Salvador Dalí and the cauliflower incident

Salvador Dalí for those who don’t know was a Spanish born painter known for his eccentric paintings and personality, but do you know about the time he drove from Madrid to Paris in a car full to the brim with cauliflower?

At the time had been called to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1955 to give a lecture on his art. But him, fearing he wouldn’t reach the level of eccentricity that was expected of an artist of his calibre decided it was better to go for an overkill. 

So he asked for his friends white Rolls Royce and filled to the brim with what he thought was the superior vegetable: cauliflower. 

So he arrived to Paris in his vegetable filled car to deliver his lecture on ‘Phenomenological Aspects of the Paranoiac Critical Method’,as he opened the door of his car several of the vegetables came tumbling out of it, announcing his arrival.

But there was a problem, he didn’t know if he was being iconic enough since the people inside the university hadn’t witnessed his grand entrance.How would they know what an avant-garde genius he was? So he turned to the crowd that had gathered and declared  “Everything departs from the rhinoceros horn! Everything departs from Jan Vermeer’s The Lacemaker! Everything ends up in the cauliflower!”

This event became incredibly well known as the Times Magazine declared: 

With bedlam in his mind and a quaint profusion of fresh cauliflower in his Rolls-Royce limousine,

Spanish-born Surrealist Painter Salvador Dalí arrived at Paris’ Sorbonne University to unburden

himself of some gibberish,”“Some 2,000 ecstatic listeners were soon sharing Salvador’s Delirium.

Planting his elbows on a lecture table strewn with bread crumbs, Dali blandly explained: ‘All emotion

comes to me through the elbow.'”

So many questions arise, the common answer to the most obvious one is that he was just doing it for

the drama. As so he became well known for his tomfoolery and eccentricity and this kind of stunts

became unsurprising and almost expected from the man that would assure with pride that “I don’t

take drugs, I am a drug”.

I, for one, he is incredibly iconic, and this type of creative random thinking is what made him one of the best artists of his time.