Opinion
Dalí and the art of food
Salvador Dalí, as I have written on other occasions, anticipated in the art of performances, installations and other artistic languages that are not strictly objectual... But he also anticipated in food art, or edible art, and became an artist who practiced it assiduously. Salvador Dalí, from a young age (from the age of six, in fact), wanted to be a chef. But this, in a wealthy family, no matter how republican it was, would have been a dishonor —we are talking about other times, of course. This created a lifelong trauma for him, and even more so considering that his father forbade him from entering the kitchen forever, where he placed his sexual fantasies. In this way, food, in his pictorial iconography, performances and actions —even, in my opinion, better than his painting—, has a very relevant presence.
The last performance
As you probably already know, Salvador Dalí ordered the Galatea tower, attached to the theatre museum —which was to be his tomb— to be decorated with three-cornered breads or croutons (about 1,500). In fact, some people think that they are a Dalí creation, but in reality they are traditionally made in Salt, in Banyoles, in the Empordà. I don't know if it is ethnographic information that Dalí had or brilliant intuition. This bread, in the past, was a "funeral bread", since it was given at these events, and many people went there even if they didn't know the deceased, because it was the best bread they could find —those were times when people had to eat black bread.
The bread of life
In fact, Dalí always had a great affection for bread, which he ate greedily with sea urchins, sardines, etc. And, in addition, he turned it into an iconographic motif with his masterpiece of a breadbasket, repeated at least twice. The most famous (Teatre Museu Dalí in Figueres) represents a basket with a piece of bread placed on a wooden table against a dark background, and is painted in a style that we would later call hyperrealism, which would triumph later. According to Dalí himself, he finished it on September 1, 1945, the day before the outbreak of World War II. He worked on it four hours a day for two months. But bread also appears in other Dalinian works: for example, in the Breadbasket (1926), on the same subject.
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