‘Painters are always zee big masturbators!’: When Lynn Barber met Salvador Dalí

I am a writer, but I wish I were an artist. At school, I used to hang around the art room because that was where all the cool girls congregated at break. Artists have more fun. They throw the best parties, they drink, they smoke, they never talk about essential vitamins or mindfulness. Some of them make money, most of them don’t, but art is what keeps them going.

When you meet, say, bankers or dentists they always tell you their plans for what they’ll do when they retire, some hobby they’ll pursue. I’ve never met an artist who had a hobby, apart from Frank Stella who told me he only carried on painting to feed his horseracing habit, but even he was pretty old by then. Most artists just want to keep making art.

Marc Quinn told me that he had to make it a rule to leave his studio at 6pm, otherwise he would go on painting all night. Tracey Emin does paint all night when she is on a roll. David Hockney, in his eighties, still dashes outside if there is a particularly good moon to paint. Art definitely keeps you young and engaged. That is why I envy artists: they have this consuming passion that will last them all their lives.

Salvador Dalí

In 1969, when I was working for Penthouse magazine, I was invited to interview Salvador Dalí. Bob Guccione, the magazine’s founder, asked if I spoke French, and I said yes (not strictly true). He said he wanted me to go to Paris and interview Dalí at the Hotel Meurice. I had never flown anywhere alone before, and I’d certainly never been to a really grand hotel, so it was all wildly exciting. I was met in the lobby by a short, dapper Irishman who introduced himself as Captain Moore, Dalí’s secretary, and led me down miles of corridor to the artist’s suite. He advised me to address Dalí as “Maître” which came quite naturally when I met him – he was so tall, so old, so grand and so exotic-looking with his wonderful, waxed moustache.

Guccione had told me to ask Dalí about sex, which of course I did, and Dalí immediately started enthusing about masturbation – “Zee painters are always zee big masturbators – nevaire make love, only watch, and some-times masturbation!” He told me that “Every big artist, every important people – Michelangelo, Leonardo, Napoleon – is impotent and this is good. Because if you work too well with your sex, you never produce nozzing. Only childs. But for artist, le libido and le sexual instincts sublimate in the artistic creation.”

Dalí seemed to enjoy being interviewed, and we were soon joined by his considerable retinue, all earwigging. But each time Dalí’s wife Gala walked in, everyone drifted away – they were all terrified of her. Captain Moore told me that Dalí and Gala always lunched alone, but that I could join him, his fiancée, and – a considerable bonus – Dali’s ocelot who seemed quite at home in the Meurice dining room. When we had finished, Captain Moore suggested that I might like to join them both for a threesome at their flat. This was a familiar occupational hazard of working for Penthouse – everyone assumed I liked threesomes – and I gave my familiar answer: that I’d love to, but it was the wrong time of the month.

I was meant to join Dalí for tea, but a Japanese journalist was already battering him with questions, and then a troupe of actors, Julian Beck’s Living Theatre, walked in and fell on the drinks trolley. Dalí said we should talk again in the morning but, as I explained, I had to catch a plane back to London and had nowhere to stay in Paris. Dalí told Captain Moore to get me a room at the Meurice.

So, there I stayed for three days, interviewing Dalí every morning and going to parties in his suite every evening. It was only when Gala started giving me the evil eye that Dalí said he thought we’d done enough interviewing. He gave me a wonderful goodbye present – a conical hat covered with wax flowers and butterflies that he had designed for Gala to wear to a fancy dress ball in the 1930s. Years later, when a Stuttgart museum asked to borrow it for an exhibition, they insured it for £15,000.

The Chapman Brothers

In 1999, I chose to interview the Chapman Brothers, Jake and Dinos, because I admired their work, but unfortunately, they hated me more or less on sight. Jake kept telling me I was “bourgeois”, which he seemed to regard as a deadly sin. He said their work was political and intended to shock, alienate, and undermine the viewer. He once memorably said to me that he wanted: “to rub salt into your inferiority complex, smash your ego in the face, gouge your eyes from their sockets and p--- in the empty holes.”

I went to see them at their freezing cold London studio off the Peckham Road where the work in progress was a Nazi death camp, 28 feet long, which would be shaped like a swastika, with hundreds of bodies strewn about. They had bought the bodies from a military modelling catalogue, but they came as separate arms and legs and torsos which had to be stuck together. It was as fiddly as building a cathedral out of matchsticks.

It was too cold to talk in the studio, so we adjourned to a nearby McDonald’s where Jake went on lecturing me about their artistic aims: “Our work is intensely strategic, intensely non-human, intensely cruel.” There were hours of this stuff and, inevitably, my attention wandered. I noticed that one of Dinos’s hands was slightly, and the other markedly, deformed with the fingers pulled back as if hanging from a window ledge. Eventually I asked what was wrong with his hands. “Was it congenital?” He said, “that’s irrelevant,” but I replied that “surely, it’s as relevant as possible, given that you make works based on genetic mutations?” Jake went through the roof. “How can you be so dumb as to ask questions like that?”

We parted on bad terms but met up again at a party at Sadie Coles HQ in Heddon Street, which moved on to the Zinc Bar. In the few yards between the gallery and the bar, Jake did a deal with one of the guests to swap a set of their new Goya etchings for a motorbike. Dinos was furious and, by the time we sat down, they were already squabbling. Jake started lecturing me again about how stupid and bourgeois I was, and eventually I freaked and seized Dinos’s hand and said, “You have got to tell me about it! You make works about genetic mutation for chrissake!” Jake stormed out but I was still hanging on to Dinos’s hand. He started talking very quietly and urgently: “What you’re doing is fascist! If someone isn’t entirely, totally, absolutely f---ing normal by your rules, then they’re abnormal. I had arthritis. The end. We make sculptures. The end. We are interesting because of what we do now, not because of what we were when we were kids.”

When my interview was published in the Observer Magazine, I got a message that the Chapman Brothers would kill me if they ever saw me again. I took this threat sufficiently seriously to make a point of avoiding them at parties. Then, in 2022, I ran into Jake at Tracey Emin’s exhibition in Margate, and he said it was great to see me. He emailed me afterwards, as follows:

So now I am friends with Jake Chapman. In fact, I emailed him earlier this year, and he replied saying he was doing a sea survival course in Devon. Why on earth? He said he was planning to row across the Atlantic.

I warmly hope he survives.

Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin was so nervous about being interviewed by me that he insisted on lots of preliminary lunches, so he could find out what I was going to ask him. I always think these talks about talks are a waste of time. (My worst was when Theresa May invited me to tea at the House of Commons so she could decide whether she wanted to be interviewed – she didn’t, it turned out.) Having lunch with Howard Hodgkin was no hardship however because he took me to such good restaurants and always insisted on paying.

He also arranged for me to have a “private viewing” of his new work at the Anthony d’Offay gallery. I’d never done this before, or since, but it’s routine for collectors or potential buyers, apparently – you’re shown into a very nice separate gallery with a painting on the wall and a comfortable armchair. The handsome assistant asks what you’d like to drink, then leaves you for as long as you want and tells you to ring the bell when you’d like to see a different painting. It made me insanely self-conscious. I kept wondering if there was a spy camera somewhere and how long I’d got to sit looking before I could ring the bell. Frankly, I wished I’d brought a book.

All the lunches with Hodgkin were good fun though, and it was lucky he was well known at the posh restaurants he took me to because his paint-stained hands and scruffy clothes would have put most waiters off. Also, his habit of bursting into tears. Friends had warned me about this, but still it was disconcerting to see a 67-year old man, with shaking shoulders, blubbing into his table napkin. The worst was when I said I loved his paintings (which I do) but hated their titles – A Henry Moore at the Bottom of the Garden, Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi, On the Riviera, After Visiting David Hockney. I could understand, I told him, that he didn’t want to call his paintings Symphony in Green or Black, but couldn’t he just title them with a date, to get away from these deadly posh jet-setter associations?

Hodgkin gave a little yelp and burst into tears. “Of all the horrible things to say, that’s outrageous. My titles are the pictures, and the pictures are the titles. I’m not just hurt; I’m absolutely appalled by what you say... You have cut me in half.” I thought I’d blown it, but in fact the next week he invited me round to his studio to see one of his new paintings and he was fine. And I do seriously love his paintings – I just hated him crying.

Maggi Hambling

I blow hot and cold about Maggi Hambling. I think her drawings of Henrietta Moraes dying are among the greatest artworks of the 20th century, but I also think that her sculpture of Oscar Wilde in his coffin in Charing Cross is one of the most hideous.

I first interviewed Maggi at her studio in Clapham. The room was dominated by a hideous Triffid plant called Esmeralda, and it was a relief to go up to see her at her home in Suffolk in 2014, where she spends most of her time. She was preparing an exhibition of her sea paintings, Walls of Water, for the National Gallery.

She took me to see the new paintings housed in a temperature-controlled barn, which had been built on rollers so that it counted as a temporary structure for planning permission. They were knockout but she told me off for asking questions: “I do think it’s very important to approach a painting in silence. Looking at paintings is more difficult than watching TV.”

After the barn, she took me to her painting studio which has the words “Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood” on the door and a litter of cigarette stubs underfoot. She was meant to have given up smoking when she turned 59, as her father did, and she managed to do so for four years, but had found herself watching a JCB lifting an enormous bronze wave sculpture: “It was absolutely nerve-wracking. And it was my birthday. So, I said, f--- it, anyone got a fag? And went on to smoke the whole packet. I must say, smoking is so much better the second time around.”

Then she took me to the main house where her partner, Tory Lawrence, former wife of Lord Oaksey, was preparing lunch (Maggi doesn’t cook). They have been together over 30 years, but when I asked Maggi if she thought of it as a marriage, she said, “It’s a war! We argue about practically everything.” Over lunch, Maggi told Tory off for eating cream (bad for her arthritis) and Tory told Maggi off for smoking. Maggi complained that their new neighbours in London kept asking them to dinner, but “They don’t have an ashtray! They made me smoke in the garden! There’s too much f---ing health everywhere!”

She is now 78, still smoking, still painting, and still giving art classes in London. “You’ve got to keep that sort of independent spirit, and keep it alive,” she says. “I feel younger and freer now than I ever have before.”

Lucian Freud

I spent years trying to get an interview with Lucian Freud – he was always top of my wish list, and I practically stalked him. I wrote to him about once a fortnight and never got a reply. Until one day, I did. I’d said in my letter that I knew he worked almost non-stop but that he must sometimes have to go to the dentist or out for a meal or something and I’d come along as a fly on the wall. This was his reply:

I still have the letter, framed, in the downstairs loo.

A Little Art Education, by Lynn Barber (Cheerio, £15) will be published on May 23. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk