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Dalí and wife Gala enjoying their San Miguel Beer. Itaas Mo! Postcard from the Dalí Museum St. Petersburg, FL |
What is the Salvador Dalí Museum doing in St. Petersburg? This resort-town in South Florida, locals refer to as St. Pete, where old geezers from the colder Midwest roost to retire, apparently also hosts the most substantial collection of the late Surrealist’s paintings. A silver-haired lady next to me, in pink cardigan and sweatpants, asked her granddaughter as a matter of fact if the painting she was looking at was indeed the one labeled Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano. If this is not an indication of how popular culture has accommodated subversive Surrealist images, I don’t know what is. Surrealism, as originally conceived, was anti-rationalist and anti-bourgeois. It privileged the irrational and unconscious motives of man, lending a visual idiom to anxieties stemming from repressed sexual desires. Its strategy, at least in painting, included the juxtaposing of disparate images to produce dreamlike effects intended to startle and shock. Surrealist exhibitions, like those of the Dada movement, were very much political acts, and staged as events aimed at scandalizing common bourgeois morality.
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Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano 1934 |
These days, bus-loads of schoolchildren are herded through the museum dedicated to the painter of The Grand Masturbator and Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity, encouraged to explore their “dreams and fantasy” in “Surrealist” art contests. To help introduce the kids to the world of Dalí, teachers are provided the video Get Surreal with Salvador Dalí, and updated with the newsletter The Dalí Times. Finally, to complete Dalí’s Disneyfication, the current exhibit on Dalí and Film includes a screening of Destino, his unfinished collaboration with Walt Disney, a sort-of-Surrealist Fantasia, completed posthumously from his detailed storyboards. It sits snugly between Un chien andalou with its notorious eye-slashing opening, and L’âge d’or where a Christ-like figure emerges at the end as one of the libertines from 120 Days of Sodom. But the public, pleased to be in on the joke and primed by more vulgar TV, agreeably overlooks what now seems to be merely Surrealist silliness, happy as a clam to go home with their melting watches on t-shirts and other “surreal deals” at the gift shop. André Breton must be turning in his grave.
The bulk of the collection came from the stash of industrialist A. Reynolds Morse and wife Eleanor, longtime friends of the Dalís and the artist’s most avid collectors, stretching as far back as the 1940’s. The roughly 200 pieces used to be displayed in their home in Ohio (wall-to-wall Dalís!), then, later, in a private museum beside the new office building of their Injection Molders Supply Company. In the 1980’s, they offered the whole lock, stock, and barrel to any museum that would best preserve its historical integrity. St. Petersburg ended the nationwide search by matching the Morse’s offer with a cool $3M to build and maintain a brand new museum dedicated to the Dalís, with the added bonus of their wider exposure through the local tourist trade. On a personal note, the locale where the museum was to be erected “reminded the Morses of Cadaques, Dalí’s childhood home on the Mediterranean Sea”.
Dalí, ever the shameless self-promoter, would have gleefully approved the prospect of an all-but-beach-front museum right smack where the sun-dried tourists flock as the final resting place of his oeuvre. He never did hide his love for money and fame, to the perennial annoyance of Breton, who called him “Avida Dollars”, an anagram of his name.
What I like best in all philosophical writings of August Comte is the precise moment where, before founding his new positivist religion, he places the bankers, whom he regards as of capital importance, at the summit of his hierarchy. Perhaps this is the Phoenician side of my Ampurdan blood, but I have always been dazzled by gold in whatever form it appears. Having learned in my adolescence that Miguel de Cervantes, after having written his immortal Don Quixote for the greater glory of Spain, died in wretched poverty, that Christopher Columbus, after having discovered the New World, had also died under the same conditions, and in prison to boot, already in my adolescence, as I say, my prudence strongly counseled me two things:
1) to have my prison experience as early as possible. And this was done.
2) to become to the greatest extent possible a bit of a multimillionaire. And this, too, was done. (from Dalí on Modern Art)
This openly flouted the original Surrealist ethic against commercialism and political orientation towards the left. Dalí was eventually expelled from the movement in the late 1930’s, despite the fact that by then, “Surrealism had… uncomfortably become wedded to capitalism, and Dalí simply admitted to that fact” (David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism). He fully embraced the consumer and entertainment culture of postwar America, collaborating with Hollywood (Spellbound) and Disney (Destino), and produced umpteen permutations of his stock Surrealist gestures.
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Portrait of Colonel Jack Warner 1951 |
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Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln 1976 |
But, as Hopkins observes, “Dalí’s flamboyant showmanship, emblematized by his famous upturned moustache… warrants further attention precisely because students of modernism find the artist’s self-promotion so galling” (Dada and Surrealism). If his museum-cum-shrine is any indication, only he among the old guard Surrealists would most likely be at home today with the commodification of art and the cult of personality. He would surely have his own reality show, along with has-beens Bret Michaels and Gene Simmons, perhaps even parading his leathery ass on Fort De Soto. He would be laughing with his piña colada in the face of Breton’s grim idealism and demagoguery, laughing all the way to the bank.
