A Surreal Exchange: Salvador Dalí’s Unique Demand for a Baby Elephant as Payment

There was a time when Salvador Dalí was much more than a Spanish painter and sculptor: he became a pop icon. He appeared in American programs where people had to guess his identity, he became a celebrity of international stature at a time when Spain needed to put itself on the map. With that carte blanche under his arm, the artist dedicated himself to committing the most outrageous acts you can imagine. Among them, the typical, asking for a baby elephant in exchange for designing an ashtray.

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Smoking elephant

Although nowadays we can take a plane almost as normally as if we were taking an Alsa, in the 60’s it was something exclusive to the rich and people who had saved a lifetime to make a dream trip. On those flights you could smoke (not so long ago: in ‘Mission Impossible‘ they do it and in some airlines there are still ashtrays as a vestige of another era) and Air India, in that period of ostentation, wanted to stand out from the rest.

By asking the fashionable artist, Salvador Dalí, to design their own unique ashtray. It was a piece of white ceramic held by elephants with a green snake on the rim. Beautiful in its own way. So much so, that Dalí knew he could ask for whatever he wanted as payment: $100,000 and a baby elephant. The artist’s original idea was to give him to the children of Figueres, but he ended up at the Valencia Zoo, where he was called Noi (changing his original name, Surus).

Well, this is what happened, but the Indian press insisted that Dalí’s idea was to cross the Alps with him. At that time the elephant measured one meter twenty and weighed 250 kilos. Frankly, it doesn’t look like it would have held up to the hike very well. When the elephant arrived in Figueres, the artist walked through the streets with it before going to eat and leaving it with the waiters at the Hotel Durán while he enjoyed a menu of lamb, fish, shellfish and melon with ham.

Every story has an ending, and in this case there are two more or less sad endings: the elephant, which arrived in Spain in 1968, died in the mid-70s without being able to get used to the Iberian climate. As for the ashtrays, five hundred were made for first class and gifts from Air India, and today they are sold on the Internet for about 10,000 euros, a tenth of what Dalí asked for. That is, without the elephant in the box. We have made some progress.

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