Dalí & Film: An Exhibit Overview
Surrealist Artist's Paintings and Film Projects Described in Depth
"Dalí & Film" is a groundbreaking traveling museum exhibition that explores the relationship of painting and film in the works of Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí.
Dalí & Film is the first museum show devoted to the relationship between painting and cinema in the art of Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). Presently at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida (February 8-June 1, 2008), this unprecedented international loan exhibition opened to critical acclaim at London's Tate Modern (June 1-September 9, 2007) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (October 14, 2007-January 6, 2008). Its last stop is New York's Museum of Modern Art (June 29-September 15, 2008) as Dalí: Painting and Film, the title used by LACMA.
Dalí's Art and the Power of Film
More than 100 important paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs and films by the eccentric self-promoting Dalí describe the inspirational role of cinema in his artistic experimentation and expression. Film was an influential and fertile laboratory for Dalí's fantastic imagery. He enjoyed weekend screenings of Hollywood's early cinematic comedians Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon. The painter soon translated his enthusiasm for avant-garde movies into collaborations with filmmakers Luis Buñuel (Un Chien andalou and L'Age d'or of 1929-30), Alfred Hitchcock (1945's Spellbound), Walt Disney (1946's Destino) and the Marx Brothers. Both amazed and mystified by film, the often contradictory Dalí wrote in 1927, "The best cinema is the kind that can be perceived with your eyes closed."
Film and painting intellectually cross-fertilized each other in Dalí's inventive imagination. This is evident in such paintings as The First Days of Spring (1929), The Persistence of Memory (1931) and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) in which images seamlessly dissolve into one another as they do in motion pictures.
Dalí's fascination with Freudian theories of personality, dreams and the unconscious influenced his often disturbing Surrealist compositions. This is demonstrated by his paintings Apparatus and Hand (1927) and Inaugural Goose Flesh (1928) as well as the haunting and unnerving dream-like opening sequence of a woman's eyeball being sliced open by a razorblade in the 16-minute movie Un Chien andalou.
The Exhibition in Florida
The Salvador Dalí Museum's memorable presentation of Dalí & Film is amplified by additional works from its superlative collection. These include The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952-54) and The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft which can be used as a Table (1934).
Sources:
- Ades, Dawn (ed.), et al. Dalí (exh. cat.). New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2004.
- Gale, Matthew (ed.), et al. Dalí & Film (exh. cat.). New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007.
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