How does a surrealist's garden grow? A show of Dali works rooted in botanical prints is lush with fruits and flowers sprung from other-worldly seed.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published August 17, 2003
[Courtesy of Salvador Dali Museum]
Salvador Dali, Lys (Lilium musicom) from the FlorDali Suite, 1968, photo lithograph with original engraved remarques and color.
Salvador Dali, Pamplemousse erotique (Grapefruit), from the FlorDali -- Les Fruits Suite, 1969, photolithograph of original gouache painted on printed illustration and original engravings.
Salvador Dali, Soul of Don Quixote, bronze, cast in 1985.
ST. PETERSBURG - Leave it to Salvador Dali to take the botanical print, that beautiful but innocuous art of the real, and turn it into something, well, surreal.
The two groups of prints, one of flowers, the other, fruits, at the Salvador Dali Museum demand from us what most of his work does: to look at the world in a new way. And, because this is Dali, to view it in a sometimes discomfiting way, though these works are sweetly beguiling in a way absent in his better-known paintings.
So, while you can learn a lot of things from the flowers (and I'm betting Dali could sing that little Disney song by heart), you're also getting quite a bit of the birds and the bees, the life cycle of fruits, mythology, iconography, art history and fried eggs. The eggs, incidentally, are sur la plat, in this case a sunny-side-up chrysanthemum surrounded by flying saucers. The eggs seem to make the point that an army, indeed, marches on its stomach, even when it's an alien invasion.
FlorDali, the floral botanicals, are illustrations by Dali based on those by well-known practitioners from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, such as Basilius Besler and Pierre-Joseph Redoute. The suite consists of 10 photolithographs engraved and colored with Dali's embellishments. The 12 images of Flor Dali-Les Fruits are lithographs of old prints, to which Dali added his own painted imagery. They, too, are engraved line drawings but are composed more like traditional botanicals without as much of the background landscapes seen in the floral prints.
All the flowers rise from a horizon line in riotous fecundity. In Lys, lily blossoms become sound horns and turntables for phonograph records, while an etched figure below plays a piano that spews water. It's a landscape of cultivation on multiple levels. And Dali, who never wears his heart on his sleeve, carries it in his hand beneath the larger bleeding heart of a bloom in Begonia.
The fruit prints are embedded in less sunny territory.
Figs and apples, both used as the temptations in versions of the Garden of Eden story, are here active agents of destruction, the fig attacking a human figure and the apple providing a leash for a dragon.
Grapefruits, a favorite food of the artist and one sometimes difficult for him to obtain, become objects of desire and the desirous. A halved fruit sprouting spindly legs and a banner indicating her gender scuttles away from a large whole fruit raining fluid on a branch bearing immature fruit, a blossom and twiggy arms and legs. Below is a sketchy figure, maybe a witness to this juicy scene of deflowering.
The overarching premise of all these botanicals is the appropriation of a past genre and, since sod is in the details, Dali appropriates those, too, borrowing from everybody, especially himself. The piano is a central element in the painting Sentimental Colloquy and eggs appear in at least five others, for example. His admiration of Vermeer is clear in the plum-man dressed out in the shoes and ruffled collar of the Dutch baroque.
Dali, never one to leave a good idea alone, took these images of images and created several more lithographs that collage the fruits and flowers into entirely new metaphors and meanings. Flordali I reprises the note-sapping lily, now sharing a broad plane with a kneeling peach blossom which, in its earlier version, is a penitent but now looks like a Broadway hoofer in a grand finale with the chrysanthemum and the plum.
Dirk Armstrong, the museum's assistant curator, has installed the prints in an appropriately straightforward fashion; read the wall labels for more insight into this garden of unearthly delights.
A collection of small bronzes is another component of the museum's summer show, sculptures Dali molded in wax between 1970 and 1980 and sold to a collector who has had them cast in bronze. Sixteen of the 40 are on view, a special, one-time casting for the museum in their original sizes. (They were subsequently cast in multiples in larger sizes, too.)
Dali only dabbled in sculpture, but wax seems to have been a natural for him (what material wasn't?), its soft malleability conforming to three-dimensional versions of the fantastical creatures of his imagination. St. Narcissus of the Flies is a hooded figure holding out a truncated hand in benediction or supplication, or maybe anger, given the poor man's destiny to be killed by Emperor Diocletian and then have his tomb desecrated by soldiers. He was vindicated, the story goes, when fies attacked them. Flies, of course, hold a special fascination for Dali as symbols of decay and death, so a well-fed one sits in the yawning maw of the saint's torso.
Soul of Don Quixote is the largest of the group, the faceless figure enshrouded in folds set on a base anchoring his right foot, a clump of knobs like clods of earth. The left one has pushed off, or the stump of it has, leaving behind its knobs, shedding its mortal coils, so to speak. Cosmic Elephant is a "Star Wars" beast with sagging limbs, a victim of gravity, and both the saint and the dragon of St. George are doomed monsters. His homage to Marcel Duchamp's Nude Woman Descending a Staircase is surprisingly still. The single figure has ascended instead, and the fraught movement of Duchamp's painting is translated into the curving chambers of a shell that is her staircase.
Like the botanicals, these works are all over the place referentially, exploring mythology, religion, literature, history and other artists. Some of the sculptures have the angular, light-collecting planes of cubist sculpture, some the expressive fluidity of Donatello.
Both shows are lighter fare than the work occupying most of the other galleries. But taken altogether, they once again teach us more about the vast facility of Salvador Dali, his questing mind and the good fortune of having a repository for such a singular gift right here.
"Fruits and Flowers: Dali's Botanical Prints" is at the Salvador Dali Museum, 1000 Third St. S, St. Petersburg, through Sept. 1. "Dali Bronzes" is on view through Sept. 7. Museum hours are 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday and noon to 5:30 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $12.50 for adults and $5 after 5 p.m. on Thursday. (727) 823-3767.
