G A L L E R Y G U I D EDecember 2005-April 2006

Salvador Dali Museum St. Petersburg

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To cite include the following: The Dali Museum. Collection of The Dali Museum Library and Archives.

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Galleries 1 to 3Dali Under the Influence, a new display

to complement the special exhibition Pollock toPop: America's Brush with Dali, flowschronologically through galleries 1-3.Accompanying the paintings are descriptivelabels paired with reproductions of the key worksthat influenced Dali.

Dali, like many great artists, drew from a widearray of artistic sources, assembling his owncanon of individual artists from which he borrowed freely. These artists are vital tounderstanding what Dali admired most in painting. Their painterly technique, their images,and their aspirations helped Dali in the development of his own distinctive iconography.

These artists include the classical Greek artist who created the Nike of Samothrace(circa 200-190 B.C.), Renaissance artists Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, 17thcentury Dutch artist Jan Vermeer, 19th century Romantic painter Jean Frangois Millet, 20thcentury artists Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, and Abstract ExpressionistMark Tobey and Willem de Kooning.

Dali Under the Influence is curated by Joan Kropf, Curator of the Collection, andDeputy Director of the Museum.

Galleries 4 to 8IntroductionPollock to Pop: America's Brush with Dali, in galleries 4 to 8, explores the influential

and little discussed exchanges between Dali and post World War II artists in America.Featuring some of the most significant works of modern art, the exhibition includes 14works on loan from private collections, foundations and museums, plus 17 works by Dalifrom the Museum's permanent collection.

Image Above: Salvador Dali. Cadaque's (1923). O Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida.

Dali lived in New York from 1940 until 1948. After World War II he frequently visitedthe city, living at the St. Regis Hotel. His works were constantly on view at a number ofgalleries there. Younger New York artists saw his work, and he was equally curious abouttheir work. Dali remained open to new tendencies in art, and his painting entered into anartistic dialogue with Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Pop art is conventionallyconsidered antithetical to Abstract Expressionism and arguably such an opposition isfalse. Many Pop artists were engaged with abstraction. Certainly Dali was interested inboth positions.

Key Art MovementsAbstract Expressionism is the post-World War II art movement, which shifted the

center of the art world from Paris to New York. Influenced visually by Picasso and theSurrealists, as well as American sources, these artists developed an immediate, abstractvisual language appropriate for the post-atomic age. Most of them abandoned figuration,working on a large-scale where they could focus on spontaneous ways that paint couldbe applied to the canvas, including dripping or pouring.

Pop Art in America began in the 1960s, when younger artists turned to the visualimages and the techniques of consumer popular culture-advertising, comic strips andconsumer products-to challenge the distinctions between "high" and "low" art and goodand bad taste. These artists sent Shockwaves through the art world with their neweveryday subject matter.

Visitors may want to continue their tour in gallery 8,but these notes follow the sequence of 4 to 8

Gallery 4Claes Oldenburg took common objects and recreated them in

soft fabric, also transforming their scale and making them intomonuments, as in Soft Pay-Telephone-Ghost Version (1963). Dalidid much the same earlier in his Lobster Telephone (1936), andVenus de Milo with Drawers (1936). Dali's essentially Surrealistinterest in soft objects mirrored Oldenburg's large-scale softsculptures. Soft sculpture equally owed much to the earlierSurrealist practice of making objects of "symbolic function."

Roy Lichtenstein, in Interior (1977), made reference to a rangeof motifs derived from Surrealist and Avant-Garde painting.

In the 1970s Dali's curiosity about facial recognition theoryled him in a direction which paralleled Chuck Close'sdeconstruction of the portrait image into gridded fragments ofpaint. As with the Abstract Expressionists, Dali sometimesemphasized the physical presence of the paint, even though hedeployed it in making representational images, as in Gala

Claes Oldenburg. Soft Pay-Telephone-Ghost Version (1963). Courtesy The Brant Foundation. Greenwich. CT. ©Claes Oldenburgand Coosje van Bruggen.

Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters becomes a Portrait ofAbraham Lincoln—Homage to Rothko (1976).

Gallery 5Dali 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'smajor large-format canvases include: The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus(1958-1959), The Ecumenical Council (1969), Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963), TheHallucinogenic Toreador (1969-1979), and Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Seawhich at Twenty Meters becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln—Homage to Rothko(1976). All were exhibited in New York, and all reflected Dali's awareness of the art of theyounger generation, especially in terms of their scale and treatment of the image.

Gallery 6Chuck Close, though neither a Pop artist, an Abstract Expressionist, nor a Photo-

realist, addressed the human face as a landscape. His paintings Paul (1994) and Maggie(1998-99) make use of Dali's pioneering technique of painting the pixels that describe aphotographically captured human face. In both paintings he breaks up the face intopainterly units derived from the underlying grid used in the process of enlarging thephotographic image. For Close, the photograph replaced drawing as the model for thepainting and this interest in photography paralleled Dali's own preoccupation withphotography, optics and theories of facial recognition.

James Rosenquist juxtaposed hugely enlarged collage images cut out of magazinesand applied to his paintings using a grid system borrowed from his early days a billboardpainter. Shadows (1963) juxtaposes images in a manner similar to Surrealism: a tire on

Chuck Close, Paul, (1994). Philadelphia Museumof Art. © Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Wil den stein.New York.

Salvador Dali. Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963). © Salvador DalMuseum, St. Petersburg

the right, two silhouettes of a face in the center, and a waterfall on the left. Shadows alsoemploys Dali's use of shadows and double images, as seen in the two examples here:Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1941) and Telephone in a Dish with Three Grilled Sardinesat the end of September, (1939).

Galleries 7 and 8Abstract Expressionism prompted Dali to re-introduce spontaneous modes of

applying paint. While he had experimented with spontaneous processes in the 1920s and1930s, he was best known for meticulously painted illusions. Dali mixed classicalfiguration with the splattering of paint in his Velazquez Painting the Infanta Margarita withthe Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (1958).

Andy Warhol's later painting Rorschach: 4 Times (1984) directly quotes the"controlled-chance" technique, such as the inkblot, which the Surrealist employed. Dali'suse of the inkblot, which he called "Decalcomania," paralleled Jackson Pollock's driptechnique, Willem de Kooning's gestural abstraction and even Mark Rothko's color fields.

Jackson Pollock, in the early 1950s, re-introduced the figurative image into hispainterly language, as in his Number 7 (1952). Roy Lichtenstein had begun as anabstract painter, as can be seen in his Variations 7 (1959). As a Pop artist, he tookimages from comic books and made them the subject of painting. He took art itself as areference point, as in Yellow Brushstroke II (1965), where the rich brush stroke thatcharacterizes abstract expressionist painting is made into a pop icon.

Willem de Kooning, whom Dali greatly admired, provided a model for a form offiguration 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 lookslike paint. This can be seen in his untitled, (circa 1970-1977) painting, which represents awoman, 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 theinfluence of Surrealism. He provided Dali with a model of rectangular panels set against apainterly ground. In a later work by Rothko, Orange and Tan (1954), all the representationalelements have been stripped away, bringing the ground to the fore as the "subject" of thework.

Pollock to Pop: America's Brush with Dali is curated by Dr. William Jeffett, Curatorof Exhibitions of the Salvador Dali Museum.

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 the20th century. Born in Figueres, Spain in the principality of Catalonia,he achieved international recognition in America in 1928. He becameone of the most recognizable surrealists after he joined the Surrealistmovement in 1929. Dali and his wife, Gala, escaped Europe duringWorld War It, spending 1940-48 in the United States. For the nexttwo decades, every fall they returned to Manhattan to live. In 1974,Dali opened his Museum-the Teatro Museo Dali-in Figueres, Spain.

Cluck Close (b. 1940} creates gridded, large-scale portraits basedon photographs. While the final portrait reads clearly from adistance, up close each cell is an abstract creation. Often Closereturns to the same photo to recreate the portrait using differentmaterials and techniques. In 1988, he became a quadriplegic, yet hehas found ways to continue his work.

Willem de Kooning (1904-1987} came to America from Rotterdam in 1926as a stowaway. De Kooning shocked the art world with his series of violent,large-scale portraits of women, presenting identifiable figures at a timewhen other artists embraced abstraction. In these representational works,the subject is taken over by the application of paint. His later work movedtowards more abstract compositions.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) one of the founders of Pop art, adapted Bendayprinting dots to the arena of fine art. He stenciled the dots on a grand scale tocreate ironic, pulp-oriented cartoon images, choosing such subjects as MickeyMouse and romance characters, often including the lettering and speechballoons of cartoons. Later, Lichtenstein applied Benday dots to imagesassociated with "high art" including Surrealism, and even gestural painting.

Master of humor and irony, Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) is a Popsculptor. His early work was a response to manufactured society:large vinyl objects of commonplace items such as hamburgers,pay phones, and light switches. In the mid 1960s he begancreating startling public "Colossal Monuments" of such simpleobjects as clothespins, spoons with cherries and bent screws.

Photo Credits, above, top to bottom:Ron Gerelli.Sa/vador Dal/11951) ©Ron GereMi/Mutton Archive .'Getty ImagesLaura Miller. Chuck Close working in his studio -SChuc-i Close, courtesy Pace W ktersstein. New YorkHans Namuth, Willem de Kooning j'964). £1991 Hans f̂ amuth Estate. Courtesy center fty Creative Photography, University of ArizonaMalcom Kirk, Boy LicMsnsflen 1^965) ©Mataom KirkHay Fisher, Coosje van Bniggen and Claes Oldenburg |199D|. ©Ray Fisher.' Time & Lifs Pictures/Getty Images

One of the most celebrated and recognized of the AbstractExpressionists, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) embodies the idea of theaction painter, "dancing" his paint over his canvas. His work shifted fromSurrealist-inspired symbolic paintings to all-over poured canvases in1947. Influenced by Navaho sand painters, Pollock began to lay hiscanvases on the ground, pouring and dripping his paint in a spontaneousyet controlled "dance" over the entire canvas. He shocked the art worldby returning to figurative painting in the last years of his life.

James Rosenquist (b.1933) began his career painting billboards while studyingart in Minnesota and New York. By 1960 his work was included in a number ofgroundbreaking group exhibitions that established Pop art as a movement. Heachieved international acclaim with his room-scale painting, F-111 (1965),developing a collagist style of placing unrelated objects in radically differentscale adjacent to one another. He works and lives in Aripeka, Florida.

Mark Rothko (1903-1970) created monumental vertical canvasesfeaturing rectangles of luminous floating color. Rothko's familyimmigrated from Latvia to Portland in 1913. His work was associatedwith the Color Field painting movement of the 1960s, but he never felt hewas a colorist, but rather a painter of heroic and tragic emotions thatcould only be represented through all-over arrangements of envelopingcolor. He completed a major project of 14 paintings for a modern chapeiin Houston, Texas (now known as the Rothko Chapel).

Perhaps the true personification of Pop art, Andy Warhol (1928-1987)made his personality as important as his art. His art career began in1960 when he began painting his iconic Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and such American icons as Mickey Mouse. Warhol'sambitions led to the Factory, his studio where he produced over 2,000works between 1962 and 1964. At the Factory, he presided over a largecircle of people, directing them to create everything from paintings tohappenings. Surviving a gun attack in 1968, he became more withdrawn.He began publishing interview magazine, painting commissionedportraits and was soon involved in the Manhattan club scene.

Photo Credits, above, top to bottom:Hans Namuth. Jackson Pollock painting "One: Number 13, 19SO,' as Lee Krasner looks on. ©Estate of Hans Namutfi. courtesy Pol lock- KrasnerHouse ara Study center, Eas: Haippton, New York. USARosonquist Painting a Billboard in Times Square, New Yor* ic 19531,Mart: Rothko. ic 1945). E2005 KalB RothKo P<izel aixf Christocher RothkcAndy Warttot with Mao Image, 1974

Temporary /Student Gallery

Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Exhibition

Februarys - 19, 2006Juried art show featuring work by Pineilas

County students selected for the national

Scholastic Arts and Writing Competition.

Organized by the St. Petersburg Festival of

States.

Student Surrealist Art Exhibit 2006

February 24- April 9, 2006

Annual Dali Museum-sponsored exhibition

featuring juried selection of 85 works by Pineilas

County middle and high school students based

on the themes of Surrealism, dreams and

fantasy. Organized by the Salvador Dais Museum.

Dali Illustrates Wagner's 'Tristan and Iseult'

April 14 2006 - January 29, 2007

This exhibition consists of the 1970 suite of 21

engravings that illustrate the famous opera, a

lithograph of a 1939 watercolor costume design

published in 1970, and an experimental

lithograph from 1972 that utilizes the optical

plastic Rowlux.

Events

Progress EnergyThe Salvador Dali Museum's exhibition Pollock toPop: America's Brush with Dali is sponsored byProgress Energy.

The Salvador Dali Museum is sponsored in part by thePineilas County Arts Council, the City of St.Petersburg, the State of Fiorida. Department of State,Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Florida ArtsCouncil.

Weekly Events:

Saturdays at 9:45 am: Tour suitable for families

with children ages 6 to 12.

Saturdays 11:00 am - 4:30 pm: Hands-on

activities for kids and their parents in theTemporary/Student Gallery.

Thursdays at 2 pm: art® 2 films featuring art

documentaries shown in the Temporary

/Student Gallery

First & Third Thursdays at 6 pm: Dali' & Beyond

Film series featuring films shown in the

Temporary/Student Gallery.

Monthly Events:First Wednesday month: Coffee with a Dali

Curator features coffee at 9:45 followed by

themed Gallery walks.

Saturday- date varies each month: Breakfast

with Dali from 9:00 - 11:00 am interactive tour

for children and their families followed by a

breakfast with the docent. Pre-registration is

required.

Special Events

For a detailed and current list of these special

events please visit our website:

www.salvadordalimuseum.org or ask a staff

member for a current Calendar of Events.

Salvador Dali Museum1000 Third Street South

St. Petersburg, Florida 33701

727-823-37671-800-442-3254

www.salvadordalimuseum.org