This season, we got to do something I have been wanting to do, but could never
convince Kevin it would be fun for him too. Mother Nature even helped out on
this one with providing a raining, gloomy day for us. Ha! So indoors we went .
. . we explored the
Salvador Dali Museum
in
St. Petersburg, Florida. Not only did we get to explore, we got the entire place to ourselves! Now,
I know that's not the case for everyone (and it won't be for us next time
either) but wow! What an experience. We had to be there by 6 a.m. in order to
meet with security, get our filming done and out of there before they opened
to the public. They were very accommodating, and both the museum and us wanted
to make sure we didn't impede visitors' experiences either.
It was incredibly cool, the building alone is a piece of art. Everything Dali
did caused your brain to work. It was a total mental workout! Here's what
Producerman had to say, "This was my first time in an art museum. Call me
crazy but I'm not the artsy fartsy type. I have lived in the
Tampa Bay area
for 18 years now and never made the trek across the bridge to see the melting
clock painter guy. Boy was I wrong. We got to meet the guy that knows the most
about the
Dali Collection,
Curator Peter Tush. He told us so much about the museum that we couldn't fit it all into one
episode, so we made another extra segment from all the footage." Click
this link
or the YouTube clip below to watch. Check out the full episode of RV There Yet? - Alternate Plans featuring our trip to The Dali Museum.
We got to spend an interesting 10 minutes talking with the Dali Museum
curator, Peter Tush. Here's what we talked about:
When you come into our collection and you start exploring the museum, we have
96 oil paintings that show the sheer gamut of Dali's career. It begins in the
period of impressionism
goes all the way through his
Madrid days
as a student into
surrealism
through
nuclear mysticism
and into some of his very last pieces. So the beauty of the collection is this
immersion into the mind of Dali. You're really able to experience the sights,
the sounds, and the ideas that he had in a very direct and immersive way.
We have a painting that we acquired once we moved here to St Petersburg. It's
called
Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean
which when seen from 20 meters becomes a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Dali was
reading Scientific American magazine from 1973. It was about how much visual
information does the mind need to recognize a face, and so they had some very
interesting versions of familiar images like Abraham Lincoln, the Mona Lisa,
and essentially from a distance just like pixels, these became recognizable
but when you got up close they're very abstract. Dali had the genius idea and
he was 72 years old at this time, that he could create an entirely different
composition which would when seem from a distance would transform from the
image of his wife at the window to an image of Abraham Lincoln.
When people were visiting and he wanted to show it to them he was in a small
room you couldn't get 20 meters away from it, so he had a pair of binoculars,
and he would have people look through the wrong end of the lens to create that
illusion to allow them to see it as if they were at a distance. Dali was a
master of illusion and this was something he was fascinated by. He was aware
of some of the other people who had developed illusions but he had a very
unique perspective and take on them, and I think he just really liked to lead
people to question what they assumed to be the case you know. Maybe the world
looks quite different than the way we're perceiving it. If we just took
another moment. Took a step or a beat perhaps it would be completely different
than we assumed it to be.
I have a painting called the
Hallucinogenic Torador. It was painted in 1967 and 68 so a period of time Dali had a lot of fans
who were very open to seeing things differently. It was inspired by the most
simple of ideas. Essentially Dali bought some pencils in an art store started
looking at a
Venus de Milo
that was on the cover and suddenly he saw a face, and for the next 16 months,
he kept redeveloping it and redeveloping until finally it's this mammoth sort
of conglomeration of all these stories and all these ideas that Dali has about
double imagery, about spanish bullfighting, and about beauty and western
art. From the very center of it where you have all of these venuses,
there's 31 venuses in the painting. You suddenly start to realize there's this
transformation into a face, and once you make that connection, you start
seeing all the other parts of the story. The hidden bull, the other image of
the bullfighter. There's a variety of different things to have your eyes dance
back and forth across.
We've developed something called
Dali's Masterworks in Augmented Reality. and it's on our app. Essentially it allows you to see eight of our
paintings, the large canvases in our collection, and they actually come to
life. And for 30 seconds to a minute you see key aspects of the painting
suddenly become animated and start to float or start to hover or become
illuminated and then at the end of that there's four or five different details
that are brought out to share more information about. It's an incredible way
to re-imagine the way that Dali imagined these paintings you know wanting to
tell these stories
It's a comprehensive collection. The most comprehensive in the world that goes
from almost the beginning of his career through 1976 very close to when he
passed. And in that collection there are great examples of all of his key
periods but there's one painting we have that's called The Weaning of
Furniture-Nutrition that I think is really very special. Dali had become a
surrealist. He had become a master of conundrums and finding dream imagery to
share but the special gift that he had is the ability to paint something that
looked like a photograph of something that's completely impossible to imagine.
This painting is one of the most successful because it's subtle. It's not so
much
Freudian
as it plays with the idea about what is it to wean. He has the woman who was
his nanny as a child who has a hole in her body and there's a chest of drawers
right next to her on a beach and if you look at it? It looks like it's a hand
tinted photograph and yet what you're looking at is completely impossible, and
it's that idea the dedication to his craft but also showing us something
extraordinary that nobody else would have imagined I think is what makes that
painting just so special in the collection.
One of the great pleasures of being here at the museum is that I've had a long
history of being aware of a lot of 20th century movements - a lot of other
artists you really get to see Dali from a very different perspective you get
to discover his ideas, his goals, his aspirations, and see him very
differently than i think we perceived him in the past.
