FLORIDA: ST. PETERSBURG DALI MUSEUM

June 9-18 2017

At the end of another long day of scoring, we used an Uber to go to St. Petersburg, a neighboring community known as "Sunshine City."

Well, there wasn't any sunshine when we were there. We dashed through a downpour to our destination, a building marked by this famous signature: 

What? You don't recognize it?

Maybe this photo I took of the sign after our visit and when it had stopped raining will help. (Or maybe you know from the title of this post.)

I had to borrow this photo of The Dali Museum from Wikipedia because it was just too wet to take my own photo.  Built in 2011, The Dali, as it is affectionately known, houses the largest collection of Dali's works outside of Europe (2,400 at last count) and is one of only two major museums dedicated exclusively to his work, the other being in his hometown of Figueres, Spain.

This museum is actually the third museum to house this particular Dali collection. The first one was located in Beachwood, Ohio. It's opening was presided over by Dali himself. It drew so many visitors that a new museum was created out of an old marine warehouse in St. Petersburg in 1982. It was followed by this museum, built at a cost of $30 million in 2011.


The rocks in the entryway were crawling with Dali bugs.

Even the stand to hold our wet umbrellas had a Dali-esque illustration.

The lobby of the museum contains what is called The Rainy Rolls, 2010.  Information at the site calls it a "metaphysical joke."  Rather than protecting its occupants from the rain, there is a torrential downpour inside the car. Plants grow from the engine casing and snails parade across the front of the hood.

Rainy Rolls 2010 was actually created by local artists to pay homage to a similar car Dali created for the 1939 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris.

The driver of the 2010 version, by the way, is wearing Jules Verne-style diving gear. The passenger in the backseat, whom I unfortunately did not get a photo of, is a mermaid.

Next to the Rolls is a life-sized beaded giraffe whose mane appears to be on fire. It is based on that tiny giraffe in the background of 1937 Dali painting.

The museum is worth a visit just to see the building. It has been named one of the ten most interesting museums in the world by Architectural Digest and the Michelin Guide has given in a three-star rating. The glass entryway, a geodesic dome named "The Enigma," is 75 feet tall.

It includes a spiral staircase based on the double helix construction of the DNA molecule, something Dali became fascinated with later in his life.

A little background on Salvador Dali (1904-1989) is helpful. Born in Figueres, Catalonia (Spain), Dali had his first public art exhibition in 1918 at age 14. He studied art in Madrid and became acquainted with avant-garde movements, read Freud, and became obsessed with dreams. After his first solo show in 1925, he became a critical and commercial success at the ripe old age of 21. Dali became friends with Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, who influenced his style. In the mid-1920s Dali grew a mustache, and it became more flamboyant and iconic as he aged, as did his personality. (For example, he traveled with a pet ocelot and often drew pictures on checks he wrote in restaurants so they wouldn't be cashed.)  He married his live-in girlfriend of five years, Gala, in 1934. She would be his muse and business manager.

I suppose he was the kind of artist you might not want to paint your portrait, but in the beginning he wasn't too bizarre. He painted his aunt in 1924 (left), and it almost looks like an Impressionist painting. However, the portrait of his sister, painted in 1923, is a little more, um, unique.

The Average Bureaucrat (1930) reflects Dali's dislike of the bureaucracy and the bourgeois. Dali had been kicked out of his family home the previous year, and this soul-less image is somehow tied in to his anger at his father, who was a notary. Not very flattering.

One of Dali's signature motifs is melting objects. The title of this 1940 melting painting is Daddy Longlegs of the Evening - Hope! I don't see a spider and I'm not feeling much hope looking at it...although maybe the winged Victory rising from the melted plane is the Hope part?  Dali and Gala had moved to the United States to escape the war in Europe in 1940. This was the first painting he completed during that period, and it is the first painting bought by the couple whose collection of Dali's work fills this museum.

Dali had a gift for titling his works. For example, he has a 1933 painting entitled Myself at the Age of Ten When I Was the Grasshopper Child.  I like this one even more, The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table, painted in 1934. I'll bet you didn't know that Dali was a big fan of the 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. That is Vermeer kneeling in the painting. His right leg has turned into a table top. That appears to be a shadowy bear in the clouds on the horizon.

Old Age, Adolescence, and Infancy - The Three Ages (1940) shows three paintings within paintings.  The old man on the left is really a cliff topped by out-of-focus trees that make the hair and a woman with a bowed head posed in front that forms the eye, nose, mouth and chin. The nose and chin of the adolescent in the center is Dali's nurse sitting with her back to the viewer, and the eyes are part of two hills on the other side of a bay. A fisherwoman repairing a net forms the face of a baby on the right.

Similarly, there are hidden images in Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940). To me, the painting appears to show a slave woman looking at a slave market that is milling around a giant bust of Voltaire, easily seen because of its sharply contrasting black and white colors. Apparently Voltaire was known for his opposition to slavery, but also for contradicting himself and focusing on practicality.

Look closely and you'll see that Voltaire's bust is actually formed by two slave women sitting in front of a bright opening in a wall.

Just before the outbreak of World War II, Dali had a falling out with the Surrealists, partly because of his extreme political views and partly because of his changing interests. Later in 1940, Dali and his wife Gala were able to pull some strings to get visas to travel to New York. They lived as refugees in the United States for eight years, splitting their time between New York City and the Monterey Peninsula in California.

One of the things Dali did while in the US was to help create the set of a ballet called Sentimental Colloquy.  This study for the backdrop, created in 1944, shows bicyclists with stones on their heads and wispy capes or veils trailing behind them. In spite of his denouncement of Surrealism, this seems to fit that mold.

Dali and Gala returned to their home in Port Lligat, Spain (barely south of the French border), in 1948, publicly supporting the Franco regime, which led to Dali being further ostracized by the art community. However, in the 1950s Dali began to become more interested in Catholicism, the religion of his childhood, and at about the same time he branded himself as a classical artist, moving away from abstraction.

Back in Spain, Dali produced thirteen monumental paintings, almost one per year. They often somehow related to his beloved homeland and often contained some kind of optical illusion.

One of my favorite paintings in the museum, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1958-59), shows Columbus (or is it a young Dali?) as a young boy stepping ashore in the New World carrying a banner bearing the image of Mary or some saint who looks exactly like Gala, Dali's wife. The painting is very large--13.5 feet x 10 feet.

Some critics think this humble monk carrying a cross is Dali.

Hidden behind the spears on the right is an image of the crucifixion of Christ.

I never would have guessed this painting of the discovery of American was by Salvador Dali.

The following year, Dali painted The Ecumenical Council (1960), which is almost as large as the previous painting. The work honors the election of Pope John XXIII, whom Dali hoped would be successful in his attempts to unify the church. The top third of the painting is a representation of the Godhead, with Christ holding a cross on the left, God the Father in the arched doorway in the center with his hand extended to block his face, and the Holy Spirit barely visible just under his symbol, a white dove. The center of the painting is a scene from the papal coronation.

At the bottom, Gala (again) is depicted with a cross and a book and appears to be kneeling in worship to her husband, who has signed his painting by putting himself in the bottom corner of the work.

A third massive painting Galacidalacidesoxiribunucleicacid - Homage to Crick and Watson (1963) pays homage to the discoverers of DNA. The title of the painting is a portmanteau of Gala's name (and it is she standing at the front of the painting surveying the scene), "Cid" (the Spanish hero), "Allah,"  and the scientific name of DNA. The Prophet Isaiah in the top left corner holds a scroll inscribed with the title of this painting,Below him is the twisted helix of DNA.  In the upper center, God the Father reaches down with his right arm to raise his Son from the dead.

A kind of "building block" structure on the right is actually riflemen with their guns pointed at each other's heads.

Don't see it? Neither did I, until I watched this video highlighting the important parts of the painting. 

In 1969-70, Dali painted The Hallucinogenic Toreador, yet another massive artwork. This one is set in a bullfight ring. As she does in so many other paintings, Gala appears in this work, this time as the disembodied head in the top left corner. (She hated bullfights.) below her is a series of Venus de Milo statues draped in the colors of the Spanish flag. However, look a little closer. Can you see the toreador formed in the negative spaces? The green drape is his tie, the white drapes his shirt, the red drape his cape, and the pink field his cap. His face is created by the two largest Venus statues.

Dali always had a fascination with hidden images, but this painting took that interest to a new level.

Dali's creativity spread beyond oil on canvas. In 1974 he painted an iconic bust of  the Native American chief White Eagle (created in 1899 by the American sculptor Charles Schreyvolgel) with two Dutchmen in red cloaks raising a Coca-cola bottle (White Eagle's nose) in a toast to each other. White Eagle's mouth became a basket of food on a white tablecloth. 

I think my favorite piece in the museum is Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln - Homage to Rothko (1976). A nude Gala is looking through a cross-shaped window. It's a little hard to see, but a figure of Christ on the cross is in the clouds. In one of the small squares by Gala's left foot is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Next to that is a square with her in it, looking out a square window.

So what's this all about? The title is the giveaway.  If you step back 20 meters and squint just a little bit, voilà! There is Abraham Lincoln!  Dali did this BEFORE a computer could pixelate an image for him--and he added all the extra symbolism, like the cross-shaped window and the crucifixion imagery.

This painting went on display at New York's Guggenheim Museum during the US Bicentennial in 1976.

The origin of this painting is worth noting.  According to the museum website, "This painting is based on a photograph that Dali first saw in the November, 1973 issue of Scientific American, Vol. 229 No. 5. "The Recognition of Faces" by Leon D. Harmon featured a reproduced low resolution (252 pixels) monochromatic photograph of the face of Abraham Lincoln from an American $5 bill. Harmon's computer generate "coarse-scale" portrait demonstrated the low quantity of information needed to represent a recognizable individual face. The concept awaked [sic] Dali's old fascination with paranoia--specifically, how much of the reading of an image is from the viewer as distinct from the thing viewed. By squinting slightly and so flattening the depth of field, the portrait of Lincoln snaps into view displacing the figure of Gala. Once seen, the image appears at each return."

And why the subtitle, Homage to Rothko? "[Rothko was] a leading abstract expressionist painter who had committed suicide in 1970. Early in his career, Rothko experimented with automatic drawing and surrealist techniques. He studied the writings of Freud as did Dali. By the 1940s, Rothko abandoned all references to the figurative and painted using simplified shapes, color gradations, and value relationships.  Dali's multiple blocks of colors in varying progression of hues ending in a dark perimeter is evocative of the meditative 'color field' paintings of Rothko."

If you only know Dali as the painter of melting watches and spindly-legged elephants, you are missing out on some of his incredible brilliance and technical skill.

Well, time to bid farewell to Salvador Dali.  Here he is posing with a few busts in 1957:

 And here are a couple of photos of him with his beloved Gala in 1959 and one more from 1960:

On our way out (via the gift shop, of course), I did not that you can buy a melting clock. I was tempted, but did not succumb.

Gala himself established the other Dali Museum in 1974, which has the largest collection of his works in the world. It is located in his hometown of Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. It's on my list.