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Art

Beyond Dali

A new exhibit at St. Petersburg’s Salvador Dali Museum encompasses a century of Spanish art and its influence.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published May 11, 2006

For two years, the Salvador Dali Museum has intensified its focus on raising the profile of its eponymous artist in the international art world, which often marginalized Dali. Collaborations with major museums have produced impressive retrospectives of the Spanish surrealist that have invited fresh appraisals of his contributions to 20th century art.

Now the museum presents an exhibition making a broader case for a century of Spanish artists and their collective influence on 20th and 21st century art.

It’s splendid, massive, somewhat eccentric. And a bold move for the Dali Museum. Most of the several hundred thousand annual visitors are out-of-towners who come to see the most comprehensive collection of works by Dali in the world. About one-third of what’s usually on view has been stored to make room for about 90 borrowed works by other artists. Forty-one paintings by Dali are still up, including his monumental ones, interspersed with art by other Spanish artists.

I hope no one is disappointed; they shouldn’t be. It’s full — stuffed, really — with big names, bracketed by Pablo Picasso’s 1909 bronze Head of a Woman (Fernande) and War? Why?, a contemporary aluminum sculpture by

Jaume Plensa , the artist who recently unveiled the celebrated Crown Fountain in Chicago’s new Millennium Park.

Informative but not overly long wall texts walk us through the progression of movements, beginning with the heady days in early 20th century Paris when it brimmed with European artists. Picasso and Juan Gris , Spanish transplants, were making names for themselves, and we see examples of their forays into cubism along with other Spanish artists, many of whom remained in Spain during the prewar years and worked in comparative isolation.

An early painting by 25-year-old Joan Miro, before he went to Paris, illustrates the importance of that urban milieu. Portrait of Heriberto Casany  looks back to Van Gogh for its inspiration rather than hinting at the poetic visual language Miro developed once he hit France that would align him with the surrealists even though his work was far different from Dali’s.

The Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939 , devastated the country physically and psychologically. An event that resonated internationally was the bombing of Guernica, a Basque town, by the Germans with the approval of Gen. Francisco Franco, who was leading a rebellion against the government. Thousands of civilians were killed.

Spanish artists living in France responded, most notably Picasso, whose monumental Guernica is considered one of the greatest paintings in Western art, a devastating reproach to war and its horrors.

Guernica, alas, is not part of this exhibition, but a series of small etchings and aquatints, based on the mural’s figures, is.

The war was followed by Franco’s 40-year dictatorship. Picasso never returned to Spain because of that. Dali did, with great success, by ingratiating himself to Franco, which must have rankled many of his peers who worked in a repressive climate. Their interpretations of abstract expressionism, primarily an American movement given traction by European artists who fled during World War II, are somber and moving. And decidedly Spanish. You might have difficulty connecting Goya’s powerful depictions of human misery with abstract slashes of dark paint. Yet Jose

Guerrero’s  use of sunny yellows to mitigate a deep black references Goya’s stubborn, fierce and definitely qualified optimism, a quality that seems to trail through centuries of art from the Iberian Peninsula.

It’s important to recognize that Spain is really several cultures that mostly coexist peacefully but cling to their own distinct territorial imperatives. As Plensa  said in an interview at the museum, there are at least four Spanish languages, and those cultural distinctions sometimes seep into art.

In the 1970s, art coming out of Spain sometimes reflected the pop movement’s cult of appropriation, but it had an earnestness, almost a heavy hand, its American counterparts lacked. That’s understandable, since Spain was still in Franco’s grip (he died in 1975). That era still produced some surprisingly fresh conceptual art, such as Pere Noguera’s  Canon Packing Material Made in Japan, a witty double-entendre using real and photographic images of packing strips that also look like noodles. But most of it, plucky and bold as it tries to be, seems to drift dispiritedly.

You turn a corner in the museum and come upon a prodigious display of contemporary art that announces itself like a detonated explosive. After years of wandering in an aesthetic desert, Spanish art has found its place again, in works as varied as Plensa’s Tattoo III and Perejaume’s Altarpiece: Girona Township Theater. Generalizations about such variety is a bad idea, but these artists seem to share an uncanny sense of the beautiful, a quality too often disavowed in contemporary art.

Tattoo, a sculpture of a man in a meditative pose, is massive, more than 7 feet tall. Unlike stone or metal sculptures, this one is translucent resin that glows with changing colors projected from inside his body. His skin is corrugated with words. It’s a manipulation of the cliches we have about people — seeing through them, seeing into them, looking skin deep, wearing one’s heart on the sleeve, or in this case, on one’s nose, cheek and thigh. It’s both lyrical and grounded.

Altarpiece is a series of panels with mirrors on one side and photographs on the other that shows a progression of views inside and outside a theater. As we flip the mirrors, we get fragmented reflections of the photographed view, itself a fragment and a re-creation of the real thing. Its theatrical subject is also about creating illusions.

The contemporary art could stand on its own as an exhibition, which is a problem, if such an embarrassment of riches could ever be a problem. By the time you get to it, you may be tempted, especially if you have detoured into the Raymond James Community Room, where several fine videos are looping, to exit too quickly.

Please don’t.

For all its density, this is a remarkably coherent and thoughtful exhibition, ambitious but not overreaching.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com.

 IF YOU GO
“Salvador Dali and a Century of Art From Spain: Picasso to Plensa” is at the Salvador Dali Museum, 1000 Third St. S, St. Petersburg, through June 30. Hours are 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday (open until 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday) and noon to 5:30 p.m. Sunday. Adults $14, discounts for others. After 5 p.m. Thursday, general admission is $5. (727) 823-6767 or
www.salvadordalimuseum.org.  

[Last modified May 11, 2006, 07:11:52]