Dali is my love.
The Dali exhibition was incredible. Jaw-dropping. Stunning. Amazing. Breath-taking. All those adjectives that we toss around until they're practically meaningless - this show gave those terms new meaning.
The museum suggests it takes two hours to go through the show fully. Pshaw! I spent four and a half hours in there, and I would have stayed for longer but it closed at 11:30 pm and the security guards kicked us out. Nearly literally - I was one of the last three people in the galleries, eking out every drop of the show and every second longer that I could be immersed in the environment. To be completely surrounded by Dali's work, his paintings and drawings and dreams and concepts and visions, was the most wonderful experience.
When I first went in at 7 pm (as dictated by my ticket), the exhibition was packed with people, worse than Disneyland on a hot summer Sunday. It was impossible to see anything until you were within one foot of the canvas, so forget about standing back to take in the piece as a whole. People kept forming into queues along the walls, shuffling like cattle past the paintings. I’ve never seen anything like it - they would just stand and stare into space, then as the mass moved forward a bit, they’d move forward as well to the next piece, look at it for a minute or less, and then repeat the whole process again. As you can imagine, this general mentality and the self-imposed queues made it extremely difficult for anybody who wanted to spend longer in front of a piece. Forget about trying to move on to the next one before the line starts shuffling again! People would glare as if I were cutting the line at a bank. Absurd.
Luckily, I am adept at fitting between people (and since I’m short, they can’t very well complain if I move forward in order to see around them), so I was able to weave through the crowd pretty well. The show was set up chronologically, which was by far the ideal arrangement, because it was possible to track Dali’s development and various stages as an artist. Themes would appear, tentatively at first, then repeated with more and more fervour, until they faded away and were replaced by a new obsession. I took great pleasure in spotting the “first” of different iconic Dalinian motifs: the first crutch, the first “soft portrait” (I had never known that the horizontal and amorphous head with the closed eye was a representation of Dali himself), the first appearance of Gala, his love and wife. Some concepts were there all along: the flat, empty plains of Dali’s surrealist visions were inextricably linked to the landscapes of his childhood, a fact that I learned only when I saw his earliest paintings.
I felt as if I came to know Dali emotionally, as I traveled through the galleries. He experienced his life with intense fervour, both positive and negative, and he poured those emotions into his paintings with a rawness that only becomes truly apparent when you begin to see the repetition of images that haunted him, and themes that filled his thoughts. This understanding of Dali’s inner workings was one of my epiphanies during my visit. The other was the discovery that his paintings and drawings are far more detailed than I had ever imagined, true worlds living in perfect, tiny dimension in the landscapes and shadows of the main focus. Many artists add great detail to paintings - crowds of revelers, trees, animals - but as you move into the painting, those small images disintegrate into brushstrokes and meaningless shapes, re-resolving as a badger or woman’s arm when you step back to view it from a distance. In complete opposition to this technique, Dali must have used brushes with only one or two hairs to create photo-realistic detail that remains perfect even upon the closest scrutiny. When viewing his paintings in books, I’ve noticed villages on the horizon or solitary figures walking in the foreground, but they are always impossible to discern at that scale (the entire painting on one page). Seeing the paintings in real life opened up new worlds - I could have stared at those tiny details for hours. For many paintings, I was less than a foot away, examining people only half an inch tall with fully-decorated garments and hair blowing in the wind. When you’re that close to a painting, it fills your vision completely and you seem to be inside the scene in a way that can’t be explained, only experienced. I could feel the wind, smell the rain and sea, and taste the fresh bread lying sliced and crumbling. Most exciting of all, I discovered that Dali had included these miniscule details in nearly every painting, even those that have always appeared bleak and barren in art books. The horizon will be seen to be dotted by a cluster of houses, if viewed only inches away. Tiny figures stand to one side of the painting, unnoticed at more than a few feet away. These miniscule gems were just lying in wait within each of his paintings, and I discovered them one by one as I passed through the show. The effect was a magical sensation of Dali’s world expanding around me, a secret language spoken but only heard by those willing to take the time and focus to pick up on those minute marks, and the willingness to fall into the picture in order to view them closely enough.
Dali met the love of his life, Gala, when he was still quite young and she was married to a Surrealist poet. Within six months, she had left her husband and was with Dali from that time on. His depth of love and her over-arching importance in his life becomes explicitly clear when his paintings are viewed chronologically. She begins to appear in his images, painted repeatedly and always with the soft touch of an artist attached to his model with all his soul. This dedication was beautiful to see, but it also spoke of a man whose love for this woman encompassed more than just the love for a wife - to Dali, she became his entire world and it’s clear that his unresolved agony at his mother’s early death caused him to focus the love he couldn’t express to his mother onto Gala as well.
I discovered an incredible little detail at the show that speaks more about his love for Gala than anything else could. In books, it’s impossible to view the artist’s signature on his paintings and drawings. At the show, his signature of “Salvador Dali” was clearly visible in the corner of each work, although in the miniscule script that he so favoured. Soon after he and Gala began their lives together, Dali’s signature changed to “Gala Salvador Dali” on each piece, and remained as such through the rest of his life. I was overwhelmed when I discovered this gesture on Dali’s part. As an artist myself, I understand the depth of emotion that must have propelled him to sign their names as one, and on his own creations. I was particularly touched because he met Gala when he was not much older than I, and from what I understand, he had historically had emotional difficulties in relating to women. With that in mind, his passion for her seems absolutely understandable to me - and signing her name with his was a brave, brash gesture only capable by a person who saw another as his entire world.
Numerous famous paintings had been flown in from museums all over the world, most of which are seminal pieces instantly recognizable as Dali’s work to any casual art-lover, and even people who know nothing of art and Surrealism. Being in the presence of so many masterpieces felt as if Dali’s genius was a torrent rushing through the galleries, overwhelming us all and carrying us along in the current. I imagine that to spend time with Dali when he was alive would have been to feel the same sensation - of an overwhelming creative force that inhabited and took over everything Dali saw and did. Some of the most famous paintings included The Great Masturbator, the woman with a torso of half-open drawers, the prophecy of the Spanish Civil War with boiled beans, St. Anthony Fending Off Temptation, Gala’s dream with the pomegranate and bee, and Christ floating unharmed on the cross of eight cubes. This last piece has always been a favorite of mine, even though I am absolutely un-religious, because of how the space around Christ suspends his body so that his appearance is one of strength and successful determination. Truth be told, when viewing this piece, I never thought of the floating man as Christ in particular, just a male body, simultaneously fierce and peaceful.
Dali would become obsessed with a theme or image, and repeat it in painting after painting. The Angelus, a very popular classical painting during Dali’s youth, shows two peasants praying in a field at twilight. Dali interpreted this painting as having violent and sexual undertones - quite the unexpected interpretation for nearly anybody else to learn - and used the two peasants as a recurring motif. Later, Dali became similarly obsessed with Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead, although in a more positive manner. When I learned of Dali’s enthusiasm for this painting, my heart seemed to leap from my chest. Isle of the Dead has long been one of my favorite pieces of art, and I’ve never seen it as depressing or bleak, but rather as calming, peaceful, and inviting. To see how Dali had interpreted Bocklin’s images and made them his own in later paintings felt as if he were speaking directly to me.
In the end, it was lucky that I had someone coming to pick me up at 11:30 pm so that I had to run right out of the exhibition instead of lingering. It turned out that the museum had set up a fully-stocked gift shop at the exit of the show, and even in my rush to zoom through and get outside to where my ride was waiting, my eyes still caught glimpses of a plethora tantalizing Dali-related items for sale. While it’s no surprise that the P.M.A. would take the opportunity for additional revenue, it simply hadn’t occurred to me for some reason that they would have brought the gift shop to us, rather then forcing us to trek all the way downstairs to the basement where the permanent store is located. As a result, I had to pass up such fine merchandise as: miniature fabric replicas of the pink satin sofa based on Mae West’s lips; reproduction lobster telephones; plastic lobsters (sans telephones); plastic ants; dishes emblazoned with something related to Dali; a myriad clothing items including various t-shirts for all members of the family, baseball caps, visors, scarves, and ties; vases shaped in the round like the profile of a face; and of course, although I didn’t see them, I knew that the official show catalogues were there and I was racing right past them.
So I ended up saving that $48 that I probably would have parted with, given the opportunity to flip through the glossy catalogue pages and relive the show in years to come. But that’s not to say that I mightn’t still give in and take a quick walk back to the museum this weekend, picking up a catalogue (and maybe even a poster or print) in the process. After all, money comes and goes, but Surrealism has always been a strange sort of religion to me, and always will be.
The museum suggests it takes two hours to go through the show fully. Pshaw! I spent four and a half hours in there, and I would have stayed for longer but it closed at 11:30 pm and the security guards kicked us out. Nearly literally - I was one of the last three people in the galleries, eking out every drop of the show and every second longer that I could be immersed in the environment. To be completely surrounded by Dali's work, his paintings and drawings and dreams and concepts and visions, was the most wonderful experience.
When I first went in at 7 pm (as dictated by my ticket), the exhibition was packed with people, worse than Disneyland on a hot summer Sunday. It was impossible to see anything until you were within one foot of the canvas, so forget about standing back to take in the piece as a whole. People kept forming into queues along the walls, shuffling like cattle past the paintings. I’ve never seen anything like it - they would just stand and stare into space, then as the mass moved forward a bit, they’d move forward as well to the next piece, look at it for a minute or less, and then repeat the whole process again. As you can imagine, this general mentality and the self-imposed queues made it extremely difficult for anybody who wanted to spend longer in front of a piece. Forget about trying to move on to the next one before the line starts shuffling again! People would glare as if I were cutting the line at a bank. Absurd.
Luckily, I am adept at fitting between people (and since I’m short, they can’t very well complain if I move forward in order to see around them), so I was able to weave through the crowd pretty well. The show was set up chronologically, which was by far the ideal arrangement, because it was possible to track Dali’s development and various stages as an artist. Themes would appear, tentatively at first, then repeated with more and more fervour, until they faded away and were replaced by a new obsession. I took great pleasure in spotting the “first” of different iconic Dalinian motifs: the first crutch, the first “soft portrait” (I had never known that the horizontal and amorphous head with the closed eye was a representation of Dali himself), the first appearance of Gala, his love and wife. Some concepts were there all along: the flat, empty plains of Dali’s surrealist visions were inextricably linked to the landscapes of his childhood, a fact that I learned only when I saw his earliest paintings.
I felt as if I came to know Dali emotionally, as I traveled through the galleries. He experienced his life with intense fervour, both positive and negative, and he poured those emotions into his paintings with a rawness that only becomes truly apparent when you begin to see the repetition of images that haunted him, and themes that filled his thoughts. This understanding of Dali’s inner workings was one of my epiphanies during my visit. The other was the discovery that his paintings and drawings are far more detailed than I had ever imagined, true worlds living in perfect, tiny dimension in the landscapes and shadows of the main focus. Many artists add great detail to paintings - crowds of revelers, trees, animals - but as you move into the painting, those small images disintegrate into brushstrokes and meaningless shapes, re-resolving as a badger or woman’s arm when you step back to view it from a distance. In complete opposition to this technique, Dali must have used brushes with only one or two hairs to create photo-realistic detail that remains perfect even upon the closest scrutiny. When viewing his paintings in books, I’ve noticed villages on the horizon or solitary figures walking in the foreground, but they are always impossible to discern at that scale (the entire painting on one page). Seeing the paintings in real life opened up new worlds - I could have stared at those tiny details for hours. For many paintings, I was less than a foot away, examining people only half an inch tall with fully-decorated garments and hair blowing in the wind. When you’re that close to a painting, it fills your vision completely and you seem to be inside the scene in a way that can’t be explained, only experienced. I could feel the wind, smell the rain and sea, and taste the fresh bread lying sliced and crumbling. Most exciting of all, I discovered that Dali had included these miniscule details in nearly every painting, even those that have always appeared bleak and barren in art books. The horizon will be seen to be dotted by a cluster of houses, if viewed only inches away. Tiny figures stand to one side of the painting, unnoticed at more than a few feet away. These miniscule gems were just lying in wait within each of his paintings, and I discovered them one by one as I passed through the show. The effect was a magical sensation of Dali’s world expanding around me, a secret language spoken but only heard by those willing to take the time and focus to pick up on those minute marks, and the willingness to fall into the picture in order to view them closely enough.
Dali met the love of his life, Gala, when he was still quite young and she was married to a Surrealist poet. Within six months, she had left her husband and was with Dali from that time on. His depth of love and her over-arching importance in his life becomes explicitly clear when his paintings are viewed chronologically. She begins to appear in his images, painted repeatedly and always with the soft touch of an artist attached to his model with all his soul. This dedication was beautiful to see, but it also spoke of a man whose love for this woman encompassed more than just the love for a wife - to Dali, she became his entire world and it’s clear that his unresolved agony at his mother’s early death caused him to focus the love he couldn’t express to his mother onto Gala as well.
I discovered an incredible little detail at the show that speaks more about his love for Gala than anything else could. In books, it’s impossible to view the artist’s signature on his paintings and drawings. At the show, his signature of “Salvador Dali” was clearly visible in the corner of each work, although in the miniscule script that he so favoured. Soon after he and Gala began their lives together, Dali’s signature changed to “Gala Salvador Dali” on each piece, and remained as such through the rest of his life. I was overwhelmed when I discovered this gesture on Dali’s part. As an artist myself, I understand the depth of emotion that must have propelled him to sign their names as one, and on his own creations. I was particularly touched because he met Gala when he was not much older than I, and from what I understand, he had historically had emotional difficulties in relating to women. With that in mind, his passion for her seems absolutely understandable to me - and signing her name with his was a brave, brash gesture only capable by a person who saw another as his entire world.
Numerous famous paintings had been flown in from museums all over the world, most of which are seminal pieces instantly recognizable as Dali’s work to any casual art-lover, and even people who know nothing of art and Surrealism. Being in the presence of so many masterpieces felt as if Dali’s genius was a torrent rushing through the galleries, overwhelming us all and carrying us along in the current. I imagine that to spend time with Dali when he was alive would have been to feel the same sensation - of an overwhelming creative force that inhabited and took over everything Dali saw and did. Some of the most famous paintings included The Great Masturbator, the woman with a torso of half-open drawers, the prophecy of the Spanish Civil War with boiled beans, St. Anthony Fending Off Temptation, Gala’s dream with the pomegranate and bee, and Christ floating unharmed on the cross of eight cubes. This last piece has always been a favorite of mine, even though I am absolutely un-religious, because of how the space around Christ suspends his body so that his appearance is one of strength and successful determination. Truth be told, when viewing this piece, I never thought of the floating man as Christ in particular, just a male body, simultaneously fierce and peaceful.
Dali would become obsessed with a theme or image, and repeat it in painting after painting. The Angelus, a very popular classical painting during Dali’s youth, shows two peasants praying in a field at twilight. Dali interpreted this painting as having violent and sexual undertones - quite the unexpected interpretation for nearly anybody else to learn - and used the two peasants as a recurring motif. Later, Dali became similarly obsessed with Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead, although in a more positive manner. When I learned of Dali’s enthusiasm for this painting, my heart seemed to leap from my chest. Isle of the Dead has long been one of my favorite pieces of art, and I’ve never seen it as depressing or bleak, but rather as calming, peaceful, and inviting. To see how Dali had interpreted Bocklin’s images and made them his own in later paintings felt as if he were speaking directly to me.
In the end, it was lucky that I had someone coming to pick me up at 11:30 pm so that I had to run right out of the exhibition instead of lingering. It turned out that the museum had set up a fully-stocked gift shop at the exit of the show, and even in my rush to zoom through and get outside to where my ride was waiting, my eyes still caught glimpses of a plethora tantalizing Dali-related items for sale. While it’s no surprise that the P.M.A. would take the opportunity for additional revenue, it simply hadn’t occurred to me for some reason that they would have brought the gift shop to us, rather then forcing us to trek all the way downstairs to the basement where the permanent store is located. As a result, I had to pass up such fine merchandise as: miniature fabric replicas of the pink satin sofa based on Mae West’s lips; reproduction lobster telephones; plastic lobsters (sans telephones); plastic ants; dishes emblazoned with something related to Dali; a myriad clothing items including various t-shirts for all members of the family, baseball caps, visors, scarves, and ties; vases shaped in the round like the profile of a face; and of course, although I didn’t see them, I knew that the official show catalogues were there and I was racing right past them.
So I ended up saving that $48 that I probably would have parted with, given the opportunity to flip through the glossy catalogue pages and relive the show in years to come. But that’s not to say that I mightn’t still give in and take a quick walk back to the museum this weekend, picking up a catalogue (and maybe even a poster or print) in the process. After all, money comes and goes, but Surrealism has always been a strange sort of religion to me, and always will be.