Delectable diversity from Dali

[Image courtesy Salvador Dali Museum] Salvador Dali, The Lobster Telephone, 1936.

By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 22, 2002

In two exhibits with vastly different messages, the artist infuses common objects with surrealistic whimsy and delves into the psychic ties uniting love and death.

ST. PETERSBURG -- Hank Hine has been director of the Salvador Dali Museum for less than a year, but two new exhibitions indicate he is already putting his stamp on it.

The smaller show, "Dali Objects/Dali Fetishes," consists of four assemblages from the 1930s that embody "the concept of the surreal object."

Those wishing to explore the philosophical framework behind the works' creations can refer to an excellent essay by curator of collections Joan Kropf in the accompanying catalog. Most viewers will simply appreciate Dali's juxtaposition of everyday objects to create a new "symbolically functioning object."

The Lobster Telephone is the most straightforward work, a real telephone of Bakelite onto which a lobster of cast plaster is attached. Dali combined one of the best examples of technology at that time with one of the earth's most primordial creatures. And in a typical example of Dali naughtiness, you would have to speak into the lobster's posterior regions, the site of its sexual organs, while your ear listened close to the grasp of its claws. Clever, huh?

The Surrealist Shoe is more challenging. Dali was way ahead of today's fashionistas in recognizing that shoe and fetish are ideological soul mates (pun intended). The Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket, with its shot glasses of creme de menthe and dead flies, and The Venus with Drawers, a recreation of the Venus de Milo with strategically placed drawers tufted in white ermine, are perfectly conceived pieces that trump in design and execution many of today's installations of conceptual art.

"Love and Death: Dali and Two French Writers" is a larger, more provocative show. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Spanish surrealist artist created etchings to illustrate work by French writers Guillaume Apollinaire and Andre Malraux.

The documents are what we would call coffee table books today, but of a higher order. They were produced in very limited editions as portfolios, or "suites," meaning they weren't bound but packed as separate sheets into a beautiful box for collectors. Such an arrangement makes them more accessible to a larger audience that would never be allowed to leaf through a rare bound volume but can enjoy the text and art framed and hung on a wall or set up in display cases.

Both portfolios are in the permanent collection of the Dali but have never been shown and probably won't be brought out again for some time because of the works' fragility.

Apollinaire, a leading avant-garde writer of his generation, coined the phrase "surrealism" in 1917. He enlisted in the French army in 1914, and soon after he fell in love with a young schoolteacher named Madeleine Pages. The romance didn't last, but the poems he wrote to her from the front became the controversial Secret Poems of Apollinaire. In them he contemplates the horror of trench warfare, which repelled him but also provided a sexual charge that was translated into erotic declarations of love.

Dali, who was most familiar with the writer, revisited that era in 1967 with his illustrations of the poems.

Malraux's career as a political activist and writer was just starting at the time of Apollinaire's death in 1918. From the 1960s until his death in 1976, a time when he shed his early radicalism, Malraux became a leading cultural arbiter in Europe. King, I await you in Babylon is a memoir-essay that's part of a larger text he worked on through the 1970s. He and Dali, who had known each other for decades, collaborated on the limited edition volume published in 1973.

King is like a dream narrative based on the life of Alexander the Great, with whom Malraux sometimes identified. (Malraux was a great man and had an ego to match.)

The texts of Apollinaire's poems and Malraux's story will be meaningless to all but those fluent in French, but wall labels do a good job of leading you through the stories. And you do not need a thorough understanding of them to appreciate the accompanying etchings.

All of them demonstrate Dali's masterful draftsmanship, even those that critics dismissed as mere sketches.

The group of 18 Dali produced for Apollinaire's poems are more complex and use familiar motifs he associated with love and death. Landscapes are populated with nudes, guitarists, decaying figures and images resembling the self-portraits he named The Great Masterbator. Those illustrating Malraux's fable are more simply drawn and convey more overtly the destructiveness of battle. Through this suite, too, runs a strong strain of eroticism Dali associated with death. Bones are everywhere, horse and human remains.

The images are generally unpleasant; a few approach the pornographic. Should you avoid them? No (with the caveat that some are too graphic for children).

Like many difficult artists, Dali was able to burrow inside his mind -- call it the subconscious, the psyche, whatever -- into recesses most of us want to avoid. What he pulled from those forays could be ugly or beautiful. He challenged us to understand that in being fully human, we embrace them both.

Small catalogs accompanying each exhibition are new and welcome additions.

"We'll still have large, colorful catalogs for outside shows," Hank Hine said, "but these little books document shows from our collection, which we haven't documented before."

Each includes an essay, bibliography, list of works and color reproductions, nicely bound with the modest size and heft of the learned journals found in university libraries. And at $9, they are affordable souvenirs.

Art review

"Love and Death: Dali and Two French Writers'' runs through Dec. 15, and "Dali Objects/Dali Fetishes'' runs through Jan. 19 at the Salvador Dali Museum, 1000 Third St. S, St. Petersburg. Hours are 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday; 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Adults $10, half-price after 5 p.m. Thursday, discounts for students and seniors. (727) 823-3767 or www.salvadordalimuseum.org.

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