This week's peronality: Salvador Dali and his exotic animals

In the company of, 

Salvador Dali was a phenomenon. Drawing upon the realm of dreams and the unconscious mind to depict - with scrupulous realism - an unsettling vision of unreality, his great canvases are truly archetypal images of the 20th century. Melting clocks, flowers sprouting from cracking eggs, disembodied faces floating in a barren landscape - any art lover can call to mind Dali's Surreal iconography at the mere mention of his name. His work probed the unconscious world of thoughts, dreams and perception in fanciful and nightmarish images influenced by Freud, Cubism, Futurism and metaphysical art. Extraordinarily imaginative, he also sculpted, and contributed to fashion, photography and theater. Dali's art has been called the epitome of Surrealism.

Dali the man was also a fantastic creation - as he observed, "At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since." With his flamboyant moustache, assertive character and irrepressible capacity for self-promotion, the figure of Dali the artist became instantly as recognizable as one of his great artworks. But what kind of man lay behind the public image? What was he like in his domestic environment, relaxing with his wife and close friends, or at work in his studio?

Salvador Dali will forever be remembered as a very eccentric man, and so it shouldn't be surprising that he also had some unusual pets. When he was a kid, he had a pet bat, and later in life he developed some sort of obsession with anteaters, presumably because he hated ants since he found them devouring his pet bat's dead body one day. But although Dali was seen and photographed walking an anteater on a leash in Paris, it seems that the animal was not actually his pet. 

Dali's actual exotic pet was an ocelot named Babou, who even joined his master in fancy restaurants. 

This wild cat goes by the name of Ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), but other names are: 'McNenney's Wildcat' and 'Painted Leopard'. They occur in South/Central America, Mexica, Caribbean and Texas. It weighs on average about 10 to 15 kilograms. It is in fact the biggest of the genus Leopardus, and is bigger than the Oncilla which stays in the same habitat. 

Ocelots are nocturnal and territorial. A typical Ocelot would fight to the death when threatened, and can be very aggressive if needed. Still, it is a loner by nature, joining another only for mating purposes.

There is a funny anecdote:

Salvador Dali once visited a New York restaurant with his pet ocelot, which he tethered to a leg of the table while he ordered coffee. A middle-aged woman later walked by - and was horror-stricken by the animal. 

"What is that?" she cried. "It's only a cat", Dali explained disdainfully. "I've painted it over with an op-art" design". Looking again, the woman sighed with relief. "I can see now that's what it is", she said. "At first I thought it was a real ocelot".

["I knew Dali only slightly", the art critic Robert Hughes one recalled. "He held court at the St. Regis in New York, where he favored new acquaintances with foul gusts of the worst human breath I have ever smelt".]

The elephant is a recurring image in Dali's works. It first appeared in his 1944 work "Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate a second before awakening". The elephants, inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk, are portrayed "with long multi-jointed, almost invisible legs of desire" along with obelisks on their backs. Coupled with the image of their brittle legs, these encumbrances, noted for their phallic overtones, create a sense of phantom reality. "The elephant is a distortion in space", one analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea or weightlessness with structure". "I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly." - Salvador Dali, in Dawn Ades, "Dali and Surrealism".

Various other animals appear throughout his work as well: ants point to death, decay, and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the human head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house when he first met Sigmund Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear. 

Maintain your animal spirit!