A romantic visit with... Amanda Lear

Her destiny crossed that of painter Salvador Dalí somewhat by chance in Paris in the mid-1960s. With her androgynous face and willowy body, Amanda Lear was already a high-profile model, spotted in the nightclubs of Swinging London (she had a brief affair with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones). Studying at Beaux-Arts, the young woman dreamt of a career in the arts. She quickly became the muse of the Surrealist master - she is said to have inspired his works Hypnos (1965) and Venus in Furs (1969).

The relationship between Dalí and Amanda Lear remained platonic (the artist was still married to Gala, Paul Éluard's ex-wife, and had been since 1932), but the pair’s media antics delighted the tabloids. For almost fifteen years, Dalí and Amanda Lear played the act of a non-conformist couple, each feeding the story of their intellectual and friendly collaboration with the wildest rumours. The woman who reinvented herself as a disco queen in the early 1980s (on the advice of her lover, a certain David Bowie) has countless piquant anecdotes from this time – and a few paintings by the master, said to have been lost in a fire at her Provençal home in the early 2000s. Meet a true pop culture legend.

"I'll tell you the truth, when I met Salvador Dalí in the 1960s, I didn't like his paintings at all – or even Surrealism in general, which I found terribly distressing! I had a very academic artistic training at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. My favourite painters were the Fauvists like Henri Matisse, but also Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Cézanne – who Dalí detested. For me, that was what painting was all about! At the time, I was painting live models – in fact, it was at art school that I saw a naked man for the first time. I must have been about eighteen, and I never imagined for a second that I was going to meet Salvador Dalí…

Dalí was very macho, he didn't think women could paint anything other than bouquets or maternity scenes. The real painters were Vermeer or Michelangelo with the Sistine Chapel.

Amanda Lear

To pay for my tuition, I did some modelling. One day, I walked for designer Paco Rabanne. After the show, Paco took me to a restaurant for dinner, and that's where we bumped into him. Paco was Spanish too and they knew each other. He introduced me to Dalí, who said to me: ‘Mademoiselle, you have the most beautiful skull I have ever seen.’ To which I replied that I was also a painter, and that we were therefore colleagues – you can imagine the look on Salvador Dalí's face! He was very macho, he didn't think women could paint anything other than bouquets or maternity scenes. The real painters were Vermeer or Michelangelo with the Sistine Chapel. In short, painting was a man’s thing. At the time, art for me was above all a question of aesthetics, I was attracted by colours - a terrible mistake, of course! It was only later that I realised that art wasn't about that. 

In his paintings, Dalí expresses his fear of death and his anxiety about sex – he was impotent. Which reminds me of a funny story… During the last major Dalí retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, I came across Bernadette Chirac standing in front of a tiny painting titled The Spectre of Sex-Appeal – some of his best paintings are the size of a postcard. The painter is depicted as a little boy with a hoop and a little sailor's costume, facing a decaying creature, with its bones visible. In fact, it's a metaphor for his impotence… I explained it all to Bernadette and she was rather shocked!

During the last major Dalí retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, I came across Bernadette Chirac standing in front of a tiny painting titled The Spectre of Sex-Appeal. The painter is depicted as a little boy with a hoop and a little sailor's costume, facing a decaying creature, with its bones visible. It's a metaphor for his impotence… I explained it all to Bernadette and she was rather shocked!

Amanda Lear

Dalí was my teacher, but I had to find my own style and forge my own artistic education by distancing myself from his judgements. Today, painting is a form of therapy for me. You can't live without art, at least I can't. I'm lucky enough to be able to travel all over France with my touring plays, and while my friends are in a city’s bars and saunas, I'm visiting museums and extraordinary cathedrals. Recently, in Albi, I rediscovered Toulouse-Lautrec's pastels in the town museum – it was wonderful!” ◼