Salvador Dali'
dal 13/10/2007 al 5/1/2008
Segnalato da
13/10/2007
Salvador Dali'
Los Angeles County Museum of Art - LACMA, Los Angeles
The exhibition focuses on the profound relationship between the paintings and films of famed surrealist artist. Throughout his life and career, he collaborated with movie greats such as Luis Bunuel, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney, and created works influenced by Cecil B. De Mille and the Marx Brothers. On view approximately one hundred works from collections around the world, including a significant number of paintings; these will be seen alongside Dali's major film projects.
Painting & Film
curated by Dawn Ades, Montse Aguer, Fèlix Fanés, Matthew Gale, and Helen Sainsbury
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Dalí: Painting & Film, the first exhibition ever to focus on the profound relationship between the paintings and films of famed surrealist Salvador Dalí (1904–1989). On view from October 14, 2007 through January 6, 2008 in the city that popularized the medium, the exhibition argues that Dalí’s personal engagement with cinema—as a fan, a screenwriter, a filmmaker, and an art director—was fundamental to his understanding of modernism and deeply affected the different stages of his career. Dalí is widely regarded as one of the most outrageous artists of the twentieth century and his paintings are among the most recognizable works of art made in the last hundred years. And, as the exhibition reveals, his collaborations with Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney also created some of the most memorable and influential scenes in avant-garde and mainstream cinema.
Always of popular interest, Dalí’s work has been the subject of a number of major retrospectives in the past two decades. Dalí: Painting & Film looks beyond this historical approach to explore his long and changing relationship with the cultural phenomenon of cinema and features approximately one hundred works from collections around the world, including a significant number of paintings. These will be seen alongside Dalí’s major film projects such as Un Chien andalou, L’Âge d’or (1929–30), Spellbound (1945), and Destino (1946), as well as examples of the later films he created himself, Chaos and Creation (1960)—shot on video—and Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1976). Related photographs, drawings, paintings, and manuscripts will also be on view.
Dalí was part of the first generation of artists for whom film was both a formative influence and a creative outlet. Throughout his career, and in many mediums, he frequently referenced elements of cinema: its episodic nature, popular appeal, narrative structure, techniques like fades and dissolves, and strong characterization of its stars. For example, an early series of drawings about Spanish nightlife from 1922–23 illustrates Dalí’s appreciation of the strong graphic aesthetic of the silent expressionist films of that era. Later paintings like The First Days of Spring (1929) and The Persistence of Memory (1931) reveal his interest in filmic perspective and in creating compositions that dissolve into other images and coincide with the artist’s first movie collaborations, films that he co-wrote with Spanish director Luis Buñuel in 1929–30: Un Chien andalou and L’Âge d’or. Other paintings such as Autumnal Cannibalism (1936) and Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) demonstrate Dalí’s ability to imply animated movement and narrative while even later paintings like Portrait of Colonel Jack Warner (1951) and Portrait of Laurence Olivier in the role of Richard III (1955) show how the idea and techniques of film moved from an influence on his work to its very subject at a time when the artist himself began directing his own movies.
Just as Dalí brought cinema to life in his paintings, his fantastical, other worldly perspective oozed onto the film screen. Both Un Chien andalou and L’Âge d’or are marked by the artist’s vivid imagination and his engagement with the Freudian theories that energized surrealism, especially the study of dreams and the unconscious. The films include haunting images—such as the slicing of an eyeball with a razor and a hand infected with ants—mirroring the disturbing anatomic depictions in major paintings of that moment, including Apparatus and Hand (1927).
Eventually, Hollywood called and Dalí moved beyond the realm of avant-garde films. While exiled in the United States during the second world war, he began work on major studio productions. His dream-like vision proved ideal for the 1940s movie industry and on the cinema screen, where total immersion in Dalí’s imagination became possible for a mass audience. Dalí seized the opportunity to work on Twentieth Century Fox’s Moontide (although ultimately his sequence was not included in the film), Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and Walt Disney studio’s Destino, an animated film completed 2003. The famous dream sequence for Hitchcock’s thriller brought the disquieting universe of contemporary paintings to grand scale but in total, Dalí achieved only limited success with these projects. His role was ultimately marginalized to the realm of fantasy and nightmare. Nonetheless, he remained an important influence in Hollywood and his impact still resonates in the nightmare sequence from the 1950 film Father of the Bride and the hallucinatory aesthetic of the 1966 Fantastic Voyage.
The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation in Figueres, Spain (http://www.salvador-dali.org), brings together a team of scholars who will contribute to the comprehensive catalogue:
Dawn Ades (curator, Salvador Dalí: Centenary Exhibition), Montse Aguer (Director, Centre d’Estudis Dalinians, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation), Félix Fanès (curator, Dalí: Cultura de Masas) and Tate curator Matthew Gale (author of Dada and Surrealism). The LACMA showing of this exhibition is co-organized by Ilene Susan Fort, the Gail and John Liebes Curator of American Art, and Sara Cochran, Assistant Curator of Modern Art.
Credit
This exhibition was organized by Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, Spain, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Los Angeles presentation was made possible in part by LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Director’s Endowment Fund. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. In-kind media support for the Los Angeles presentation provided by 89.9 KCRW.
The LACMA showing of this exhibition is co-organized by Ilene Susan Fort, the Gail and John Liebes Curator of American Art, and Sara Cochran, Assistant Curator of Modern Art.
For more information about LACMA and its programming, call (323) 857-6000 or log on to http://www.lacma.org.
Film Tickets & Information: Film tickets are on sale now and may be purchased in person at the museum box office or lacma.org Prices: $6 for members, seniors (62+), and students with ID; $9 for non-members. Tickets to the second film on a double bill are $5 and only available at the museum box office prior to the screening. All films are subject to change and many films are unrated and may not be appropriate for younger viewers.
Opening October 14, 2007
Los Angeles County Museum of Art - LACMA
5905 Wilshire Boulevard - Los Angeles CA, 90036
Museum Hours and Admission: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, noon–8 pm; Friday, noon–9 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11 am–8 pm; closed Wednesday. Adults $9; students 18+ with ID and senior citizens 62+ $5; children 17 and under are admitted free. Admission (except to specially ticketed exhibitions) is free the second Tuesday of every month, and every evening after 5 pm.