GALLERY GUIDE December 2005-April 2006 This document is posted publicly for non-profit educational uses, excluding printed publication. To cite include the following: The Dali Museum. Collection of The Dali Museum Library and Archives. Salvador Dali Museum St. Petersburg Dali lived in New York from 1940 until 1948. After World War II he frequently visited the city, living at the St. Regis Hotel. His works were constantly on view at a number of galleries there. Younger New York artists saw his work, and he was equally curious about their work. Dali remained open to new tendencies in art, and his painting entered into an Museum Store artistic dialogue with Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Pop art is conventionally Temporary considered antithetical to Abstract Expressionism and arguably such an opposition is & Student false. Many Pop artists were engaged with abstraction. Certainly Dali was interested in Gallery both positions. Key Art Movements Abstract Expressionism is the post-World War II art movement, which shifted the Gallery Entrance center of the art world from Paris to New York. Influenced visually by Picasso and the Surrealists, as well as American sources, these artists developed an immediate, abstract Galleries 1 to 3 visual language appropriate for the post-atomic age. Most of them abandoned figuration, Dali Under the Influence, a new display working on a large-scale where they could focus on spontaneous ways that paint could to complement the special exhibition Pollock to be applied to the canvas, including dripping or pouring. Pop: America's Brush with Dali, flows Pop Art in America began in the 1960s, when younger artists turned to the visual chronologically through galleries 1-3. images and the techniques of consumer popular culture-advertising, comic strips and Accompanying the paintings are descriptive consumer products-to challenge the distinctions between "high" and "low" art and good labels paired with reproductions of the key works and bad taste. These artists sent Shockwaves through the art world with their new that influenced Dali. everyday subject matter. Dali, like many great artists, drew from a wide Visitors may want to continue their tour in gallery 8, array of artistic sources, assembling his own but these notes follow the sequence of 4 to 8 canon of individual artists from which he borrowed freely. These artists are vital to understanding what Dali admired most in painting. Their painterly technique, their images, Gallery 4 and their aspirations helped Dali in the development of his own distinctive iconography. Claes Oldenburg took common objects and recreated them in These artists include the classical Greek artist who created the Nike of Samothrace soft fabric, also transforming their scale and making them into (circa 200-190 B.C.), Renaissance artists Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, 17th monuments, as in Soft Pay-Telephone-Ghost Version (1963). Dali century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer, 19th century Romantic painter Jean Frangois Millet, 20th did much the same earlier in his Lobster Telephone (1936), and century artists Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, and Abstract Expressionist Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936). Dali's essentially Surrealist Mark Tobey and Willem de Kooning. interest in soft objects mirrored Oldenburg's large-scale soft Dali Under the Influence is curated by Joan Kropf, Curator of the Collection, and sculptures. Soft sculpture equally owed much to the earlier Deputy Director of the Museum. Surrealist practice of making objects of "symbolic function." Roy Lichtenstein, in Interior (1977), made reference to a range Galleries 4 to 8 of motifs derived from Surrealist and Avant-Garde painting. In the 1970s Dali's curiosity about facial recognition theory Introduction led him in a direction which paralleled Chuck Close's Pollock to Pop: America's Brush with Dali, in galleries 4 to 8, explores the influential deconstruction of the portrait image into gridded fragments of and little discussed exchanges between Dali and post World War II artists in America. paint. As with the Abstract Expressionists, Dali sometimes Featuring some of the most significant works of modern art, the exhibition includes 14 emphasized the physical presence of the paint, even though he works on loan from private collections, foundations and museums, plus 17 works by Dali deployed it in making representational images, as in Gala from the Museum's permanent collection. Claes Oldenburg. Soft Pay-Telephone-Ghost Version (1963). Courtesy The Brant Foundation. Greenwich. CT. ©Claes Oldenburg Image Above: Salvador Dali. Cadaque's (1923). O Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida. and Coosje van Bruggen. Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln—Homage to Rothko (1976). Gallery 5 Dali shifted from small to large-format canvases in the post-war years, as Abstract Expressionist painting sought to envelop the viewer within the field of the painting. Dali's major large-format canvases include: The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1958-1959), The Ecumenical Council (1969), Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963), The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1969-1979), and Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln—Homage to Rothko the right, two silhouettes of a face in the center, and a waterfall on the left. Shadows also (1976). All were exhibited in New York, and all reflected Dali's awareness of the art of the employs Dali's use of shadows and double images, as seen in the two examples here: younger generation, especially in terms of their scale and treatment of the image. Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1941) and Telephone in a Dish with Three Grilled Sardines at the end of September, (1939). Gallery 6 Chuck Close, though neither a Pop artist, an Abstract Expressionist, nor a Photo- Galleries 7 and 8 realist, addressed the human face as a landscape. His paintings Paul (1994) and Maggie Abstract Expressionism prompted Dali to re-introduce spontaneous modes of (1998-99) make use of Dali's pioneering technique of painting the pixels that describe a applying paint. While he had experimented with spontaneous processes in the 1920s and photographically captured human face. In both paintings he breaks up the face into 1930s, he was best known for meticulously painted illusions. Dali mixed classical painterly units derived from the underlying grid used in the process of enlarging the figuration with the splattering of paint in his Velazquez Painting the Infanta Margarita with photographic image. For Close, the photograph replaced drawing as the model for the the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (1958). painting and this interest in photography paralleled Dali's own preoccupation with Andy Warhol's later painting Rorschach: 4 Times (1984) directly quotes the photography, optics and theories of facial recognition. "controlled-chance" technique, such as the inkblot, which the Surrealist employed. Dali's James Rosenquist juxtaposed hugely enlarged collage images cut out of magazines use of the inkblot, which he called "Decalcomania," paralleled Jackson Pollock's drip and applied to his paintings using a grid system borrowed from his early days a billboard technique, Willem de Kooning's gestural abstraction and even Mark Rothko's color fields. painter. Shadows (1963) juxtaposes images in a manner similar to Surrealism: a tire on Jackson Pollock, in the early 1950s, re-introduced the figurative image into his painterly language, as in his Number 7 (1952). Roy Lichtenstein had begun as an abstract painter, as can be seen in his Variations 7 (1959). As a Pop artist, he took images from comic books and made them the subject of painting. He took art itself as a reference point, as in Yellow Brushstroke II (1965), where the rich brush stroke that characterizes abstract expressionist painting is made into a pop icon. Willem de Kooning, whom Dali greatly admired, provided a model for a form of figuration in which there was a tension between figuration and abstraction, that is, between paint that creates the illusion of looking like something else, and paint that looks like paint. This can be seen in his untitled, (circa 1970-1977) painting, which represents a woman, or the more landscape-derived and abstract Untitled XVIII (1985) in Gallery 4. Mark Rothko's Hierarchical Birds (1944) is an early work of the artist showing the influence of Surrealism. He provided Dali with a model of rectangular panels set against a painterly ground. In a later work by Rothko, Orange and Tan (1954), all the representational elements have been stripped away, bringing the ground to the fore as the "subject" of the work. Chuck Close, Paul, (1994). Philadelphia Museum of Art. © Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Wil den stein. Pollock to Pop: America's Brush with Dali is curated by Dr. William Jeffett, Curator New York. of Exhibitions of the Salvador Dali Museum. Salvador Dali. Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963). © Salvador Dal Museum, St. Petersburg Above: Roy Lichtenstein, Yellow Brushstroke II (1965), Private Collection, © Estate of Roy Uchlenstein Artist's Biographies Artist's Biographies Salvador Dali (1904-1989) is one of the most influential artists of the One of the most celebrated and recognized of the Abstract 20th century. Born in Figueres, Spain in the principality of Catalonia, Expressionists, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) embodies the idea of the he achieved international recognition in America in 1928. He became action painter, "dancing" his paint over his canvas. His work shifted from one of the most recognizable surrealists after he joined the Surrealist Surrealist-inspired symbolic paintings to all-over poured canvases in movement in 1929. Dali and his wife, Gala, escaped Europe during 1947. Influenced by Navaho sand painters, Pollock began to lay his World War It, spending 1940-48 in the United States. For the next canvases on the ground, pouring and dripping his paint in a spontaneous two decades, every fall they returned to Manhattan to live.