Dali Lectures In A Diving Suit

The stunning and eccentric Surrealist artist Salvador Dali was never short of bizarre shenanigans for promoting himself. One spring day in 1936 he decided to perform an outlandish prank. He carried it out at the International Surrealist Show, which was held in London from 11 June to 4 July,1936, at the New Burlington Galleries. Some fifty artists, the leading surrealists of the era, participated in the exhibition, among them Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Francis Picabia and Pablo Picasso. The resourceful and mustachioed Dali came up with the freaky idea to deliver a lecture at the exhibition in a heavy deep sea diving suit. When the owner of the diving suit store asked the artist, where he planned on diving? Dali replied: ' Into the subconcious of the human mind.' It was a nice day and Dali began to deliver his intriguing and astonishing lecture on 'authentic, paranoid phantoms' to his motley and prying audience when something went wrong. Suddenly he could not breathe. Salvador Dali was suffocating because he had no oxigen in the diving suit. The artist waved his hands asking for help but the people at the lecture mistook it as a slapstick comedy, believing that it was part of the show, a surrealist stunt to amuse and entertain. The audience laughed As Dali was asphyxiating. He almost died locked in that heavy diving suit. Eventually, with great effort, Dali managed to unscrew the scuba helmet and luckily he could breathe again. He died half century later in 1989, aged 84.