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DALÍ CENTENNIAL:  An American Collection

Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida

by Richard Speer

    A cardboard cutout of Salvador Dalí greeted visitors at the entrance to Dalí Centennial:  An American Collection.  Fittingly, the cutout was larger than life-sized, as was this entire exhibition, a sprawling, chronological tour of the artist's life and art.  Curated by Joan Kropf, the show juxtaposed works from the museum’s permanent collection (some 95 oils, 135 drawings and watercolors, and 1,500 prints) with newly acquired and on-loan pieces.

    The museum’s warhorses—The Hallucinogenic Toreador and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus—remained in their prominent permanent display positions, but the remainder of the collection was dotted with fresh additions.  These included rare manuscripts and artifacts such as an antique certified copy of the artist’s birth certificate, the newsletter, Studium, which he created at the age of fifteen, and a catalog dating from the early 1930s from the Julien Levy Gallery in New York.  Also of note was a charming, if predictably inscrutable, poem handwritten by Dalí to his wife and muse, Gala.  Purchased from the estate of André Breton, the poem was displayed here for the first time since its acquisition in 2003.

On loan from the Salvador Dalí Museum in Figueres, Spain, were a pair of stereo-optic paintings from the mid-1970s, rendered 3-D with the aid of special visors.  Other highlights included a study, on exclusive loan from a private collection, for the aforementioned Toreador and a print show themed around the artist’s series on Alice in Wonderland, Don Quixote, Carmen, Hamlet, and the hippy movement of the 1960s.

Outrageous lobster-shaped telephones, bejeweled table utensils and flatware, and a work on paper (L’Apocalypse Pieta) made with the aid of a nail bomb rounded out the centennial, offering insight not only into Dalí’s iconoclastic methods and media, but also into the prodigious range of an artist whose lingering import, populist-poster clichés aside, extends far beyond melting clocks and an iconic waxed mustache.

—Richard Speer
(Unedited plain-text version)
 

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