Hello Dali!

Saturday, July 20, 2019

Hello Dali!

Salvador Dali - the surrealist guy who painted melting clocks. And he liked to do different things with his mustache. That was pretty much all I knew about him until we went to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg this past week.

The museum houses a painting he did when he was only 10 years old, a self-portrait he did at 17 and numerous works from when he was a young man in addition to much later works. Since he was born in 1904, he lived through both world wars but the second war greatly affected him, which shows in his paintings.

I'm sure the story of his wife Gala was just touched on and glossed over. It appears she left her husband and child immediately upon meeting Dali and never left his side again. She was older than he and became his business manager. He signed many of his paintings with both his and her name. There are probably some fascinating tales in there if one chose to dig into them.

But enough scandal, back to the art. There were two master work paintings that I found particularly impressive. The first, Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea - which when viewed from a distance becomes a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. It just makes you wonder "how'd he do that?"

The second, The Hallucinogenic Toreador, is one that is extremely rich in details that I would have missed if the docent hadn't pointed them out. Hard to miss Venus de Milo, but I could easily have missed the matador, the bull and the dog and I wouldn't have known why the flies were there. It made me go back through some of the other works and look for those types of details.

Here are some photos of some other works that struck my fancy, including some bronzes, one of which was made into a full size sculpture for the garden.