Original photo by tofino/ Alamy Stock Photo
You may not know it by name, but you’re almost certainly familiar with Salvador Dalí’s best-known work, “The Persistence of Memory,” which depicts melting clocks on a bleak landscape. No less famous, albeit in an entirely different way, is the Chupa Chups logo — which Dalí also designed. While the idea of a surrealist collaborating with a lollipop company may sound odd, it begins to make sense when you learn a bit more about the eccentric artist — starting with the fact that he was close friends with Chupa Chups founder Enric Bernat, a fellow Spaniard.
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It's a factIn addition to his beloved anteater, whom he was fond of taking on walks through the streets of Paris, Dalí also had a pet ocelot named Babou. One supposes cats and dogs weren’t surreal enough to strike his fancy.
The two met at a café one day in 1969, with Bernat making Dalí aware of his need for a logo and the world-renowned artist quickly taking care of it for him. He did so with great intention, of course: “Acutely aware of presentation, Dalí insisted that his design be placed on top of the lolly, rather than the side, so that it could always be viewed intact,” Phaidon notes. Dalí reportedly designed the instantly recognizable daisy-based logo in less than an hour on that fateful day, and it’s still in use decades — not to mention billions of sales — later.
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Chupa Chups was originally going to be named ______.
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Chupa Chups was originally going to be named Gol.
Dalí believed he was the reincarnation of his brother.
To call Salvador Dalí eccentric would be an understatement, and many of his more out-there qualities were present from an early age. This includes his firmly held belief that he was the reincarnation of his brother, who was also named Salvador and died nine months before the younger Salvador was born. He didn’t come up with the idea himself — his parents impressed it upon him when he was 5 years old — but neither did he ever grow out of it. In 1963, when Dalí was around 59, he painted “Portrait of My Dead Brother” in memory of his sibling.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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