One can never have enough insight into Dali. A new display of works in St. Petersburg further plumbs the depths of the surrealist's mind.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published January 18, 2004
[Salvador Dali Museum]
Salvador Dali, The First Days of Spring, 1929, oil and collage on panel. Dali meant to shock his audience with this work, the surrealist’s exploration of Freudian dream analysis.
[Salvador Dali Museum]
Salvador Dali, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War, 1936, oil on canvas. Painted months before civil war erupted in Spain, it foreshadows the carnage that would follow.
ST. PETERSBURG - In case you're wondering, Dale Chihuly isn't the only big-name artist with a big show at a bay area museum. Salvador Dali is holding his own just fine at the eponymous museum, a few blocks south from the Chihuly glass show at the Museum of Fine Arts.
"An American Collection" is the first salvo from the Salvador Dali Museum as it celebrates the Spanish surrealist's 100th birthday; more will come over the next year. This show, drawn mostly from the museum's vast permanent collection, offers a trove of revelations even for those familiar with the artist's work, because of how it's organized and because much of it has not been on display, at least not for a very long time.
The paintings are the backbone of the exhibition. Star billing has been given to Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), one of the few borrowed works in the show (this from the Philadelphia Museum of Art). It is a magnificent work, painted in 1936 and arguably as fine a polemic on the horrors of war as Picasso's Guernica. In some of Dali's paintings, distortion is distancing and intellectual, used primarily in service to his surrealist imagery. But here it takes on raw, flagellating power. A mutilated torso grips, with decaying hands, a "figure" balanced on top with only one appendage, an elongated leg that stretches along the other side to a single breast, above which rises a head with a tortured expression. They're locked in a monumental death grip under a brilliant blue sky and billowing white clouds. Like Goya's great paintings of war, it is a perfect balance of savagery and sorrow.
The exhibition is predominantly chronological. The first galleries are straightforward in presenting Dali's earliest work, mostly paintings. After that, curator Joan Kropf mixes things up a bit more, clustering paintings, drawings and prints that suggest Dali's basic preoccupations and themes coupled with his wide-ranging interest in cultural influences.
The First Days of Spring (1929), which the museum exhibits occasionally, documents his emergence as a surrealist and his exploration of Freudian dream analysis. It's full of sexual and autobiographical references that would recur for decades in his art. At the same time, and as he would continue to do throughout his career, Dali paid homage to techniques from the past, using, for example, the strong line of a central vanishing point, a common device for presenting perspective in the Renaissance.
We're all familiar with The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, for example, but we see it in a new way when it's hung near Future Martyr of Supersonic Waves, a small gouache with pencil, and the oil on canvas Velazquez Painting the Infanta Marguerita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory, all done in the 1950s. Future Martyr, which has not been shown before, is a modest drawing of a man's face that's being pulled and distorted as if under the extreme effects of high speed, about to explode, much like the way things get pulverized in Disintegration. If life speeds up too much more, they both say, we're in big trouble.
Nearby, Velazquez Painting the Infanta Marguerita seems completely unrelated, an homage to one of Dali's idols with references to Diego Velazquez's portrait of the title and to Las Meninas, another famous painting by the baroque artist. It's a wonderful work on its own terms, but the dark, linear planes into which the figures recede and the sparks of light and energy that illuminate their fragile existence on the canvas raise the same question of mutability as the other two works.
Two examples of Dali's stereoscopic paintings are in the United States for the first time, on loan to the museum from the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali in Figueres, Spain, and they're highbrow fun. There are actually four paintings, two sets of nearly identical pairs meant to be viewed through special optical "glasses" that create a three-dimensional image. And they work. In The Foot of Gala, the artist's wife and muse is laughing as her foot seems to spring out of the canvas and start kicking at our intrusion into her private life.
The Raymond James Room is lined with about 40 prints that demonstrate, even more than the paintings, Dali's wide-ranging intellectual interests, including popular culture, classics and mythology. Printmaking perhaps appealed to him especially because it allowed for so much experimentation. While he roams around Don Quixote, the Divine Comedy, Currier and Ives prints, the Pieta and Goya's Los Caprichos, he employs an equally disparate arsenal of techniques within the lithographic and etching processes.
All the galleries are dotted with freestanding cases containing historical documents, books, manuscripts written by and about the artist, and ephemera such as school report cards. A few of his sculptures are included, such as the famous Lobster Telephone, as is a set of ravishing tableware he designed in vermeil with enamel and bone.
A large watercolor study for The Hallucinogenic Toreador of the Venus de Milo, the famous classical sculpture Dali appropriated for the painting, is on loan from a private collector and hung next toToreador. Seeing the study in the big "pit" area where Dali's other monumental works are permanently displayed is a little jarring at first. It is so different from the cool technical perfection of such works as Toreador, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus and The Ecumenical Council. But its immediacy, the dashing, gestural strokes and the way Dali revisits his treatment of the three-dimensional sculpture as a one-dimensional image is one more example of Dali's restless, ceaseless mind that would entertain almost anything rather than be bored.
As an artist, he certainly knew how to entertain an audience. There is something here for everyone, from those who seek more didactic illumination into Dali's aesthetic to those who just want to play along with the visual games the artist loved. Any child would be fascinated with Seven Flies and a Model, a rarely seen work described on the wall label as "ink and fly on paper." You're invited to figure out which one of the flies is the real thing, squished under glass, and which are two-dimensional copies. Yuck, you say? Okay, then how about the double-image paintings in which Dali "hid" a second image within more obvious configurations. Even if you find the concept gimmicky, you have to love the virtuosity with which they're rendered. (Make sure you check Puzzle of Autumn in this context.)
So I say to Dali, who died in 1989 but whose spirit lingers throughout the museum: Happy Birthday. This exhibition reminds of me of a quote from W.H. Auden's elegy to William Butler Yeats: "You were silly like us: Your gift survived it all." The icing on the cake is that it's also a gift to those who see it.
Review
"Dali Centennial: An American Collection" at the Salvador Dali Museum, 1000 Third St. S, St. Petersburg, through Sept. 26. The museum is open from 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 $10 for adults, discounts for seniors and students. (727) 823-3767.
