Ozzy and Dali By Jen Karetnick If you ever wondered how the idea for pop-artist Romero Britto to paint Absolut vodka billboards was conceived or why Vincent Van Gogh’s lifework became a series of vessels for the eponymous premium gin and vodka, you need to look no further than Salvador Dalí. In 1964, Dalí designed the bottle and label for Conde de Osborne Solera Gran Reseva Brandy de Jerez. Quite possibly, he was the first artist on record to do so for commercial purposes. He also, apparently, set the precedent for eclecticism. “It was very difficult to have a business relationship with Dalí because he was not serious,” admitted Claire Filhol, director of communications and unofficial Dalí archivist for Grupo Osborne, the noted sherry and brandy manufacturer. “He was special.” Translation: The surrealist Spanish painter was nuttier than the country’s vaunted almonds. Of course the artist’s peculiarities are well noted in both fact and fiction; you only need to trek to the self-designed Dalí museum in Figueres, Spain, where beheaded dolls decorate the arches of doorways, for visual confirmation of his oddities. And naturally my translation is more a literal extrapolation than actual verbatim. When Filhol picked me up at the architecturally bewildering former nunnery that is Hotel Monasterio to bring me to the Osborne headquarters in El Puerto de Santa Maria at 8:30 a.m., where I would see the sketches and original bottles (a series of four that changed slightly through the decades), she informed me between cigarettes – in English – that it was much too early in the day to actually be speaking English. When she discovered I was from Miami, she was convinced I would understand Spanish somehow intuitively, having absorbed it perhaps by osmosis, even though I’m pretty much limited to mas cerveza, por favor. As for me, I thought it was much too early to already be 103 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but the weather, like Americans, cigarette smoke and Dalí, it seems, can’t be instructed on just how to be industrious. On the other hand, Osborne employees report for work about two hours before the rest of Spain, and the majority are actually in a good mood. Indeed, you should have seen how happy I made Filhol when I accidentally pronounced a Spanish word with a French accent (the language I sort of studied in school before giving up on my diacritically deaf ear entirely). “Ah!” she exclaimed, “Je parle français,” and proceeded to ask if I would like to conduct the interview in French. All this to say we eventually called for a translator, an Andalusian woman named Afrika who had lived for a year or two in Atlanta, Georgia. But when it comes to Dalí, as I found out, intermediaries were de rigeur, so I was in appropriate, if somewhat alliterative, company. Although I had been led to believe that Dalí had agreed to design the brandy bottle because he had a relationship with the Osborne family, that theory turned out to be erroneous. Only one member of the Osborne family, Rafael, had ever even met Dalí, and it was a singular moment – as in, it happened just that once, when the drawings needed to be authenticated in the early 1980’s. “The process was very difficult,” Filhol sighed between drags of her (fourth) cigarette. “He was getting crazier by then.” Nor is it true that Dalí accepted the commission because he especially enjoyed Conde de Osborne Solera Gran Reseva Brandy de Jerez. “He loved all brandy,” Filhol, via Afrika, shrugged. He must have loved money, too. Pure and simple, this was a business deal, initiated by EPSA (Europa Publicidad, S.A.), Osborne’s advertising firm. The general manager of EPSA, Juan Cros, envisaged the idea of a landmark campaign utilizing Spain’s notable artists. Dalí was paid 300,000 pesetas, about 5,000 Euros – a nice bit of cash in 1964 – for both bottle and label. He was later petitioned to star in three ten-second television advertisements, a Christmas promotion for Osborne’s Veterano brand, for an additional 900,000 pesetas. The ads, filmed in Dalí’s Port-Ligat home because he wouldn’t travel to El Puerto de Santa Maria, have the creative punch of Andy Warhol hawking Campbell’s soup during a break from a daytime soap opera, rather than simply painting it. What Dalí was loathe to embrace, next to conventionality and mass transportation, was paperwork. He refused to sign formal contracts, which Cros was required to bring to him, it being a mountain-Mohammed situation. The records, then, that Filhol keeps carefully in plastic sleeves at the Osborne headquarters, are little more than a few typed lines, followed by the artist’s scrawl, attesting to the barest conditions to which he would comply: that he would keep the bottle vertical and that he would devise it so it could be mass-produced and actually hold the liquid for which it was intended. Dalí also approved an exclusive clause forbidding him to design a brandy bottle for anybody else; in return, Osborne promised not to sell the original design for less than $4,000 USD. Dalí came through with a typical, surreally influenced archetype, which was then forged commercially in a mold made by sculptor Javier Corberó in Barcelona. More square than round, with a crooked neck and greenish wax melted over the cork, the bottle was painted the vague color of skim milk (today it’s the white of Nicole Kidman’s skin). Two clear patches interrupted the coloring, symbolizing what the artist felt were the “tears” of creation. The label, which remained constant throughout the years, depicts Dalí’s grisly construal of the Osborne family crest: a dripping, blue-blooded bull’s heart (alluding to the Osborne’s crusty origins of British nobility before relocating to Spain in the eighteenth century), underneath a crown that looks like it’s made of thorns rather than gold. At the same time, Dalí designed a silver-plated, hinged egg sculpture that the bottle can nestle into as if half-hatched, begging the question of which came first: the birth of an idea or the launch of a beverage. During my visit in 2004, both the bottle and egg, as well as the two signed sketches of bottle and label, were on display at the opulent Osborne seat, which includes marble floors, gilt-trimmed oil paintings on the walls and an indoor bamboo garden amidst much familial memorabilia. After being appraised, the drawings and the bottle comprised a traveling exhibit for the “Dalí in Mass Culture” program, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Dalí’s own birth, at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. The advertising clips were also available for viewing. But the egg, unfortunately, was deemed too fragile for travel, given that it returned slightly damaged after its only other appearance Stateside at the Nieman-Marcus department store in Dallas twenty years ago. Odd juxtapositions aside, Grupo Osborne is clearly proud of its role in art history: As it turned out, Dalí was the first and last artist to participate (though the EPSA campaign laid the groundwork for a French company, who followed suit with artist renderings for Champagne labels). Juan Cros, after his exhaustive dealings with Dalí, may have felt otherwise. Says Filhol, “He had to go to a very relaxing place afterward.” I venture to guess that’d be at the bottom of a bottle of brandy – one in which the difficult Dalí did not have a notorious hand, and where Cros did not have to moderate. Love it? Hate it? Jen cares! (Sort of.) Let her know at Kavetchnik@aol.com. This article was previously published in The Drexel Online Journal, which is now defunct. © 2007 by Jen Karetnick. Please ask for permission before copying or distributing in any form.