Salvador Dalí was offered $250,000 to illustrate a Bible, a commission designed to convert him to Catholicism. He invented a technique called bulletism for the work and used his wife Gala as his model. The story shows why you cannot change someone who doesn't want to change.
Questions this video answers
$250,000 (stated equivalence: about $3 million today)
A painting method called 'bulletism'—shooting ink-filled bullets from a gun onto the surface.
He gave an all-white printed set to the Pope, who reportedly loved them.
Chapters
We love books.
In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.
The question that we often wonder is, can people change? And what is the recipe for in order to get people to change?
And today, could you change somebody for $3 million?
In the pantheon of artists, you will not find something more controversial, more polarizing, more talented than Salvador Dali. And you'll be hard pressed to find a piece of art as incredible as the Dali Bibles.
How they came into existence is almost as fascinating as how they turned out. So you ask yourself, like, how did Salvador Dali end up illustrating a Bible?
Some very close friends of Dali, his name was Giuseppe Alboreto, ended up becoming very, very worried about Dali in the sense that Dali was living a life of excess and debauchery.
Giuseppe thought, what I want to do is have Dali share the same peace and the same understanding that I have from being a Catholic. I need to figure out how to convert him to Catholicism.
See, I think I understand Giuseppe and what he was trying to do with Dali because I've found myself in a situation where friends have been struggling or having a hard time, and I see their full potential. I see that their lives could be different. They could be better. And what I figured out about myself and why that doesn't work is because when I was a little kid, between the ages of, like, three and seven, I was picked on a lot. I was bullied. I never fit in. I had a lot of different situations that made me really sensitive. I became a really sensitive.
Little guy that, like, felt things very, very deeply.
And later on in life, when I've encountered people that I feel like share that same sort of dysfunction or those same behavioral cascades, I end up in these situations with people all the time where I want it more than they do.
Giuseppe, he decided to commission him to illustrate the Bible. And so he offered him $250,000, which today would be about $3 million, to do this project.
Thinking that during the process of illustrating the Bible, Dali would find God.
You know, I'm sure the thing with Giuseppe was he's looking at Dali, who's working himself to death, has all of these issues, anxiety, clearly embracing some addictions that aren't super healthy. He's a tortured artist. And if he really cared about the guy, you would say, like, hey, you're so talented, Dolly. Like, if you just slowed down for a minute and you stopped putting yourself in this vicious circle of chaos and addictions and debauchery and all that, live a healthier, more balanced life, which in the end, you might be more Successful in the sense that you have more balance, you're more authentic to who you really are versus running from something. The story is that Dali printed a set of these in all white and gave them to the Pope at the time, and the Pope loved them.
Dali invented a form of painting while he was working on this called bulletism. And basically, he took an old gun, load up the bullet with ink, and then he would shoot it.
He took the work really, really serious. You can literally stare at some of these images for hours, and these are incredible pieces of art.
But Dali never converted to. If anything, I think after this, he had more debauchery than he did before.
One thing that Dali kind of in his odd sense of humor did is the commissioners of this Bible weren't big fans of his wife, Kala. They thought she was too controlling.
And he uses her as his model or his muse for all of the female bodies that are in this.
So just imagine if you paid your buddy $3 million to find God and leave his wife, and he ends up painting hundreds of images, and she's in a lot of.
You know, one thing that Dali believed was that creativity came from suffering. And he created all these different scenarios to constantly live in this mindset of suffering and chaos. He believed that it was a world that he built around himself. And you can see that Giuseppe, being a friend, would want to help him with that, would want him to think a different way, because it's hard to be friends with somebody who's always torturing themselves and always putting themselves in situations that make them miserable. You know, one of the outcomes of being an empath is you feel things very deeply, and so you end up feeling other people's pain, and you end up rooting for them, and you end up being kind of vested in the outcome. I see the potential in somebody. I believe in their full potential, but I can't impose that on other people. And it's just like hypnosis. It only works if the other person wants it.
Now, I'm going to bring you to the hypnosis section of the library. And, you know, for a long time, I studied hypnosis, and I've read a lot of books on it because I was worried that somebody could just hypnotize me randomly.
It ends up that the one thing that makes everybody susceptible to hypnosis, that makes hypnosis work on somebody is that they want it to work.
It works 100% of the time, then.
So if you find yourself being Giuseppe and you're trying to change somebody, you have to ask yourself the question, are they not changing because you're not doing enough, or are they not changing because they don't want to?
If you feel like. Or you end up in situations where you're the Dali, where other people are constantly trying to encourage you and get you to think bigger, maybe you could do an inventory and just figure out a couple things that you could let go, a couple things that aren't serving you very well. And so what happens is when I believe in somebody more than they believe in themselves. Just like Giuseppe believed that there was a better thing for Dali if he became a Catholic, if he embraced Catholicism. We can change people, but we can't change people that don't want.
And so that's what these Bibles remind me of. The layer below what's on the surface, or just appearances, is this beautiful story that this art came out of somebody wanting to change somebody.
You can't change somebody that doesn't want to be changed.
I believe in you, but now it's up to you to decide.
