect, the peculiarity of this upbringing should not detract from the inherent nettlesome trouble and strife that came in the undertow of his childhood. His existence was conflicted. To outsiders, he was an oddity. To his mother, he represented both grief and a gift, thus, he was emotionally doted on and wanted for nothing. And his wealthy father was by turns stoically stern and liberally supportive in equal measure—he viewed him as a miracle, and that is a difficult thing to uphold.
Indicative of this is the fact that he would later be expelled from his family by his father over the disgust of his son’s picture of Jesus Christ entitled Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of my Mother. His religious father’s view was that if he was a miracle birth, then he had defied that fortune with his immoral, ungodly art, desiccating the memory of his perfect brother.
Even still, it wasn’t through his later art alone that Dalí sought his own individualism. His childhood behaviour was notably strange too. From a young age, Dalí was prone to fits of bizarre sadism. On one occasion he pushed his friend from a six-metre bridge and watched on with a bowl of cherries as his friend’s mother tendered to her badly injured son. Then we have the wounded bat incident, whereby he saw one morning that it had been swarmed by ants, thus he unthinkingly picked it up and simply bit its head off. And to top off this strange collation of childhood brutalities, he also made the frank admission that he was drawn to necrophilia at a young age but was cured of such urges.
“[We] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections,” Dalí said of his dead brother in his later writings. This was symbolic of the mythology that Dalí endowed him with and his desire to escape his shadow. Psychologists have argued that his surreal ways were an attempt to assert a stark difference to “pure” brother and craft his own identity.
Portrait of My Dead Brother, 1963 – Salvador Dalí
He would address this subject head-on with his 1963 work, ‘Portrait of My Dead Brother’. The style is notably different to his usual work, with his surreal style set in the background and a pop art portrait of his brother rising to the foreground. In his brief gallery description of the painting, Dalí wrote: “”The vulture, according to the Egyptians and Freud, represents my mother’s portrait. The cherries represent the molecules, the dark cherries create the visage of my dead brother, the sun-lighted cherries create the image of Salvador living thus repeating the great myth of the Dioscuri Castor and Pollux.”
The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali
As Dalí would write himself about this mythologising in his memoir, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali: “As is known, three years after the death of my seven-year-old elder brother, my father and mother at my birth gave me the same name, Salvador, which was also my father’s. This subconscious aim was aggravated by the fact that in my parents’ bedroom – an attractive, mysterious, redoubtable place, full of ambivalences and taboos – there was a majestic picture of Salvador, my dead brother, next to a reproduction of Christ crucified as painted by Diego Velazquez; and this image of the cadaver of the Saviour whom Salvador had without question gone to in his angelic ascension conditioned in me an archetype born of four Salvador’s who cadaverized me.”
Adding: “The more so as I turned into a mirror image of my dead brother I thought I was dead before I knew I was alive. The three Salvador’s reflecting each other’s images, one of them a crucified God twinned with the other who was dead and the third a dominating father, forbade me from projecting my life into a reassuring mold and I might say even from constructing myself. At an age when sensibilities and imagination need an essential truth and a solid tutor, I was living in the labyrinths of death which became ‘my second nature.’ I had lost the image of my being that had been stolen from me; I lived only by proxy and reprieve.”
