In his characteristically exuberant (and unreliable) autobiography, “The Secret Life of Dalí,” Salvador Dalí describes his pivotal 1934 arrival in America: “I went out on the deck of the Champlain, and suddenly I beheld New York. . . I exclaimed, ‘New York salutes me!’. . . and I in turn saluted the cosmic grandeur and the virgin originality of the American flag.”
Granted, Dalí also recounts his “intra-uterine” memories in the book, fondly reflecting on his time as a fetus (which he describes as a “paradisal state”) and the trauma of birth—obviously, the book doesn’t have strict fidelity to fact. Yet, despite a sense of unreality in his autobiography, there is an undeniable kernel of truth in Dalí’s account of his initial encounter with the United States. America was, for the painter, a young nation offering a media infrastructure and resources to satisfy his voracious desire for fame.
The Dalí Museum’s latest exhibit, “Dalí in America”—on view through Oct. 18, in celebration of America’s semiquincentennial—begs a question: What is Dalí’s America?
The answer to this question, like Dalí himself, remains enigmatic and capricious, with responses swirling mosaic-like throughout the exhibition. “Dalí in America” consists of archival material, photographs, video clips from talk shows, smaller sketches, and grand “masterworks,” all offering up incongruous meanings of Dalí’s America.
Newspaper articles, and even an enlarged poster-size entry log from Dalí and Gala’s first visit to the U.S., tell the history: In 1934, he visits New York for the first time—and the city, representative of America, does “salute” him. Julien Levy Gallery (a major New York space) held an exhibition of his work, and before the show concluded, all 22 pieces were sold. Shortly after, in 1936, he secured the pinnacle of mid-century media: a cover portrait in Time magazine. He is even solicited by luxury stores on Fifth Avenue to design window displays in his surrealist style.
A newspaper article from the exhibition reports that after receiving customer complaints about one of these displays, the store made changes, rendering it more commercially friendly. When Dalí saw the altered display, he smashed the window and was subsequently arrested. Apparently, despite his celebration of the financial freedom America provided, there was a tension between commerce and his artistic vision. Dalí encountered commercialism’s limit: its built-in capitulation to the consumer.
His TV appearances on programs like “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “What’s My Line?,” and “The Dick Cavett Show” align with his popularized public image as an eccentric artist, mustache carefully twirled upward at each end. In the clips shown at “Dalí in America,” he is a self-constructed spectacle, respected as an artist, but also caricatured as a benign aberration from the American norm. His inventiveness as an artist is converted into a television-friendly performance of strangeness—though, in truth, it is impossible to divide Dalí-the-artist from Dalí-the-spectacle cleanly.
Two masterworks (large-scale paintings that are central to Dalí’s artistic oeuvre) are borrowed from the main gallery for the exhibit. The famous anamorphic image emblematic of his “paranoic-critical” method, aptly titled “Portrait of Gala looking onto the Mediterranean sea which from a distance of 20 metres is transformed into a portrait of Abraham Lincoln,” seems only incidentally tied to America. It features our bearded, 16th president, but mainly to demonstrate the illusory effect promised by the title: from around 10 feet away, there’s a pixelated Lincoln; upon approaching the composition, he transforms into a painting of his wife-muse, Gala, staring out over a cliff.
The painting achieves its effect—but the actual connection to America is more tenuous: Lincoln was chosen because of a piece in Scientific American that Dalí read, which used a pixelated Lincoln (as is used in the painting) to demonstrate the double-image.
His large oil painting of Christopher Columbus, titled “The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus,” stands 14 feet tall, imposing over the viewer. The piece is a mythic construction of Columbus, illustrating the decisive moment before he steps onto the American shore, carrying a flag with a picture of Gala, crosses populating the background. America’s advent, or discovery, is, in his late nuclear mysticism style, an almost biblical event.
The masterworks are central to “Dalí in America”—yet his smaller, lesser-known drawings stood out as reflections of his thoughts on our country.
“American Clock,” drawn for the founding’s 200th anniversary, pictures an ornate golden Dalíean clock, with embedded jewels and a red, white, and blue Lady Liberty head, on a withering branch in a way that seems to recognize the precarity of empire.
Half a century later, as we approach another major anniversary of America, in a time possibly even more tumultuous than the ‘70s, it is worth asking: Would this branch, if drawn today by Dalí, be thicker and stronger, reinforced by elapsing time, or has it continued to wither under the weight of America’s clock?
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This article appears in June 25 – July 01, 2026.
