The Salvador Dali Gallery at the Time Warner Center in New York City has on display over forty original drawings, watercolors and paintings as well as sixteen original sculptures by the iconic artist.
On loan from the private collection of Enrique Sabater Y Bonary, who has worked for several years in close collaboration with Dali and his wife Gala, the exhibit, entitled "Visions of a Genius," runs until April 30 2011. It pays homage to the memories and visions of an artist obsessed with time and the transformative power of surrealist art.
The Salvador Dali Gallery and Surrealist Art
In his memoir, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Dali describes the "surrealist object" as the "irrational object" that changes our perspective through its "symbolic function." A surrealist object serves no practical purpose; it merely makes material what has not yet been envisioned; the "intent" of the surrealist object is to startle the viewer into a different field of perception.
Dali narrates the "Tale of the Wax Manikin and the Sugar Nose" to illustrate what he means. A King who has a history of brutally beheading young women lured to his nuptial bed is hoodwinked by a girl Dali calls Gravida. She places a wax manikin of herself on the bridal bed and then hides underneath the mattress.
On beheading the manikin, the King breaks off the sugar nose which flies into his mouth. Surprised by its sweetness, he regrets his brutal deed. The girl emerges from under the bed, revealing her ruse to the King who falls in love with her, vowing that he has been cured of his cruel aberration by the sweetness he has experienced. He decides to marry the girl who accepts his proposal.
Dali uses this story to illustrate what the surrealist object is - that which provokes through madness one's encounter with the lucid moment. It is this encounter that we witness in the ink and paper sketch of "Gravida" or "The Woman Who Walks," one of several drawings and paintings on display at the Salvador Dali Gallery. In "Gravida", we see figures of a shrouded woman in various stages of "un-shrouding," her opaque body released in a series of light fleeting gestures. Gravida, through her function as symbol, transforms our vision.
Similarly, Dali's pencil and charcoal sketch entitled "Disappearing Image" plays with the idea of bringing polarities together. A lover peers deeply into the face of a vanishing beloved; each is defined by the other, the one who is encompassed by the one who is not; the one who is not delineated by the one who is.
In "Spectres," the ghostly dead is propped up by the living as much as "Notre Dame," a watercolor and ink sketch of the sublime Cathedral, is defined by the bleeding shadows of nebulous, half-articulated gryphons.
The Melting Watch and Dali's Fascination with Time
Perhaps no symbol points as intensely to paradox and polarity as Dali's melting watch. He claims that the image of the semi-fluid watch came to him in a vision he experienced after consuming "a very strong Camembert."
This soft watch has since become his trademark, metaphor of his inordinate preoccupation with time and the dissolution of the flesh. His ink and watercolor sketch "Soft Watch," places the female core - breast, abdomen and umbilicus - within the pendulum of time, intimating a slow dissolution of the body.
This dissolution is most poignantly expressed in his bronze sculptures, "The Persistence of Memory" and the "Profile of Time." Both present the form of a limpid watch draped over the limb of a dead tree, suggesting that memory, like the surrealist object, serves to startle us with remembrance of time lost. The passage of time is only made possible by our capacity to remember.
If time haunts us with persistence, we can escape its grip through creative transcendence, like that expressed by the dancers in "Surrealist Piano," a bronze sculpture that literally transforms the legs of a piano into the legs of dancing women.
Transformation and Transcendence in Dali's Art
A similar kind of transcendence appears in "Man with Butterfly," a bronze cast using the lost wax process. Here, the young man chooses to follow the butterfly, preferring its lightness to the banality of the physical world.
We are tempted to see this young man as the nostalgic reconstruction of young Dali himself who, at the tender age of nine, convinced his parents to convert an unused laundry room located on the roof of their house in Cadaques, Spain, into his private art studio and gallery. Cherishing privacy and solace, young Dali retired to his sanctuary where he painted and sculpted, producing oil pieces on hat box covers and a copy of the Venus of Milo sculpted in clay. Even then Dali was conscious of the dynamic capacity of three dimensional art forms.
Perhaps it is through his sculptures that Dali speaks most compellingly of the transformative power of art. His sculptures inhabit a nebulous realm, one that Dali has flirted with all his life - a realm caught between two worlds, the banal and the extraordinary, the mad and the lucid - a paradox most appropriately dramatized now at New York's Time Warner Center: a Salvador Dali Gallery in the midst of a shopping mall!
Source:
Dali, Salvador. The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. St. Petersburg, Florida: DASA Edicions S.A., 1986.
Sabater, Enrique. "The Vision of a Genius: Salvador Dali 1904-1989. Galeries Elysees:New York, 2010-2011.
Mary Desaulniers - I am a retired teacher and grandmother looking forward to the next 30 or more years with great relish and enthusiasm. My passions are ...
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