Salvador Dali's Optical Illusions
in...@wadsworthatheneum.org
artist’s preoccupation with optics and visual perception, will be
presented by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, USA,
January 21 – March 26, 2000.
Featuring 60 provocative, hypnotic, sometimes sinister dreamscapes
created between 1926 and 1982, the exhibition traces Dali’s experiments
with a variety of pictorial techniques. These include anamorphic
perspective; his famous “paranoiac-critical method” that produced
multiple, hallucinatory images within a painting; pointilism;
stereometry; and holograms.
A number of Dali’s famous “double image” paintings will be on view,
including his first ambitious attempt, “The Invisible Man” (1929-32);
“Impressions of Africa” (1938); and “Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish
on a Beach” (1938). Other noted works are “Soft Construction with
Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War” (1936), “Dream Caused by the
Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate, One Second Before Awakening”
(1944), “The Madonna of Port Lligat” (1949), and Crucifixion” (1954).
Dali fascinates modern audiences not only with his highly personal,
dream-like imagery and symbolism but also by his manipulation of
perception and keen sense of pictorial surprise. Like other great 20th
century masters he acknowledged and appropriated the past, even
emulating Old Masters such as Velazquez and Zurburan, but created a new
pictorial language of illusionism, disjunction, and psychological
double entendre. His trompe l’oeuil works layered meaning upon mystery
in some of the most imaginitive and intriguing pictures ever made.
Lenders include the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL and
Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali in Figueres, Spain; the Metropolitan Museum
of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
in Rotterdam; and private European and American collections.
Dali in Hartford: A. Everett “Chick” Austin, Jr., Director of the
Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 to 1943, was one of Dali’s earliest and
staunchest supporters. Paintings by Dali figured prominently in
Austin’s Newer Super-Realism exhibition of 1931, the first time works
by the Surrealists were shown in an American museum. In 1932, the
Wadsworth Atheneum became the first museum anywhere in the world to
purchase a Dali painting. And it was in 1934, here in the Atheneum’s
theater, that Dali first uttered his famous motto, “The only difference
between me and a madman is that I am not mad.”
For more information: (860) 278-2670, www.wadsworthatheneum.org or
in...@wadsworthatheneum.org. Exhibition tickets go on sale December 21.
(Toll-free (877) 600-MAIN or www.museumtix.com) The exhibition and its
catalogue are sponsored by United Technologies Corporation. The
exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the
Arts and Humanities.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.