"Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality."

January 12, 2014 7:20 AM

Salvador Dalí Illustrates the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac, in stunning and colorful detail.

If you, too, tire of describing Dalí as "that guy with the melty clocks", then enjoy instead his take on the 12 signs of the zodiac. Appropriately enough for a Spaniard, Dalí himself is a Taurus. The zodiac series is available on Amazon as individual lithographs, for those who have a cool nearly-$5K lying around their houses.

Bonus: Dalí also did a series of illustrations of Alice in Wonderland. It is just as trippy as you would think.

posted by chainsofreedom (12 comments total)

Those paintings are great and that website is great. I enjoyed How to Be a Nonconformist. If they allow comments there they are not showing up in my browser configuration.
posted by bukvich at 7:45 AM on January 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

The ones that have art are great. I hadn't seen the Dali zodiac but the Dali Alice in Wonderland made me think of Destino, Dali's short film collaboration with Disney. (6 minutes, completed in 2003, and I'm sure it's been on the blue.)
posted by immlass at 8:05 AM on January 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Only mildly surprised that clicking on the images take you to the Amazon page where you can buy a framed signed lithograph for $4900. (edit: didn't read the "more inside" before posting.)
posted by achrise at 10:06 AM on January 12, 2014

Dali is off base, of course, in drawing Cancer the Crab as a lobster – if you were paying for them in a Maine restaurant, you'd want to know the difference – but then again, he probably still was enamored by the lobster he used in his famous 1936 telephone. And rightly so!

It also looks like – since you can find any crazy thing on the Internet – that the lobster is a Zodiac sign in Primal Astrology. (Turns out I'm on the cusp between yak and coyote.)
posted by LeLiLo at 10:29 AM on January 12, 2014

Turns out that I'm a mountaineering bull.
posted by arcticseal at 12:03 PM on January 12, 2014

Dali is off base, of course, in drawing Cancer the Crab as a lobster

Maybe it's a crayfish (cangrejo americano in spanish)
posted by empath at 12:14 PM on January 12, 2014

Hmmm. Not stunned.


They have scorpions in Spain, so I don't understand why Scorpio looks like a mutant lizard.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:28 PM on January 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

There's also Dali's now-lost script for a Marx Brothers film, which would've been titled Giraffes on Horseback Salads. Apparently it came out of Dali's meetings with Harpo. During which Dali drew Harpo with...a lobster on his head!
posted by kewb at 12:57 PM on January 12, 2014

Here's a page on the Harpo/Dali "collaborations" with some image links.
posted by kewb at 1:00 PM on January 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

As an Aquarian I love that he painted Aquarius dumping the water.
posted by localroger at 2:51 PM on January 12, 2014

Painting was indeed an infinitely minute part of Dalí's personality — most of the rest of it was concerned with marketing and money.
posted by Wolof at 11:32 PM on January 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

I saw the late Dali exhibit that came through Atlanta a few years back. I learned a lot! Like, "The Persistence of Memory" is smaller than a dorm room print reproduction. Dude! It was interesting to see some of the stuff he churned out for money, too, like portraits of Hollywood people, as well as some very famous art.
posted by thelonius at 6:12 AM on January 13, 2014