Date: 1948 | photo: Philippe Halsman
‘One, two, three… four!’ And up goes the great surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, while four assistants throw three cats and a bucket of water into the air and a fifth holds up a chair. Behind the camera: Philippe Halsman. The scene took place in 1948—exactly sixty years before this article was originally published.
No, it was not a lucky shot. The memorable photograph was preceded by no fewer than twenty-seven failed attempts and five hours of work—a fact that inspires some sympathy for the cats, especially the one at the top that is hit full-on by the splash of water…
Besides the unfortunate cat, another striking feature is the painting on the right side of the photograph, depicting Dalí’s wife as Leda, the Spartan queen from Greek mythology. Its title is Leda Atomica, which prompted Halsman to call his photograph of the Spanish painter Dalí Atomicus —reflecting the idea behind both the painting and the photograph that everything should float like an atom, referring in turn to the atomic age in which the two men were living at the time.
This was not the only collaboration between Halsman (1906-1979) and Dalí (1904-1989). In 1954, for example, Halsman and Dalí published the book Dali's Mustache, featuring thirty-six different images of the artist’s distinctive mustache. Another highlight is Voluptas Mors, a surreal portrait of Dalí beside an enormous skull that, on closer inspection, proves to be a tableau vivant made up of seven nude models.
Back to Dalí Atomicus, because Halsman evidently liked the effect of a jump. When the American television and radio network NBC commissioned him in 1951 to photograph several popular comedians, he asked some of them to leap for joy. More than that, it inspired the Latvian American photographer to develop an entire photographic philosophy that he called jumpology, resulting in the Jump Book (1959), which includes a humorous discussion of jumpology as well as 178 photographs of airborne celebrities, including Audrey Hepburn, Richard Nixon, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, and Brigitte Bardot.
Asked to explain, Halsman once remarked: “When you ask a person to jump, their attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping, and the mask falls so that the real person appears.”
Halsman’s name is carved into the rock of eternity not only because of his theory of jumpology. He staged numerous photo exhibitions around the world, appeared in 1958 on the list of The World’s Ten Greatest Photographers, created more than one hundred covers for Life Magazine (a record), and received the Life Achievement in Photography Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers in 1975—making him every bit as great as the star of this remarkable image.
