Tonight is the last class in the Spanish art series I have been giving at the library. Tonight will be Dalí and I know it will be fun pointing out all the optical illusions in many of his works. I also know the audience will laugh appropriately when I tell some of the goofy stories about Dalí. Did you know he once arrived at a speaking engagement in a limousine filled with cauliflower? Another time he gave a talk while dressed in full scuba gear. Who else would carve a fully functional telephone with a totally realistic looking lobster for the ear piece?
Think I should pull out the old flippers and face mask to wear tonight?
I have a mug from the Dalí museum in St. Petersburg, FL that says, La sola diferencia entre un loco y yo es que yo no estoy loco - the only difference between me and a crazy person is that I'm not crazy. Man, is that true! Dalí was an absolute genius. I can't fathom how one paints optical illusions - over and over again. He painted a sea urchin at the bottom of his painting of Columbus' discovery of the New World. This sea urchin represents man's future landing on the moon...and it looks just like the surface of the moon that man did visit many years later. How did he know what it would look like? In one of his paintings he sneaks in reminders of Velásquez' works. In others he has all kinds of symbols of physics and thermodynamics. Then he has unbelievably details and symbolic religious pictures - always with his wife's face on the Virgin Mary.
So when Dalí relaxed at night in his sofa that looked like a set of luscious lips or went to sleep in his comfortable coffin, was he laughing to himself "Look what I put over on people today!" ? Or was he oblivious to his extreme attention getting behavior? Or was his lifestyle and creative genius just ho-hum ordinary to him? Was he totally comfortable in his own skin?
How different is that behavior from today's rock stars who perform in weird clothing while fire works shoot off around them? How different is that style from the people with tatoos covering every inch of their bodies?
How different is that from a person who writes a blog to get some attention :-)
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The lobster phone is the best. Apparently there are several versions of it: we saw the solid white version at the Dalí Museum in St. Pete, while there is a "fully cooked" red version at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
ReplyDeleteAlso, people who pronounce the artist's name as "Dolly" need to be beaten over the head with the 14-foot-high canvas of "The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus."