Bluette Matthey's Blog - Posts Tagged "spain"
Salvador Dali's Ultimate Dream
Long an admirer of Salvador Dali, I recently visited the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain, one of the most unique art museums I’ve ever seen. The museum was, as Dali intended, a “great surrealist object.”
The museum houses the largest, most diverse collection of Dali’s works, the bulk of which is from his own personal collection. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, works in gold, exquisitely created jewels, 3-D collages … all in a custom-designed setting as unique as the artist himself.
An inner courtyard, open to the sky, displays Dali’s 1941 Cadillac, supposedly once owned by Al Capone. By inserting a coin in a slot you can make it rain inside the car. A large boat hanging above the patio has a multitude of blue condoms hanging from its hull. The condoms symbolize tears
One of the exhibits, which takes up an entire room, is a 3-D set on a stage hosting individual components of a face which, when seen from a peephole on an elevated viewpoint atop a stairs, looks like Mae West’s face. Who figures something like that out?
One of Surrealism’s best-known founders, Dali’s life and art juxtaposed objects and concepts of reality in combinations that shocked, outraged, confused, and stretched one’s perception. Trying to see and think like Dali, a genius or a madmen, is like living in the theater of the absurd.
Dali died in 1989, after living his last years in the museum. He is buried in a crypt below the stage of the theater that is part of the museum.
http://www.salvador-dali.org/en_index/
The museum houses the largest, most diverse collection of Dali’s works, the bulk of which is from his own personal collection. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, works in gold, exquisitely created jewels, 3-D collages … all in a custom-designed setting as unique as the artist himself.
An inner courtyard, open to the sky, displays Dali’s 1941 Cadillac, supposedly once owned by Al Capone. By inserting a coin in a slot you can make it rain inside the car. A large boat hanging above the patio has a multitude of blue condoms hanging from its hull. The condoms symbolize tears
One of the exhibits, which takes up an entire room, is a 3-D set on a stage hosting individual components of a face which, when seen from a peephole on an elevated viewpoint atop a stairs, looks like Mae West’s face. Who figures something like that out?
One of Surrealism’s best-known founders, Dali’s life and art juxtaposed objects and concepts of reality in combinations that shocked, outraged, confused, and stretched one’s perception. Trying to see and think like Dali, a genius or a madmen, is like living in the theater of the absurd.
Dali died in 1989, after living his last years in the museum. He is buried in a crypt below the stage of the theater that is part of the museum.
http://www.salvador-dali.org/en_index/
