Self Portrait To Salvador Dali
"Dali dance, you draw!"
Salvador Dali
In 1971, Salvador Dali, admiring Christian's work asked him to make a drawing of himself. Not knowing of Christian's history in the National Gallery, and therefore his indifference to working before a large audience Dali thought to throw him off balance by inviting him to make the portrait in the St. Regis bar. Christian was not at all perturbed by this, which irritated Dali, who was used to seeing his mindless pranks invariably leading to someone's discomfort. He therefore started dancing around, until Christian asked him bluntly: was he going to sit or not? "Dali dance, you draw!" came the reply. Christian, a student of Leonardo, follows his Master's dictum that you "only draw after the Nature" - in other words, if you don't have a model, don't draw.
So the artist simply got up in disgust. But by the time he got home, he found himself even more outraged than he had been at the moment of the event, and felt antagonised to the point of reciprocating; it is bad enough that people treat each other as badly as they do, he thought, but an artist, supposedly a super-sensitive being, to treat another artist like that is unforgivable! His mind raced with rude lines about Dali, as he made his self-portrait, making an "Up-Yours" gesture with his fingers, on the end of which he placed the famous moustache.
Down the side of the drawing, he added, in mirror-script, some lines as they entered his head. Dali was always loudly claiming to be impotent, almost as if he were boasting about it; also he always surrounded himself by those so anxious to ingratiate themselves that they would adhere to the "maestro's" demand, and for a meeting him the required "gift in gold" (some of these gifts were so valuable, Christian wasn't surprised by the marked deterioration of Dali's last few years work, as he must have earned just as much by just sitting in the St. Regis, blowing his own trumpet!). Thus in reaction to these sides of someone Christian felt ought to know better, he wrote:
"Ah me" cries he "I'm impotente
That's why I need so many gente
To lick my arse, and then on payday
Make it for me a Dali hay day!"
Extract From The Book "Anthony Christian"
Poem From "Self Portrait To Salvador Dali"
There but for the grace of God goes God,
Past reason's limits watch him plod
With hairy gimmicks, velvet collars
Gathers more investors' dollars.
Dubious of his own agender
Surrounds himself with Regis splendour
Hey want to meet an old excreto?
Come and talk to Dalyito
"Ah me", cries he "I'm impotente,
That's why I need so many gente
To lick my arse and then on payday
Make it for me a Dali hayday".
Towards an end so empty now
I've seen him this old grazing cow
Weary , heavy like a cornflake
A sugared ego, what a headache!
With good intention and this sheet
One March evening I went to meet
The man who smiles like the pigs in the sty
The one who snides with open eye -
And so in my anger and in my time
I send to him this backward rhyme.
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