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LENNIE BENNETTFor his centennial, Salvador Dali retrospectives will fill museums.
ST. PETERSBURG - Salvador Dali probably would have had this to say about his 100th birthday bash: It's about time.
The Spanish surrealist artist, who died in 1989 at age 85 and was best known for his images of melting clocks, lived a life of celebrity and controversy. But his influence as an artistic force was dismissed by the museum world during the last half of the 20th century.
Now, eight months shy of what would be his centennial, Dali has the art world's attention once more.
At a news conference Wednesday, the Salvador Dali Museum kicked off what will be almost two years of exhibitions and symposiums in Europe and the United States.
While acrobats and dancers contorted their bodies much like Dali stretched many of the figures in his paintings, local officials and VIPs mingled with Florida's first lady, Columba Bush, honorary chairwoman of the centennial committee; museum director Hank Hine; and representatives from the Dali museum in Spain, the Palazzo Grassi in Italy and the Philadelphia Art Museum, institutions that are hosting exhibitions into 2005.
Taken together, they will present the largest display of Dali's work ever seen. A reappraisal of his place in modern art will no doubt accompany the attention as historians and critics look at Dali's protean output and his place in the various art movements that swept through western art during his lifetime.
His success and gift for self-promotion, aided by his colorful wife, Gala, and his often indiscriminate agreement to let his name be attached to mass-produced prints, led many in the art world to dismiss Dali. And the rise of modernism made his flamboyant imagery seem passe.
"He was really ahead of the game in terms of his taste for virtual reality," said Dawn Ades, a professor at the University of Essex in England and one of the world's leading Dali experts.
His critical regard may have slipped, but, if attendance numbers and gift shop sales at the Dali Museum here are any measure, his popular acclaim has not. After Sarasota's John and Mable Ringling Museum, the Dali enjoys the most visitors of any Florida museum, more than 200,000 annually.
What has changed is where those visitors are coming from.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, about 60 percent were international, mostly from Europe, where Dali is enormously popular. That number plummeted and Dali officials hustled to promote the museum to "day-trippers" closer to home.
Attendance numbers have held steady, but now less than 20 percent are tourists from other countries and 60 percent are Floridians, surveys show. Still puzzling to officials is the low number of visitors from other parts of the United States, where Dali is still regarded more as an eccentric than an important artist.
That could change when two large exhibitions organized in Italy and Spain come to the U.S. "Dali: A Retrospective" opens in Venice, Italy, in September 2004 and travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2005. Curated by Ades, who is borrowing some 150 paintings from lenders including at least a dozen major works from the Dali Museum here, it is the first comprehensive survey of his work since his death. It is so large, the museum here could not have accommodated it.
But, with a $300,000 gift from Progress Energy announced at the press conference, the Dali Museum will pick up another important exhibition in October 2004. "Dali and Mass Culture," which originates in Spain, comes here for its only American stop.
It will include paintings and drawings - never publicly shown - that Dali created with Walt Disney and his animators for a movie that was never made. Before that, the museum is putting together an exhibition opening in January from its permanent collection, taking works from storage that have not been on view before.
The Salvador Dali Museum opened in 1982 on a waterfront site adjacent to the University of South Florida St. Petersburg after the late Reynolds Morse and his wife, Eleanor, moved their extensive collection of paintings and other works by Dali from Cleveland to St. Petersburg.
It is the world's most comprehensive collection of work by the artist.
- Lennie Bennett can be reached at lennie@sptimes.com
The Salvador Dali Museum opened in 1982 on a waterfront site adjacent to the University of South Florida St. Petersburg after the late Reynolds Morse and his wife, Eleanor, moved their extensive collection of paintings and other works by Dali from Cleveland to St. Petersburg.
It is the world's most comprehensive collection of work by the artist.