May and June Birthday Artists: Salvador Dali and Gustave Courbet

I’m late with the May birthday artist so I’ll sneak him in with an earlier than usual June birthday artist. May belongs to Salvador Dalí, even though he’s so well known and often caricatured. Dalí is obviously still quite popular, however, since a piece that I wrote last year on his 1931 famed melting clocks painting The Persistence of Memory is almost always my most highly-trafficked article here at Suite101.

Born May 11, 1904 (d. 1989), Surrealist Dalí knew how to market himself and his work and was never too reticent or aloof to miss a worthwhile opportunity to get his wild eyes and curious moustache out there. He appeared to love the spectacle and drama of the artist’s life as much as creating the art itself, and he’d probably be delighted to learn that you can find his 1950s What's My Line? appearance on YouTube, along with several other live Dalí moments. But you can see in the What’s My Line? clip how Dalí easily maintains his somewhat perplexed poise throughout the questioning, then he’s sure to suavely kiss the hands of all the women on the panel as he goes over to introduce himself. Dalí would also probably be thrilled that Twilight superstar/heartthrob Robert Pattinson played him in a recent bio-movie called Little Ashes, which details Dalí’s youthful relationship with poet Federico García Lorca and director Luis Buñuel.

Moving to June, French artist Gustave Courbet (b. June 10, 1819 - d. 1877) was another gentleman who knew how to work the media. Courbet’s career and life were full of drama, imprisonment, and charges of obscenity in his Realist paintings; he liked to drink and pursue a Bohemian existence and didn’t like pandering to public opinion or art critics.

Courbet furthermore seemed to enjoy presenting himself in various self-portraits and guises, almost as if to assert to the world at large that he alone defined himself and would not be defined by others. And while you can’t find clips of the actual Courbet on YouTube, a 2008 Courbet exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art prompted NY Times art writer Roberta Smith to describe the painter's dashing and dramatic self-portrait The Desperate Man as being "like Johnny Depp’s pirate rendered by Caravaggio" -- a comparison that would most likely please the once handsome and generally always rebellious Courbet.