Salvador Dalí

Thursday

February 15, 2024

The divine Dalí and his ‘Christ’

I arrived in the city of Figueres early one January morning to visit one of the most popular, and bizarre, art museums in the world, the Teatre-Museu Gala Salvador Dalí. It houses a dreamlike picture that, for the first time since it left over seventy years ago, has made a temporary return journey to Spain. Originally simply titled “The Christ,” the 1951 canvas depicting the giant figure of a man on a cross, shown at an overhead angle hovering over a moody seascape, was painted by the most famous son of Figueres, Salvador Dalí. Through April 30, it forms the centerpiece of a show exploring its creation, history, local connections and symbolism.

Wednesday

March 29, 2023

Christopher Sandford

When Salvador Dalí met Alice Cooper

It was the ultimate summit between the two kings of pop-art camp, and one of the weirdest celebrity encounters even by the standards of 1970s New York. Salvador Dalí might have been the century’s most notorious modernist, but by the spring of 1973, when he was turning sixty-nine, his reign as the high priest of surrealism had descended into self-parody. Paintings such as his 1931 “The Persistence of Memory,” with its array of limp watches set in a barren landscape, had once sharply polarized critical opinion. For years, people saw Dalí either as a beacon of intellectual and emotional freedom, or as a madman who was more interested in money than art.