8/4/10 Two of us from Arts Across Georgia trekked downtown to the High Museum of Art
Atlanta on Tuesday to see Dali: The Late Work. I realize it
isn't very suave to use this word, but it fits: WOW! We were
awed.
Yes, awed. Not just by Salvador Dali's work, which is,
ummm, awesome, but by the outstanding display and well
designed layout of the show. Every detail was perfect!
The High brought in Elliott King to be the guest curator
and he has done and is doing a spectacular job. His
enthusiasm and knowledge is perfectamungo. Yes, we're off
the chart here when it comes to superlatives.
The High knows how to do it right! They also know how to
show off the master of talented surreal, pop and shock art,
Salvador Dali. Where else can you see Alice Cooper's brain?
or walk into a room with such stellar stars as Alfred
Hitchcock, Andy Warhol, Ed Sullivan and the like? or listen
to Dali's mustache talk about the works? of sit on lip
couches?
The High has pulled together art from around the world in
the first major exhibition of Dali's late work. The show
includes more than 100 works including 40 paintings,
drawings, prints and other related items. I got a kick out
of the bag of Dali trash that Andy Warhol asked for and
saved for many years.
In particular I loved the jewel work. Back in high school
I skipped a day to travel to see a show of Dali's jewels.
While only a few pieces are included in the exhibit at the
High, they are spectacular. Be sure to stop in the shop at
the end to look at their Dali-inspired jewelry. My Christmas
list expanded!
King toured us through the exhibit sharing tidbits about
many of the works that had us looking at them in new ways.
I've long been a fan of Dali's, yet came away with a better
understanding of the things that influenced him, and learned
quite a bit I probably never would have picked up in reading
the plethora of books on Dali.
I'm including the official release about the show below
so will not "double-dip" with specifics. All I can say is:
"We went... we saw... we did not conquer." Both of us will
be going back at least once more before the show ends in
January. - Janet McGregor Dunn, Editor
The first major exhibition to reevaluate the last half of
Salvador Dalí’s career will be presented exclusively at the
High Museum of Art this August. Beginning in the late 1930s,
Dalí went through a radical change in which he embraced
Catholicism, developed the concept of nuclear mysticism and,
in effect, reinvented himself as an artist. Comprising more
than 40 paintings and a related group of drawings, prints
and other Dalí ephemera, “Salvador Dalí: The Late Work” will
also explore the artist’s enduring fascination with science,
optical effects and illusionism as well as his connections
to such artists of the 1960s and 1970s as Andy Warhol, Roy
Lichtenstein and Willem de Kooning.
Among the highlights of the exhibition will be several works
that have not been seen in the
U.S. in 50 years, including the
monumental “Christ of St. John of the Cross,” which was
voted Scotland’s
favorite painting in 2007, and “Santiago El Grande,” which
has not left New
Brunswick, Canada,
since 1959. Designed as an altarpiece, this painting
includes Dalí’s vision of the Crucifixion, an homage to
Saint James (the patron saint of
Spain)
and an atomic explosion. The exhibition will also feature “Assumpta
Corpuscularia Lapislazulina,” from a private collection in
Spain, which has not been
seen publicly since 1959.
“Salvador Dalí: The Late Work” is organized by the High
Museum of Art in collaboration with the Salvador Dalí
Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida, and the Fundació
Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, Spain. The High will be the
sole venue for the exhibition, where it will be on view from
August 7, 2010, through January 9, 2011.
“Salvador Dalí at the High Museum brings together one of the
most important groupings of the artist’s later work to ever
be shown, and also affords our visitors the opportunity to
meet one of the greatest artists and intriguing minds of the
twentieth century,” said Michael E. Shapiro, the High’s
Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. Director. “It will be
thrilling for our audiences to see the evolution of the
world’s best known Surrealist.”
“Salvador
Dalí: The Late Work” will be introduced by a selection of
vintage photographs highlighting Dalí’s collaborations with
photographer Philippe Halsman. The subsequent galleries will
include a selection of works that provide a background for
understanding the artist’s development beyond Surrealism,
highlighting earlier works such as “Femme Couchée” (1926) as
well as those most associated with the Surrealist movement,
including “Morphological Echo” (1936) and “Transparent
Simulacrum of the Feigned Image” (1938).
Visitors will then be introduced to Dalí’s concept of
“nuclear mysticism.” With his conversion to Catholicism in
the 1940s, religious iconography also became prevalent in
his work during this period. These themes often converged in
works such as “The Madonna of Port-Lligat” (1949), which
portrays the classic Madonna and Child fragmented and
breaking into particles—Dalí’s way of uniting modern science
and atomic physics with religious tradition.
Also included in this section is the monumental “Christ of
St. John of the Cross”—one of the artist’s most famous
images—which portrays the crucified Christ on the cross from
a striking angle, looking down from above. Dalí described
the image as having come to him in a dream, in which he
envisioned Christ as the atomic nucleus. Visitors will see
this work alongside “Santiago El Grande.” This section of
the exhibition will also explore Dalí’s innovative graphic
works in his illustrations of “Don Quixote,” which he
created in public spectacles that involved applying paint
with rhinoceros horns.
The final section of the exhibition will trace Dalí’s work
in illustration, fashion and theatre, all part of his
creative projects that predated later commercial ventures by
such “celebrity artists” as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.
Included will be examples of sculpture, jewelry, a chess set
and a sampling of the artist’s rarely exhibited portrait
works of
America’s high society.
Exploring Dalí’s relationship with 1960s Pop Art, the
exhibition will include Andy Warhol’s “Screen Test: Salvador
Dalí” and the photomontage “Mao Marilyn” that blends Marilyn
Monroe’s features with those of Chairman Mao, which Dalí
commissioned from photographer Philippe Halsman.
As an example of Dalí’s innovative use of media and popular
persona, the exhibition will feature the 1960 film “Chaos
and Creation”—possibly the first example of video art—in
which Dalí creates an abstract painting using a motorcycle,
popcorn and
Pennsylvania
pigs. The final segement of the exhibition will showcase
some of the artist’s most innovative late works such as his
hologram of rock star Alice Cooper and the 1958 painting
“The Sistine Madonna,” which predates Pop Art by
superimposing the image of the Virgin and Child onto a giant
photograph of the Pope’s ear, which is composed of a benday
dot pattern.
“Dalí’s art after 1940 continues to be highly controversial
due to his perceived reactionary politics, unabashed
commercialism, and conservative mode of representation,”
said Elliott King, guest curator for the exhibition and Dalí
scholar. “Critical understanding of these issues has changed
over the past fifty years, and where Dalí was once
deliberately out of step with modern art, today we can look
back on his ‘late’ work and appreciate its innovations and
antecedence to more contemporary concerns. If we move beyond
Dalí’s veneer of self-promotion or, better still, understand
it as integral to his artistic project, the work can be
recognized as some of the most intelligent and dynamic of
the twentieth century.”
Salvador
Dalí
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), born in
Figueres, Spain,
is one of the most famous and controversial artists of the
twentieth century. He was prolific for more than 60 years,
creating more than 1,200 oil paintings, countless drawings,
sculptures, theatre and fashion designs, book illustrations
and numerous writings. The young Dalí attended the San
Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid,
holding his first one-man show in
Barcelona in 1925 and his first one-man show in
Paris
in 1929. He quickly became a leading figure in the
Surrealist movement, but was “expelled” from the group in
1939. Dalí and his wife Gala moved to the
United States in 1940 and stayed there
until 1948, during which time The Museum of Modern Art in
New York
gave Dalí his first major retrospective exhibition in 1941,
followed in 1942 by the publication of his autobiography
“The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.” In 1974 Dali opened the
Teatro-Museo Dalí in Figueres. This was followed by
retrospectives in Paris and
London
at the end of the decade. After Gala’s death in 1982, Dalí’s
health began to fail. Much of this part of his life was
spent in seclusion until his death in 1989.
Exhibition Organization and Support
“Salvador Dalí: The Late Work” is organized by the High
Museum of Art in collaboration with the Salvador Dalí
Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida, and the Fundació
Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, Spain. The High will be the
sole venue for the exhibition, where it will be on view from
August 7, 2010, through January 9, 2011. The exhibition is
curated by Dalí scholar and independent curator Elliott
King; David Brenneman, Director of Collections and
Exhibitions at the High, will serve as managing curator for
the High. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully
illustrated catalogue to be published by the High Museum of
Art.
The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí
Created in 1983, the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí is a
private cultural institution with the mission, as stated in
its bylaws, to promote, boost, divulge, lend prestige to,
protect and defend in Spain and in any other country the
artistic, cultural and intellectual oeuvre of the painter;
his goods and rights of any nature; his life experience,
thoughts, projects and ideas; his artistic, intellectual and
cultural works; and his memory and the universal recognition
of the genius of his contribution to the fine arts, culture
and contemporary thought. For more information, visit
www.salvador-dali.org.
The Salvador
Dalí Museum
The Dalí
Museum in St. Petersburg,
Florida, houses more of Salvador Dalí’s famed
masterworks than any other museum in the world, and the
collection is the largest in the world outside of the
artist’s museum in
Spain. The Museum opened in
March 1982, with the Morse bequest—the most comprehensive
private collection of Dalí’s work in the world.
Industrialist A. Reynolds Morse and his wife Eleanor Reese,
both friends and collectors of Dalí, spent their lifetime
seeking out the artist’s work and assembling the largest
private collection of Dali’s art in the world. The Museum is
currently creating a new building to protect its collection
and welcome its visitors. It is set to open in winter 2011.
The new Dalí
Museum will be more than twice
the size of the current museum. For more information, visit
www.salvadordalimuseum.org.
High
Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art, founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art
Association, is the leading art museum in the southeastern
United States. With more
than 12,000 works of art in its permanent collection, the
High Museum of Art has an extensive anthology of 19th- and
20th-century American and decorative art; significant
holdings of European paintings; a growing collection of
African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern
and contemporary art, photography and African art. The High
is also dedicated to supporting and collecting works by
Southern artists and is distinguished as the only major
museum in North America
to have a curatorial department specifically devoted to the
field of folk and self-taught art. The High’s Media Arts
department produces acclaimed annual film series and
festivals of foreign, independent and classic cinema. In
November 2005 the High opened three new buildings by
architect Renzo Piano that more than doubled the Museum’s
size, creating a vibrant “village for the arts” at the
Woodruff Arts
Center in midtown
Atlanta. For more information about
the High, please visit www.high.org.
The Woodruff
Arts Center
The Woodruff
Arts Center
is ranked among the top four arts centers in the nation. The
Woodruff is unique in that it combines four visual and
performing arts divisions on one campus as one
not-for-profit organization. Opened in 1968, the
Woodruff Arts
Center
is home to the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Symphony
Orchestra, the High Museum of Art and Young Audiences. To
learn more about the
Woodruff Arts
Center, please visit
www.woodruffcenter.org.
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