The Dali

Not long ago we traveled to the Tampa area to visit family and I had the chance to see the Salvador Dali Museum again. The Dali, as it is now named, came to St. Petersburg as the gift of a couple who collected the artists work for decades, amassing the largest collection of his work outside Spain.

The Dali, St. Petersburg, Florida

The collection came to Florida in 1982, the gift of Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, who had been collecting the artist's works since the 1940s. The museum was originally opened by the Morses in Beechwood, Ohio, but within a decade they decided to move the collection to larger space. After searching, they found a disused marine warehouse in St. Petersburg, on the waterfront. Over the years I had visited that museum building, several times, often wondering that the paintings and other works were being held on the ground floor, literally only a few feet above the Tampa Bay water level.
Happily, the new building, which opened in 2011 houses the collection well above any potential flood surge.

The more secure museum opened in early 2011 and cost upwards of $30 million. Unlike the old structure, which I remember as a big, green box, this structure features a large glass skylight and wall of thick glass. The entryway is 75 feet tall and encompasses a spiral staircase of concrete that seems to reach for the sky from the inside. The concrete walls also very thick, to resist hurricane-force winds. Besides being more secure, this iteration of the museum is larger and allows both exhibitions of various works by Salvador Dali but also traveling exhibitions.

The permanent collection of the museum comprises hundred of works on paper--drawings, etching, etc.--as well as about a hundred original paintings by Dali. Perhaps his most famous work, which introduced his melting watches, is"The Persistence of Memory" (1931) which alas is not in this collection but in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The museum does own a small later work that's an echo of it titled "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory," painted a couple decades later. This little painting contains not only his signature watches but an arrangement of solids hovering over a plain very like that in the earlier painting. But now there are bullets, dead fish, and fragmentation of some of the objects, Dali's reaction to the reality of the atomic bomb, world war, and its inhumanity.

"The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory," 1954

Several of the works in The Dali do echo that very famous work. Further, several of the painter's enormous later works that were influenced (according to Dali) by mathematics and nuclear physics are here. These are heroic in size--the figures themselves lifesize or bigger. His "Hallucinogenic Toreador" and "Portrait of My Dead Brother" are two of my particular favorites.

Although he left the surrealist group and movement around the time of World War II, he continued to paint images with surreal content, like "Nature morte vivante,"or Still Life Moving Fast, a deliciously paradoxical title. Everything in the painting seems to have been thrown into Brownian motion, water flying upward out of a floating or falling decanter, a butcher knife floating above the table, fruit flying in from the uppe right corner. And importantly, Dali's technical virtuosity is on  luminous display.

"Nature mort vivante (Still Life Moving Fast)" 1956

It was his flawless draftsmanship and technical chops that got Dali noticed in the first place, and his skills only improved with age. One of Dali's favorite things was

"The Hallucinogenic Toreador" 1970

painting hidden images and puzzles, so his "Hallucinogenic Toreador" (which is huge at about 13x10 feet) at first seems something of a mish-mash of various symbols and images that Dali painted for much of his career. There are two recognizable Venus de Milo images and at least four distorted echoing figures, plus flies, his wife Gala, and a dying bull. But it takes a bit of time until you actually see the toreador, who nose is formed by the left breast of the central Venus, his right eye is suggested by her head, and his tie forms her green drape. There is a squadron of flies over the venus figures in a kind of arcd of light that forms the bullfighter's hat. And so on. This one is one of my favorites. Like many of his works, you might think that this man was at worst insane and a best a provocateur. Actually though, Dali was both.

Although primarily a painter, Dali did many other artistic works, including designing stage sets, furniture (the Mae West sofa), display windows in a New York department store, and even a surrealist telephone with the handset replaced by a lobster. He experimented with holography, and film as well. An early collaboration with Luis Bunuel resulted in the famous surrealist film "Un Chien Andalou," which opens with a woman's eyeball being sliced by a razor. The Dali holds a few of these items--the lobster phone, a hologram, and so on. But it's almost completely devoted to painting.

Dali began painting in youth, and as so many was a realist painter of figures, landscapes and the like. He was inspired by the works of Spanish masters like Velazquez but also by other past masters like Raphael and Vermeer. But although those influences persisted throughout his life, his subject matter became decidedly odd, and he joined the surrealist movement in 1929, and it was the surrealist works that drew attention, especially "The Persistence of Memory," mentioned above, which is probably his most famous work. He loved to paint double images, as in the painting of the bullfighter, throughout his career, too.

"The Slave Market With the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire" (1940)

One my favorite small double-image works is his "Slave Market With the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire," (1940). In this work, Dali has given us a group of figures in the center while to the left, Gala leans on a red velvet tablecloth, gazing at a sculpted bust of the French philosopher Voltaire. Although the photo in this post makes the bust of the philosopher obvious, it isn't so easily noticed in person. There is a couple dressed in old-fashioned clothing with large white collars who are in a slave market, and it's their figures that give the illusion of a sculpted bust. The head of the bust is formed by the arch in the ruined wall. The figures’ heads are his eye and the dark part of their clothes provides the shadows of the lower face. Dali wrote somewhere that he thought Voltaire was perhaps too rational--not an unusual thought in one so unusal as Dali! To him, rational thought enslaved the mind, making it ordinary. 

"Portrait of My Dead Brother," 1963

One of my other favorites is Dali's "Portrait of My Dead Brother," dating from the 1960s. Oddly (and similar to Vincent van Gogh), the painter was the second Salvador Dali. He was named for an older brother (born in 1901) who died less than a year before Dali himself was born in 1904. Both boys were named after their father. Dali was told about his older brother while still a child, and the event seems to have obsessed him. In the painting to the right, he has provided a portrait of a man in his twenties or thirties, the image formed by dots of dark and light cherries falling from the sky. Dali said that every day he "assassinated" the memory of his dead brother. This picture, like the other huge late works, is quite large at about 6'x6'.

In sum, The Dali is a wonderful, small museum, particularly if you're a fan of the great, talented, and maddeningly odd Salvador Dali. Since it's relatively small, you can easily set aside an afternoon to spend at the museum if you visit St. Petersburg. It's well worth your time.

On the left, Dali’s wife Gala leans on a red velvet tablecloth, gazing at a sculpted bust of the French philosopher Voltaire. Before her very eyes (and ours), Voltaire’s face dissolves into a group of figures. Looking closely, one can see a couple dressed in old-fashioned clothing with large white collars. They are merchants standing in a slave market, and their figures create the illusion of a sculpture of Voltaire’s head and shoulders.
The outline of Voltaire’s head is formed by the arch-like opening in the ruined wall. The merchants’ heads form his eyes; their white collars form his upper cheeks and nose; the dark part of their clothing forms the shadows cast by his nose and cheeks; and the white ruffled sleeves of the figure on the right form Voltaire’s chin.
According to Dali, “Voltaire possessed a peculiar kind of thought that was the most refined, most rational, most sterile, and misguided not only in France but in the entire world.” He felt that Voltaire’s philosophy of rational thought enslaved the mind to the ordinary and stripped life of its mysteries.
- See more at: http://thedali.org/exhibit/slave-market-disappearing-bust-voltaire/#sthash.lW1lxarm.dpuf

Founded with the works collected by Reynolds and Eleanor Morse - See more at: http://thedali.org/about-the-museum/history/#sthash.EdgtR4QE.dpuf

Founded with the works collected by Reynolds and Eleanor Morse - See more at: http://thedali.org/about-the-museum/history/#sthash.EdgtR4QE.dpuf