Salvador Dali suffocates, 1936

In 1936, Salvador Dali lectured at the International Exhibition of Surrealism. "His speech 'Unconsciousness in a Diving Suit' almost ended in tragedy when air couldn't enter the diving suit he was wearing and he almost died before someone realized that his frantic motions were not part of the demonstration." http://homebase-bbs.com/ams/unit8/dali.htm For another account, see
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/01/dali-exhibition-surreal-encounters-edinburgh

Suppose he had died. Effect on art history? Probably not much. He had already painted the famous surrealist dreamscapes which were to be his most influential work. But in recent years his later "classical" and religious works, once generally despised by critics, have undergone a reevaluation: see http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/…/Late%20Dali%207.9.11.pdf for example. ("As North American art history and theory move further away from modernist paradigms largely defined by Greenbergian formalism and Breton-style ethics, the later work Dalí produced which had been quietly written off as embarrassingly reductive, commercial and gauche, begins to look surprisingly vanguard.")
 
And obviously stuff like this wouldn't have happened.

I've seen commentators link, if not outright credit, Dali with the postwar emergence of media-driven celebrity culture, especially the flamboyant, self-promoting aspects of it(see Cooper's description of Dali's entriance at the hotel). Not sure how the actual flow-chart would go, though he certainly was one person who capitalized on the being able to make his own persona into a bizarre artistic spectacle.

On that note, I suspect some of the more serious-minded among the surrealists would have preferred not to have their movement so closely identified with Dali's buffoonish excesses.
 
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