Surrealist and classic" at the Faberge Museum. Exhibition "Salvador Dali

SALVADOR DALI. SURREALIST AND CLASSIC

Faberge Museum in St. Petersburg

On March 31, 2017, the Faberge Museum will host the opening of the exhibition “Salvador Dali. Surrealist and classic. For the first time in St. Petersburg, such a large-scale exposition will be shown, including more than 150 paintings and graphic works by Dali, provided by the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation in Figueres (Catalonia, Spain), as well as other museum and private collections. The exhibition allows you to trace the artist's creative path, from the surrealist works of the 1930s that made him famous to his appeals to the subjects of classical European art in the 1980s. Particular emphasis is placed on Salvador Dali's comprehension of the heritage of the geniuses of the Italian Renaissance - Michelangelo and Cellini, as well as Dante's "Divine Comedy".

Salvador Dali, one of the main artists who determined the development of art of the 20th century, was infinitely paradoxical, like the 20th century itself. Instantly recognizable and unlike anyone else, he forever entered not only the history of fine art, but also the history of design, fashion, theater, cinema and literature. He managed to reflect in his work almost all the great ideas and contradictions of his time. The exhibition at the Faberge Museum provides an opportunity to touch the wonderful diversity of Dali's work, and to feel the inner relationship of modernism and classics, contained in his works.

The earliest works presented at the exhibition are surreal landscapes from 1934-1937. Dali depicts the desert landscapes of Ampurdana and introduces various figures and elements into them. Their mysterious combinations are reminiscent of dreams, and perhaps reveal to us the content of the unconscious artist, which he, through his "paranoid-critical method", releases from the yoke of logic and reason and transfers to painting.

The exhibition will feature one of the most interesting works of this period - "Landscape with mysterious elements" (1934) - a recent and record-breaking acquisition of the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, it was bought from a private collector in 2011. In this work, Dali originally quotes the famous masterpiece "The Art of Painting" by Vermeer. Dali admired the personality and work of the Dutch painter throughout his life, put him in first place in his scandalous comparative table of the importance of artists and even called him a "comprehensive surrealist." Paying tribute to his "mentor", Dali often depicted Vermeer in his paintings. So in the "Landscape with mysterious elements" he places him in the foreground of the Ampurdan Valley, permeated with amazing, unearthly light, and himself, still a child, dressed in a sailor's costume, accompanied by a nanny - somewhere far away. Fragments of reality - the sky, cypress trees, the ideal Ampurdan village of Portlligat - side by side in the picture with ghosts, shadows and fantastic nameless forms, giving the widest field for interpretation.

These and other iconic surrealistic images will continue to appear constantly in Dali's work, but over time they will begin to change their meaning. In the painting “In Search of the Fourth Dimension”, painted much later, in 1979, during the period of the artist’s active experiments with stereoscopic and holographic images, which can help find the third and fourth dimensions, and therefore, according to Dali’s logic, allow us to gain immortality, we again see its symbolism - white tunics, bread, cypresses, soft watches, but in a completely different context. In an attempt to unite space and time, Dali combines his own imagery with quotations from the canonical works of the Renaissance - Raphael's The School of Athens and Perugino's Handing over the Keys to the Apostle Peter. However, in itself, interest in classical European painting appears in Dali much earlier.

Immediately after his break with the surrealists and further, in the early 1940s, Dali proclaims a return to classicism and defends the values of the Renaissance. The broad intellectual and creative interests of the artist do not fit into any of the current trends of that time, and really remind of the humanism of the Renaissance. In 1945, he creates a series of illustrations for the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, one of the most famous representatives of the Florentine Renaissance. Dali freely interprets Cellini's text, providing maximum opportunities for his imagination. These illustrations, done in watercolor and ink on paper, will be shown at an exhibition at the Faberge Museum.

Another large-scale project of Dali, aimed at comprehending the monuments of classical European art and literature, is his series of illustrations for the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, ordered to him on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante by the State Polygraphic Institute of Italy. Dali began this work in 1950 in the coastal village of Cadaqués and completed it two years later with 102 illustrations in various techniques, using watercolor, gouache, sanguine and ink. Between 1959 and 1963, 100 of them were reproduced using the photogravure technique. All 100 illustrations included in the final series, which have now become textbooks, can be seen at the exhibition.

The exhibition will also feature paintings made by Salvador Dali in the early 1980s and dedicated to another great master of the Renaissance - Michelangelo Buonarotti. Working with the subjects of Michelangelo, Dali shows great respect for tradition and the past, but at the same time does not hide his desire to surpass them through constant innovation and immersion in modernity. Several of these works were shown to the public for the first time only last year at a thematic exhibition in Italy, and they will come to Russia for the first time. These works lift the veil over the little-studied last years of Dali's life. The death of his only and dearly beloved wife and muse Gala (Elena Dyakonova) in June 1982 becomes a strong blow for him and makes him think more and more about the other world. Dali has a passionate interest in the theme of immortality and writes a number of works in which he interprets the classical images of Michelangelo with the same irrepressible fantasy characteristic of him. In the famous work “Geological Echo. Pieta (1982) Dali embeds the figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ in the rocky landscape of the Gulf of Cadaqués, as if trying to find the divine in the earthly. And in a kind of artistic testament "Based on Michelangelo's "Head of Giuliano Medici"" (1982), the artist combines all the symbols and techniques characteristic of him at different stages - the beauty of the classical profile, a mysterious, surreal landscape filled with strange figures, uses the effect of optical illusion, as if summing up your creative endeavors. He also creates a whole series of works in which the images of the Medici Tomb, decorating the chapel of the dynasty of the main patrons of the Renaissance, become a majestic memorial for Gala and himself and grant them immortality, at least in the dimension of world art.

The exhibition is organized by the Link of Times Cultural and Historical Foundation and the Faberge Museum (Russia) in partnership with the Salvador Dali Gala Foundation (Catalonia, Spain). The coordinator of the exhibition is Mondo Mostre (Italy). Exhibition curators: Monse Ager, director of the Dali Museums of the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation and Thomas Clement Salomon, researcher at Mondo Mostre.

The exhibition will run from April 1 to July 2, 2017. During the exhibition, the Faberge Museum is open daily, seven days a week, from 10-00 to 20-45.

Tickets for the exhibition can be purchased in advance attickets. fsv. en Tickets are currently on sale for the period from 01.04 to 15.05. Tickets for a later visit to the exhibition will go on sale on 10.04.Ticket price - 450 rubles, preferential - 200 rubles.

Address of the Faberge Museum: St. Petersburg, embankment of the Fontanka River, 21.

Exhibition “Salvador Dali. Surrealist and classic. Recommended for visitors over 18 years of age.

For all questions dali@site

*Image Rights of Salvador Dali reserved. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2017

A large-scale exhibition "Salvador Dali. Surrealist and Classic" has opened at the Faberge Museum. Correspondents of "RG" visited the opening.

More than 150 works of the great Spanish artist - paintings and graphics - from the collection of the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation, as well as from private and museum collections (for example, from the British Tate Modern Museum) are presented. As you know, Dali left his fortune and his work to Spain. In 1983 he created the Foundation in the Spanish city of Figueres. And he was its leader until his death in 1989.

Joan Manuel Sevillano, Managing Director of the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation, told reporters:

The basis of the Foundation is Dali's personal collection. We fill in the gaps - we buy what is missing in it, we conduct an active acquisition policy. I recently calculated that over the past 18 years we have invested approximately 60 million euros. The Foundation is our private, financially independent institution, we do not receive state support. True, lately the prices of Dali's masterpieces have skyrocketed, and our incomes are not growing at the same rate. Fortunately, if you urgently need money, we get loans from banks ...

As director of the Faberge Museum Vladimir Voronchenko noted, they had been preparing for this event for a whole year. "Difficult negotiations, some successfully completed, others failed, unfortunately, for political reasons: unexpectedly, we received a refusal, and unmotivated ... But, in the end, a wonderful collection arrived in St. Petersburg. We hope visitors will like it. We always try to show something that has not yet been, that people have not seen."

Dali is widely known for his works created in the 30-40s, but the works of the late period, when he returned to classicism, to the origins, many in our country have not seen. Started with the classics and ended with the classics. Great experimenter, dreamer, paradoxical, unlike anyone else, outrageous, scandalous, madman, genius ... "There is only one difference between me and the madman: the madman thinks that he is out of his mind, but I know that I am out of my mind" Dali said.

The members of the Foundation were amazed by the museum's unique lighting fixtures: special lighting creates an extraordinary feeling from the paintings. Surreal landscapes of the 1930s, a series of illustrations for the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, one of the most famous representatives of the Florentine Renaissance, a series of illustrations for the Divine Comedy commissioned by Dali on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante by the State Polygraphic Institute of Italy. All one hundred illustrations, which were included in the final series and have now become textbooks, are presented at the exhibition in St. Petersburg.

Paintings made in the early 1980s and dedicated to another great master of the Renaissance - Michelangelo Buonarotti are also presented. "It seemed to us that this is a great connection: Dali, classics, Michelangelo - and St. Petersburg (beauty and classics)," the museum notes.

"Landscape with mysterious elements" (1934), a recent and, they say, record-breaking acquisition of the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation. However, as the director of the Faberge Museum Vladimir Voronchenko emphasized, "we avoid talking about the cost of works of art, we don't want to surprise anyone with exorbitant prices ...". "In Search of the Fourth Dimension" (1979), "Geological Echo. Pieta" (1982), "Based on Michelangelo's Head of Giuliano Medici" (1982).

An interesting story is the painting "Cod Suit for a Naked Cod with a Tail". In 1939, Dali decided to stage the ballet "Mad Tristan" in London. The costumes were prepared by Coco Chanel. At this time, England declared war on Germany, Dali and the entire troupe - Russian, by the way - emigrated to America, and there the performance was still released in 1944. And the artist painted the picture in 1941 and presented it to the Marquis de Cuevas (the husband of Rockefeller's daughter, a great philanthropist, supported the troupe, financed the ballet).

Here "Woman with a Butterfly" is from a private collection. According to the curators, the Plexiglas panel is the centerpiece of an installation created in 1958 for the Wallace Pharmaceutical Laboratory.

The company was then putting the Miltown tranquilizer on the market and approached Dali with a request to create an object for their conference that could demonstrate the effect of the drug. Dali came up with an installation-tunnel resembling a cocoon. The conference participants got into the cocoon over their heads and walked along the picturesque panels, at first with disturbing, and closer to the exit with soothing scenes. In a special booklet, Dali commented on his work as follows: "The chrysalis, the highest symbol of bodily nirvana, paves the way for the dazzling dawn of a butterfly, which in turn is a symbol of the human soul ...".

Museum workers say that they are waiting for the queue of visitors: "Wherever Dali is exhibited, there will be queues everywhere. Thanks to Spain for giving birth to such an artist!" A week before the opening of the vernissage in St. Petersburg, seven thousand tickets were sold (so far, tickets are on sale only until May 15).

Help "RG"

The Private Faberge Museum was established in St. Petersburg in 2013 in the Shuvalov Palace on the embankment of the Fontanka River. The museum was founded by the Link of Times cultural and historical foundation, founded in 2004 with the aim of returning lost cultural values to Russia.

The basis of the collection was a collection of Faberge Easter eggs purchased by businessman Viktor Vekselberg in 2004 from the heirs of the American newspaper tycoon Malcolm Forbes. From that moment on, the foundation began to form a collection of Russian arts and crafts and fine arts. To date, it has more than 4 thousand storage units.

In 2016, the Faberge Museum organized the first large-scale exhibition in Russia about the work and life of Frida Kahlo, where 35 works by the famous Mexican artist were presented. After the exhibition of Salvador Dali, the Faberge Museum plans to show a collection of works by the American artist Andy Warhol.

Direct speech

Joan Manuel Sevillano, Managing Director of the Salvador Dali Gala Foundation:

Salvador Dali has always been criticized. But he loved it and dealt with his image from the very beginning of his work. He knew that his work was relevant and important. Do not forget that he was a very educated person, a child of the elite, and this, combined with his extraordinary talent, helped him to better understand many things.

Only now, almost 30 years after Dali's death, are we beginning to realize the scale of his person. Because during his lifetime there was always a lot of extraneous noise around him. There were people who liked him, who didn't like him, and people who just didn't understand him. And now the dust has settled, and we finally understand what his influence on contemporary art is.

Meanwhile

Altmans Moscow Gallery decided to contribute to the celebration of the 185th anniversary of Lewis Carroll. And she did it, as always, brightly and loudly, linking the enduringly mysterious adventures of the girl Alice in Wonderland with the mysterious dreamer Salvador Dali and thus revealing to us the main surrealist from his not most familiar side - as a graphic artist, a draftsman.

In 1969, an editor at Random House hired Dali to illustrate a limited edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Inspired, the Spaniard created 13 gouache drawings (one for each of the 12 chapters and a cover), which he then turned into colorful heliogravures.

In his graphics and watercolors, Dali is not a mystic, but first of all a master of drawing and color with a strong, able to confidently draw a thin line exactly where he needs a hand, with a poetic vision of the plot that surprises the viewer. His Alice at the exhibition is very different. Here she is a girl flying, casting - and not casting a shadow, bringing a jump rope over her head, "jumping" from drawing to drawing, drifting farther, deeper into the country of her fantasies, the center of the composition and its barely marked edge and even part of the girl.

The flight begins with the cover - two-color, absolutely not "distant": a figure outlined with a light brown stroke rushes along a barely marked road to the almost imperceptible contours of the mountains. But on the sheet with an illustration for the chapter "Council of the caterpillar" from Alice, there is only a hand, which, apparently, is bent instead of the neck (it is she who lengthens and bends in the book in conversation with the caterpillar), and densely induced gouache saturates the sheet with fabulous tones.

The paint is so diluted with water that it simply flows down the sheet on "Pig and Pepper" and "Mad Tea Party": and the image, to be honest, seems at first glance not only not the work of the great Salvador, but simply not an artist. But then you see that the streaks of paint are just rain that has spilled from the Cheshire Cat (we don’t undertake to unravel the ideas of the Mystifier), and somewhere among them you find a girl with a jump rope and calm down. This is, of course, Dali, capable of casting a shadow on the wattle fence not only with scrupulous details, but also with gouache in the trunk of a tree turning from purple-red to barely orange. Sprouted through the recognizable "molten" hours.

Prepared by Andrey Vasyanin

The Faberge Museum hosts the exhibition “Salvador Dali. Surrealist and Classic”, for the first time in St. Petersburg such a large-scale exposition, including more than 150 paintings and graphic works by Dali.

One of the central works of the upcoming exhibition is Landscape with Enigmatic Elements, which the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation purchased in 2011 for 7.8 million euros from a private collector who wished to remain anonymous.

The exhibition allows you to trace the artist's creative path, from the surrealist works of the 1930s that made him famous to his appeals to the subjects of classical European art in the 1980s. Particular emphasis is placed on Salvador Dali's comprehension of the heritage of the geniuses of the Italian Renaissance - Michelangelo and Cellini, as well as Dante's "Divine Comedy".

Salvador Dali, one of the main artists who determined the development of the art of the 20th century, was infinitely paradoxical, like the 20th century itself. Instantly recognizable and unlike anyone else, he forever entered not only the history of fine art, but also the history of design, fashion, theater, cinema and literature. He managed to reflect in his work almost all the great ideas and contradictions of his time. The exhibition at the Faberge Museum provides an opportunity to touch the wonderful diversity of Dali's work, and to feel the inner relationship of modernism and classics, contained in his works.

The exhibition will feature one of the most interesting works of this period, Landscape with Enigmatic Elements (1934), a recent and record-breaking acquisition by the Salvador Dalí Gala Foundation, purchased from a private collector in 2011. In this work, Dali originally quotes the famous masterpiece "The Art of Painting" by Vermeer. Dali admired the personality and work of the Dutch painter throughout his life, put him in first place in his scandalous comparative table of the importance of artists and even called him a "comprehensive surrealist." Paying tribute to his "mentor", Dali often depicted Vermeer in his paintings.

So in the "Landscape with mysterious elements" he places him in the foreground of the Ampurdan Valley, permeated with amazing, unearthly light, and himself, still a child, dressed in a sailor's costume, accompanied by a nanny - somewhere far away. Fragments of reality - the sky, cypresses, the ideal Ampurdan village of Portlligat - side by side in the picture with ghosts, shadows and fantastic nameless forms, giving the widest field for interpretation.

These and other iconic surrealistic images will continue to appear constantly in Dali's work, but over time they will begin to change their meaning. In the painting “In Search of the Fourth Dimension”, painted much later, in 1979, during the period of the artist’s active experiments with stereoscopic and holographic images, which can help find the third and fourth dimensions, and therefore, according to Dali’s logic, allow us to gain immortality, we again see its symbolism is white tunics, bread, cypresses, soft watches, but in a completely different context. In an attempt to unite space and time, Dali combines his own imagery with quotations from the canonical works of the Renaissance - Raphael's The School of Athens and Perugino's Handing over the Keys to the Apostle Peter. However, in itself, interest in classical European painting appears in Dali much earlier.

The exhibition will also feature paintings by Salvador Dali in the early 1980s and dedicated to another great Renaissance master, Michelangelo Buonarotti. Working with the subjects of Michelangelo, Dali shows great respect for tradition and the past, but at the same time does not hide his desire to surpass them through constant innovation and immersion in modernity.

Several of these works were shown to the public for the first time only last year at a thematic exhibition in Italy, and they will come to Russia for the first time. These works lift the veil over the little-studied last years of Dali's life. The death of his only and dearly beloved wife and muse Gala (Elena Dyakonova) in June 1982 becomes a strong blow for him and makes him think more and more about the other world. Dali has a passionate interest in the theme of immortality and writes a number of works in which he interprets the classical images of Michelangelo with the same irrepressible fantasy characteristic of him.

In the famous work “Geological Echo. Pieta (1982) Dali embeds the figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ in the rocky landscape of the Gulf of Cadaqués, as if trying to find the divine in the earthly. And in a kind of artistic testament "Based on Michelangelo's Head of Giuliano Medici" (1982), the artist combines all the symbols and techniques characteristic of him at different stages - the beauty of the classical profile, a mysterious, surreal landscape filled with strange figures, uses the effect of optical illusion, as if summing up your creative endeavors.

He also creates a whole series of works in which the images of the Medici Tomb, decorating the chapel of the dynasty of the main patrons of the Renaissance, become a majestic memorial for Gala and himself and grant them immortality, at least in the dimension of world art.

Working mode:

daily from April 1 to July 2, 2017 from 10:00 to 20:45.

Ticket price:

full - 450 rubles,
preferential - 200 rubles.

Exhibition “Salvador Dali. Surrealist and classic. Recommended for visitors over 18 years of age.

Ticket presale is open. For all questions [email protected]

Why Dali was obsessed with the fear of death and what he hoped to gain immortality in, what riddles Vermeer sought to unravel and what his famous “paranoid-critical method” is - this was told to Posta-Magazine by the exhibition curator, director of the Dali Museums of the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation Monse Ager.

The exhibition covers almost half a century of the artist's work, from the early works of the 1930s, including "Landscape with mysterious elements", where Dali has a kind of surreal dialogue with Vermeer, to a series of 1980s created based on the works of Michelangelo after the death of his beloved wife Gala . The great innovator and eccentric of the 20th century, who asserted in his characteristic provocative manner: “Surrealism is me,” Salvador Dali constantly turned to the old masters throughout his life, rethinking their work and images and examining them through his own optics, with which he tried to find a fourth dimension that would give him immortality. In a sense, he succeeded.

About the paranoid-critical method

The paranoid-critical method is an alternative way of interpreting reality. Dali explores what is hidden behind the first, visible plane of the picture of the world. He is obsessed with the idea of teaching the viewer contemplation and real vision. He creates a double image or an image of the invisible, which can be interpreted in different ways, meaning one or the other, which makes the viewer constantly doubt what actually appears before his eyes.

About "Landscape with mysterious elements"

This work is a vivid example of Dali's surrealism. Here, against the background of a very accurate, hyper-realistic landscape, he places strange, enigmatic elements that excite the viewer, confuse him, causing anxiety. Nevertheless, this feeling makes one look even more closely at the picture in search of ever new meanings hidden in it.

About Dali and Vermeer

Dali considered Vermeer one of the greatest masters, whose brilliant mastery of painting technique is combined with the ability to capture and realistically depict the very essence of life. Dali admired his originality, mystery and authenticity, which he writes about in his book "50 Magical Secrets of Mastery":

“Van Gogh was crazy and therefore senselessly, generously and unconditionally cut off his left ear with a razor. I am by no means crazy, and yet I am ready to cut off my right hand, but not at all disinterestedly: I agree to do this on the condition that I will be given the opportunity to see Vermeer of Delft, who is sitting at the easel and working enthusiastically. I am even ready to agree to more - I will not hesitate to allow my right ear to be cut off, and even both ears at once, if I manage to find out the secret of the "magic mixture", into which the same Vermeer, the best of the best - I do not call him "divine “For he is the most human of all artists,” dipped his incomparable brush.

About Dali and the Old Masters

Salvador Dali was convinced that none of his contemporary artists could match the level of skill of the old masters such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Vermeer or Velasquez. He considered himself the least ordinary of living painters.

About Dali and the Surrealists

“The difference between the surrealists and me is that the surrealist is me,” said Dali, who came to surrealism just at the moment when this direction needed a good shake-up. His painting and texts became a fresh stream. In general, Salvador Dali believed that his work went far beyond surrealism, especially with regard to such things as freedom of artistic expression and provocation of the public.

About eccentricity and innovation

Dali's eccentric behavior was not only a manifestation of his personality, but also an integral part of his work. In this sense, he was one of the founders of happenings and performance art. In his opinion, they fueled interest in the character he created, which in itself was a work of art. Having become one of the central artistic concepts of the 20th century, this idea of total art, along with his pictorial skill, determined Dali's place among the great innovative artists.

On the search for immortality

Throughout his life, Dali was accompanied by the fear of death, hence the cross-cutting theme of his art - the search for immortality. The artist was named after his older brother, who died nine months before his birth. Dali believed that he should become a more perfect version of his brother, who seemed to him a real genius. He was obsessed with this idea, which determined the dualism of his work.

About early and late Dali

Dali's obsession substantiated the recurring themes and plots in his work. For this exhibition, I have selected works in which he appears as a more melancholy, meditative artist who looks back with nostalgia to great predecessors such as Michelangelo and other great masters of the Italian Renaissance. Engaging in painting, creativity was for him the meaning of life, which is especially noticeable in these works. They also show Dali's interest in science, in which he sought answers to questions that he could not find in religion.

Sigmund Freud had a huge influence on Dali, who was fond of his teachings in his youth. To the works of the founder of psychoanalysis, as well as to the works of Jung, he regularly turned throughout his life, especially interested in everything related to the nature of sexual desire and paranoia.

About wife and muse

Gala was a highly educated, courageous and pragmatic woman who knew how to become her husband's alter ego. What happened - it is no coincidence that Dali signed some of the works with two names: "Gala Salvador Dali." Thus, they turned into a single artistic entity.

Where: Faberge Museum, St. Petersburg

“Surrealism is me,” with this famous phrase, Dali broke with Andre Breton and the surrealists in 1936, becoming the personification of this trend in art during his lifetime. "Greedy for dollars", he turned his name into a brand, becoming a kind of pop star from painting. Dali's works are regularly exhibited in the largest museums of the world, showing the Spanish master either as a painter or as an illustrator of fashion magazines. This time the Dali exhibition will be held at the Faberge Museum in St. Petersburg. First of all, it is dedicated to how Dali mastered the heritage of Italian Renaissance artists. The exhibition was curated by Monse Ager, director of the Dali Museums of the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, and Thomas Clement Salomon, researcher at Mondo Mostre. They shared with us how the work on the concept and creation of the exposition at the Faberge Museum went.

“The exhibition has nothing to do with previous projects, we wanted to show Dali’s late legacy and delve into an important iconographic element – the landscape. At the same time, we wanted to present Dali in a completely new way, weak and sick, but not losing the desire to create.”

Salvador Dali, "Landscape with mysterious elements", 1934

The Italian theme in Dali's work was first considered at an exhibition held earlier this year at the Palazzo Blu in Pisa. Asked what unites the two exhibitions, Monse Ager replies: “The idea itself united both projects, but in St. Petersburg we wanted to emphasize the surrealist period and the presence of landscape throughout his artistic career.” The conversation about this particular genre is not accidental - the exhibition will feature "Landscape with mysterious elements", acquired by the Foundation in 2011 from a private collector. Unlike other works where the artist depicted the Catalan valley of Ampurdan, here Dali refers to the work of Jan Vermeer "The Art of Painting", better known as the "Artist's Studio". Rethinking the art of the old masters was as normal for Dali as painting his own paintings - among such works are Goya's Caprichos, Michelangelo's Pieta, and illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. But why is Vermeer so important? Ager answers this question with a quote from the artist's own book "50 Magic Secrets of Mastery", where he directly states that he is ready to lose his left hand, just to see Vermeer for ten minutes at the easel.

"Dali considered Vermeer one of the greatest masters, he praised his skill, inspiration, drawing, color and authenticity of his work."

Salvador Dali, "Inspired by„ Heads of Giuliano de' Medici“ Michelangelo", 1982. Salvador Dali, 1969. Photo:Gianni Ferrari / Cover / Getty Images

However, Vermeer was not the only artist whose talent inspired Dali. Among the 150 works, from earlier paintings of the 30s to late works of the 80s, there are paintings referring to Michelangelo, Cellini, Raphael, Perugino. Art historians, critics and audiences continue to wonder why even the most avant-garde artists of the 20th century never stopped turning to the classical masters.

“Totally modern, the artist Dali wanted to belong to both tradition and the past at the same time. He was impressed by the old masters, the way they simultaneously show the reality from the outside and from the inside.

The earliest works of this kind appear already after the break with the surrealists in the 40s: in 1945 he created illustrations for the autobiography of the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, and in the 50s he illustrated Dante's Divine Comedy in honor of the poet's 700th birthday. The illustrations, which later became textbooks, showed the main poem of the Renaissance through the eyes of our contemporary era.

Salvador Dali, Geological Echo. Pieta, 1982

Dali's appeal to Italian art in the 80s after the death of his beloved and muse Gala becomes completely different. The works are filled with melancholy, the colors change, the strokes become coarser, and the love of painting is as important as the struggle to keep painting. During these years, Dali turns to Michelangelo, who has been important to him since his youth. Michelangelo, like Dali himself, is an example of a versatile artist who is able to cover many disciplines.

Dali wants to become immortal and therefore relies on science, where he finds answers to eternal questions . In the work “Geological Echo. Pieta (1982), he places the familiar sculptures of Michelangelo in the rocky landscape of Cadaqués, fusing the divine and the earthly essence and bringing his own innovation to the traditional subject. The canvas “Based on Michelangelo’s Head of Giuliano Medici” (1981) he presents as his own artistic testament, where he combines the lyrical profile of the Renaissance hero and the elements characteristic of Dali’s painting. A rocky landscape with strange characters and the effect of an optical perspective takes the viewer into a different reality that opens up behind the image of the Medici.

Dali devoted a separate series to the famous Medici tomb, one of the main sculptural works of Michelangelo, thereby reflecting on immortality for himself and Gala. When asked why the public never loses interest in Dali's work, Monse Ager replies: “For his combination of traditional and revolutionary, he went far beyond art, thanks in large part to his significant knowledge of art history. For his ability to provoke the audience, as well as for creating such a recognizable character. Now he has become a classic, like the masters of the past. If the name of the greatest surrealist still remains synonymous with hypocrisy and swindle for you, maybe it's time to take a fresh look at his work through the master's appeal to the great classics? The era of surrealism is far behind, and although the name of Dali does not set auction records among modernist artists, it does not leave the posters of museum exhibitions. Each new exposition brings one closer to the possibility of understanding Dali - not terrible and great, but beyond the limits of art and human life itself.

All about car tuning

Surrealist and classic" at the Faberge Museum. Exhibition "Salvador Dali

Working mode:

Ticket price: