Although British art critic Brian Sewell’s Dirty Dali: A Private View isn’t quite as salacious as the title makes it sound (and doesn’t include a fraction of the dirt that was in Ian Gibson’s fascinating 1997 biography, (The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí) it’s still pretty darned interesting.

In fact, though less “warts and all” than Gibson’s book, Sewell’s 2007 documentary about the painter does have something Gibson’s account did not, and that is a personal sexual… experience (“encounter” would probably be too strong a word) with the voyeuristic Great Masturbator himself!

Sewell describes in the film how as a young man he came to stay in Port Lligat for four summers between 1968 and 1971 and was introduced into the Dali’s social circle at a time that the genius was thought to have seen his best days—and best work—now long behind him.

After a dinner, Dali convinced Sewell to recline on a sculpture of Christ and masturbate while he took photos and beat his own (apparently very tiny) meat. This sort of thing went on, obviously, with Gala’s disinterested blessing as she was into her very own swinging scene and was allegedly a complete nymphomaniac into a ripe old age. 

Although ultimately quite sympathetic to Dali, Sewell’s film depicts how unconstrained Dali was by conventional morality and yet how his own deep psychological (not to mention Catholic) shame at what he got up to, fed into his work in a perverse sort of guilty, self-loathing Freudian feedback loop.

But clearly, it worked for him…