Looking at Dali

Posted on 21. Aug, 2009 by Kerry Banks in Destinations

Salavado Dali was a master of surrealism, so it’s only fitting that the world’s most comprehensive collection of this eccentric artist’s work should be found in a surreal setting–beside a power station in an industrial section of “God’s waiting room”–geriatric St. Petersburg, Florida. Just as surprising as the location is the museum’s popularity. On a midweek afternoon, the Salvador Dali Museum (http://www.salvadordalimuseum.org) is packed, not just with curious Europeans, but with white-bread Middle America types, undeterred by the $10 admission charge or the challenging subject matter. There is no shortage of visual delights. The museum boasts an inventory of 96 oils, more than 100 watercolours and drawings, some 1,300 graphics, plus sculptures, photographs and documents.

The price of admission includes an optional tour with a guide. It’s highly advisable, as Dali’s work is complicated. Our guide, Tom, is an enthusiastic fellow who produces an alarming amount of saliva when he talks. Originally from Virginia, he has a thick southern accent, and it takes some time to adjust to the sound of his honeysuckle drawl as he discusses Dali’s fascination with Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious. But the effort is worth it. A far more complex impression of Dali emerges during our tour than I remember from the 1960s, when the wild-eyed Spaniard was regarded as another wigged-out pop star, roaming the globe in a purple cape with a black ivory cane and his twitching Count of Monte Cristo moustache.

courtesy gravitando.wordpress.com

Out tour begins with a painting entitled Daddy Longlegs of the Evening–Hope! In addition to the obligatory spider, there is a limp airplane oozing out of a cannon and a desiccated body draped over a tree, its head flattened into a fish-eye silhouette. The figure is holding a violin while ants dine on its skull. According to Tom, this 1940 piece predicts the key role that air power would play in the Second World War. The work is also significant because its history explains the museum’s creation.

The painting was purchased at an auction in 1943 by a Cleveland plastics engineeer named Reynolds Morse, and his wife Eleanor, for $600. The Morses met Dali to complete the transaction over cocktails at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. Dali, demonstrating his business acumen, regretfully informed them he could not sell the painting without its original frame. The cost of the frame was $700.

Rather than being soured by the experience, the Morses continued to buy Dali’s work. The conservative couple’s infatuation with the flamboyant artist puzzled their friends, but they persevered, braving the insults tossed at them by Dali’s domineering wife, Gala, and paying for expensive dinners that Dali presided over in chic Manhattan restaurants. Eventually, the two couples developed a friendship that included taking vacations together and collaborating on lectures and exhibitions.

courtesy worldgallery.co.uk

In 1971, Morse began to exhibit his Dali pieces in a wing of his company’s headquarters in suburban Cleveland. The collection soon outgrew its surroundings and in 1980 he began to search for a permanent home. St. Petersburg won the bid for collection under the condition that it be kept intact and accessible to the public. The Florida legislature raised $2 million to convert a vacant warehouse into a museum and establish foundations to maintain and display the collection, which is now valued at more than $350 million.

Those who only associate Dali with his surrealist canvasses will be surprised by the museum’s examples of the more conventional paintings that he did in his youth. One, in particular, the 1926 still life Basket of Bread, glows with the translucent warmth of the great Dutch masters. Eighty-three years after its creation, the bread still looks like it just emerged fresh from the oven. There are also a number of rarely exhibited items, including a drawing for a movie entitled Giraffes on Horseback Salad that Dali intended to make with the Marx Brothers. Sadly, Dali’s script was rejected by MGM as too weird.

Thankfully, the museum has plenty of examples of Dali’s stunning hallucinatory visions, the ones populated with melting watches, bleeding eggs, lobster telephones, insect-legged elephants and tilting crutches that caused many to conclude that the artist was either insane or on drugs. Dali denied the latter charge, declaring, “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”

courtesy artknowledgenews.com

These powerful and macabre 1930s paintings, pulsing with sex and paranoia, established Dali as the most famous of the surrealists, an art movement from which he was expelled in 1934 because of his right-wing political views. But the Catalonian’s photographic realism clearly stamped him as a modernist. As writer J.G. Ballard observed: “Fitted with a disquieting light that is more electric than solar, his paintings are like stills from some elegant but unsentimental newsreel filmed inside our heads.”
Dali had a mischievous wit, evident in some of his titles: The Pharmacist of Ampurdan Seeking Absolutely Nothing, Eggs on a Plate without the Plate, and Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket. The latter is a sculpture composed of dozens of shot glasses filled with creme de menthe that are attached like monstrous sequins to a jacket from under which a white brassiere peeps out. As the Spaniard noted, “It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”

Out tour culminates in a long, tall gallery devoted to six of what Dali immodestly called his “masterworks”: massive, religiously inspired paintings, crowded with mind-boggling detail and double images, all produced between 1948 and 1970. In order to paint these behemoths, he had part of his studio floor removed so that a canvas could be raised and lowered by ropes, keeping the part he was working on at eye level. The most famous of these epics, The Hallucinogenic Toreador, took almost four years to complete.

courtesy fotos.org

Head buzzing, I exit the gallery wondering what Dali would have thought of all this. He planned to attend the museum’s opening in 1982, but cancelled when Gala fell ill. After her death that year, his own health went into decline and he made no more trans-Atlantic trips before his own death in 1989. One suspects that Dali would have been pleased by the museum, especially its fabulous gift shop, whose assorted temptations artfully empty the pockets of visitors.

The shop’s array of books, T-shirts, posters, calendars and fridge magnets is supplemented by baseball caps, umbrellas, jewellery and silk ties imprinted with Daliesque grasshoppers, ants and rippling birds. There are Dali-designed tarot cards, functional melting clocks, martini glasses, jigsaw puzzles, finger puppets, and bumper stickers and coffee mugs emblazoned wth one of Dali’s most enduring and revealing statements: “The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.”

Lead image courtesy iatwm.com