“Let all the bells ring! Look! Salvador Dalí has just been born! No wind blows and the May sky is without a single cloud. The Mediterranean sea is motionless and on its back, smooth as a fish’s, one can see glistening the silver scales of not more than seven or eight sunbeams by careful count. So much the better! Salvador Dalí would not have wanted more! […] In a house on Calle de Monturiol a new-born babe is being watched closely and with infinite love by his parents, provoking a slight and unaccustomed domestic disorder.”
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With these bold and prophetic words, Salvador Dalí announced his arrival into the world on May 11, 1904, in Figueres. Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of his birth, we explore a symbol the Master invoked at the very beginning of his life’s journey: the bell.
While Dalí is inextricably linked in the collective imagination to melting watches or spindly-legged elephants, the bell occupies a place of honor in his cosmogony, representing a bridge between the sacred and the profane, between childhood trauma and imperial glory.
The secret behind Dalí’s bells lies in his lifelong fixation on Millet’s The Angelus. For years, Dalí was haunted by the invisible tolling of that bell calling peasants to prayer.
Through his “Paranoiac-Critical method”, Dalí interpreted that sound not as a religious summons, but as a signal of deep-seated anxiety and psychological tension. In his works, the bell becomes the announcement of a revelation: it is the sound that suspends time and transforms reality into a “dreamscape”.
A masterful example of this symbolism is found in Destino, the cinematic project begun in 1945 with Walt Disney. In one dreamlike sequence, the bell undergoes a typically Dalinian metamorphosis, transforming into the body of a female figure. Here, the bell is no longer an inanimate object but a vibrant entity symbolising the inexorable call of destiny.
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This poetic movement also found its way into Dalí’s commercial collaborations, most notably in the Christmas cards he designed for Hallmark in the 1950s.
In one striking illustration, Dalí depicts a cascade of dancing figures whose vibrant gowns flare out into the unmistakable shape of bells. It is a celebratory image where the heavy bronze of the bell is replaced by the lightness of a dance.
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Dalí believed that every shape must vibrate with an inner frequency, transforming the heavy bronze of a bell into the ethereal rhythm of a dance. In these holiday works, the bell-shape becomes a vessel for joy, proving that even a commercial medium could host his profound obsession with “angelic geometry”.
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During his American period and the subsequent “Mystic-Nuclear” turn, the bell took on new forms, becoming an architectural structure. In works such as Utopia (1944), it appears as a near-biological entity, a cavity resonating within the desert of the subconscious.Dalí saw in the shape of the bell a perfect geometry, capable of containing the void and resonating with the frequencies of the irrational.
Returning to the opening quote, Dalí demands that “all the bells ring” for his birth. Here, the bell loses its haunting connotation to become an instrument of triumph.
It is the signal of a positive “domestic disorder”, the announcement that a new gaze has been gifted to the world to destroy the shackles that limit our vision.
Today, on May 11th, that tolling still resonates. Dalí’s bells, from the silent ones in his canvases to the dancing ones in Destino, never stop ringing, inviting us to look beyond appearances toward a reality where the sacred merges with delirium.
“Salvador Dalí has just been born!” . Happy birthday to the Master of Surrealism!