Dali’s Moustache
“Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.”
Dali is known for art, of course, but also for his eccentric character, his fashion sense and his showmanship. If Dali was unique and singular, he worked hard to achieve it all.
His most distinctive feature was without a doubt his signature curled moustache. In a 2010 poll, it was voted the most famous moustache of all times.
While it is commonly believed that Dali’s inspiration for his moustache was classical Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, he did not confirm this theory when asked about it on a TV show in the 50's. Instead, besides confirming it to be "the most serious part of my personality”, he added it was “a very simple Hungarian moustache. Mr. Marcel Proust used the same kind of pomade for this moustache."
On another instance, Dali claimed his moustache helped him paint and served as an extra brush:
“This very morning, and just at the moment of not shaving myself, I discovered that my moustache can serve as an ultra-personal brush. With the points of its hair, I can paint a fly with all the details of his hair. And while I am painting my fly, I think philosophically of my moustache, to which all the flies and all the curiosities of my era came to be monotonously and irresistibly stuck. Some day perhaps one will discover a truth almost as strange as this moustache- namely, that Salvador Dali was possibly also a painter”
Dali's moustache was a language on its own, the subject of an entire book by Philippe Halsman and often compared to his paintings:
Attention-grabbing, extroverted, disruptive of social norms, and more often then not, defying the laws of gravity.
Almost 30 years after he passed away and was buried, Dali has made the headlines with his moustache again as they appear to not only defy the laws of gravity but the tests of time too. When the artist's body was exhumed to undergo DNA tests 2 days ago, to the exhumers’ great surprise, they found the artists’ moustache to be intact at its famous "10 past 10". This seems to be Dali’s latest “prodigious thing”.
'Salvador Dali' by Oscar Abolafia is available at Photo Image Gallery, rue Haute 92, 1000 Brussels
