The artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century have always disguised their close ties with the capitalist art market. Dalí, however, who loved to swim against the stream, always made an ostentatious display of his passion for money. When André Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, nicknamed him “Avida Dollars” – an anagram of the words Salvador Dalí – the artist provocatively appropriated the nickname and turned it into one of his most conspicuous attributes, with the result that it became part of his own “Golden Legend”.
Whereas the vast majority of mortals work in order to earn money, Dalí wanted to earn money in order to work as he pleased. For this reason, he decided to surround himself with a cohort of princes and multimillionaires, who by fighting for possession of his works sent their prices sky high. After that, a kind of divine rain poured down on Dalí in the form of an inexhaustible stream of dollars that allowed him to do exactly what he wanted. By means of this Dalinian apotheosis of the dollar, he tried to emulate the ancient alchemist’s desire to turn base metal into gold.