Won’t You Trade Your Boring Christmas Cards For Salvador Dali’s?
Having lived a good part of my childhood under the pressure of buying greeting cards for random people you don’t know why you know, I understand it can be a tedious exercise.
Your living gets particularly difficult when you can’t figure out if your X relative or neighbour would prefer the big red rose over the smaller red roses on cards, or they like them being laced around border in heart shapes. Because, apparently, there are too many choices when you go to your nearbly Archies or Hallmark store. And their diverse and inventive designs are too difficult for your pea-shaped brain to grapple with.
That’s a poor attempt at trying to be witty, but you would be happy to know that there was a time when Hallmark stores could actually look like art exhibitions.
Hallmark’s founder J.C. Hall, who rose from rags to riches, was fascinated by the rich and the famous of arts and politics. As Hallmark became a cultural thing in the mid-20th century, the brand also became a “creative partner” for many popular artists of that time. The cards featured artworks by not only the prominent artists like Grandma Moses, Saul Steinberg, and Norman Rockwell, it extended to becoming an artistic vent for people like Groucho Marx and Henry Fonda whose ability with the pencil we know not much of. Another of the most famous names Hallmark indulged with during this time was Salvador Dali.
According to an article published in 1981 in the now-defunct newspaper Evening Independent, around the year 1959 Hallmark were the only card makers to agree to Dali’s strict terms of “$15,000, cash in advance, no suggestions of subjects or medium to be used, no deadlines and no royalties” for a series of greeting cards around the theme of Christmas. The deal was struck and the painter went about his work, finishing 50 percent of the task in a matter of hours.
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A letter enclosed with the article recounts Dali being enthusiastic about what he had finished, even considering it the greatest of his works. But Hallmark wasn’t too pleased. To complete the assignment, Dali submitted 10 of his creations: Mystic Rose, Tree Butterflies, Madonna and Infant, St. Joan’s Vision, The Nativity, The Woman, The Angel of the Butterfly, The Adoration, The Crucifixion and The Butterfly Madonna. Only two of them — The Nativity and Madonna and Child — were considered by Hallmark to have public appeal, and both went to print for the Christmas of 1960. But the shapeless and formless surrealistic holy figures created an outcry among the masses who demanded the cards be pulled off the racks, and so happened. While the works have been appreciated as and when they have travelled the world within the circles of art exhibitions, publicly, like most beautiful things we know, they could never become acceptable.
