Salvador Dalí art comes to India for the first time

Although the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí never visited India, his artworks are set to be displayed in the country for the first time.

Starting Friday, an exhibition in the capital Delhi will showcase an expansive collection of more than 200 of his original sketches, etchings and watercolour paintings.

The collection has been curated by Christine Argillet, daughter of Pierre Argillet, a French collector who was also Dalí's friend and publisher.

"Dalí was fascinated by India, especially, the West's fascination with Indian mysticism in the 1960s and 1970s," Ms Argillet told the BBC.

Some of the sketches in the collection are based on photographs her father had taken during a trip to India in the 1970s, when the hippie movement was at its peak and young guitar-toting Americans visited India on spiritual quests.

Dalí's India features elephants and temples but, as with all his artwork, they're not always easy to spot, having been rendered in the artist's trademark surrealist style.

In his works, human bodies sprout flowers from their heads; eyeballs dance in a matrix of squiggles and strokes and dismembered body parts interact animatedly with the world around them. Stare for longer than a minute and these disconnected shapes begin to form new connections and meanings in the mind's eye.

"Appreciating Dalí's art is like peeling back the layers of an onion; you can keep finding something new to marvel at," Ms Argillet says.

Bringing Dalí's work to India was a long and arduous endeavour, says Akshitta Aggarwal of Bruno Art Group, the international art gallery presenting the exhibition.

"The project took five years; every sketch and artwork had to be checked for its authenticity," Ms Aggarwal says.

Strictly speaking, this isn't the first time Dalí's creations have come to India. In 1967, Dalí famously designed a set of whimsical ashtrays for Air India - the country's national airline back then - which were handed out to first class passengers.

In return, Dalí demanded not money but a baby elephant. Uttara Parikh, the then deputy commercial director of Air India, recounted to Times of India newspaper how she initially went shopping for one in a zoo in Mumbai city but returned empty-handed.

She finally procured the baby elephant from a zoo in Bangalore city (now Bengaluru) and Air India flew the animal to Spain, where it was kept in a zoo until its death in 2018. (Dalí had exciting plans for the elephant, such as undertaking a journey across the Alps, but his wife dissuaded him from attempting to carry them out).

Dalí's demand might seem outrageous, but those familiar with the artist and his legacy know that it was very much in keeping with his personality.

Born in Spain in 1904, Dalí grew up in a world that was embracing the avant-garde and responding to the fallout of two world wars. Creatives of his time, like Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and André Breton, were finding new ways to express themselves and their ideas and their artistic styles heavily influenced a young Dalí.

The surrealist movement, widely acknowledged to be founded by André Breton, resonated with him the most. Surrealist art advocated for a form of expression that was "dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason", according to Breton.

Dalí was also heavily inspired by Sigmund Freud and his theories around psychoanalysis - a method of treating mental illnesses by focussing on conflicts originating in a person's psyche. Dreams take on a special importance as they are believed to express a person's repressed thoughts and urges.

Consequently, Dalí's art reflects many of these ideas - they have an almost dream-like quality and through free association, the visuals take on meanings that are unique to the onlooker. There is also visceral, almost shocking imagery, much like forbidden desires lying hidden in the subconscious mind.

"Dalí was a free-thinker and he embraced all facets of the human condition, particularly the taboo and unsettling ones," Ms Argillet says.

The artist's outward persona reflected his colourful take on life. He dressed in flamboyant suits and sported a moustache that pointed upward so severely it seemed in danger of piercing his eyes. In a 1955 interview with the BBC, Dalí revealed the origins of his famous upturned moustache.

"Dates, you know the fruit? In the last moment of dinner, I [did] not clean my finger and I put a little in my moustache and it remains for all afternoon very efficiently," he said but later revealed that he used a strong wax to shape his moustache.

In the same interview, he described his moustache as being "very gay, very pointed, very aggressive".

Ms Argillet, who knew Dalí intimately through her childhood and teenage years and often spent her summers in Spain with her father, recollects Dalí being a humorous person who loved playing pranks and "shocking the bourgeois".

He once encouraged her to take some sweets from his bedroom and throw them at fishermen at a nearby beach. Only the sweets turned out to be cherry bombs, annoying the fishermen and forcing a young Ms Argillet to run for cover.

"At one of his parties, he had a tortoise carry around an ashtray on its shell," Ms Argillet says.

But she adds that he was also a shy, intuitive, observant person who had a knack for reading people's minds. He painted in his studio in short pants and slippers and, according to Ms Argillet, it was Dalí's shyness that made him over-perform in public.

"He was misunderstood by many. There were many layers to Dalí, just like his paintings," Ms Argillet says.

"The closer you look at his paintings, the more you understand Dalí."

The exhibition 'Dali comes to India' will be held at the India Habitat Centre from 7 February to 13 February and at Masarrat Gallery by Bruno Art Group from 15 February to 16 March.