Salvador Dali at LACMA

I went to the Dali exhibit at LACMA last night. It was amazing! I didn't think I'd see anything new, but damn was I wrong. Leave it to an LA-based museum to change it up and showcase Dali's cinema work. It was awesome to see how Dali brought his artistic vision to life on the screen with such greats as the Marx Brothers, Hitchcock, and Disney.

The museum showcased a variety of his paintings and sketches, too--some of them refreshingly new to me. But I don't think they were the best examples of his work (see below for some of my favorites). I think LACMA failed a little in this regard. Dali is a painter who is world-renowned for his paintings and sketches, and while film provided him an opportunity to bring his paintings to another realm of art--moving picture--and therefore provided more insight into how his mind worked--something he deeply relished--the museum should still have had more of his familiar and unique paintings and sketches present. It does a disservice to those who aren't familiar with his work as much as it does for those who love his artistic variety. His overall style and artistic prowess lies in how diverse his paintings are and how he evolved as an artist over time that explored a number of mediums. I attended the Salvador Dali exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2005, and the standard it set for me is a hard one for LACMA to compete with.

There was one piece that I absolutely fell in love with all over again:

Dali -1937: "Metamorphosis Of Narcissus"

A painting from the exhibit that was new to me was:

Dali -1945: "Melancholy"

Some favorites--a few of these not available at LACMA--include:

Figure at a Window (1925):

Cannibalism in Autumn (1936-37)

Drawers Cannibalism (Composition with Drawers), (1937):

Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, (1938):

Visage of War, (1940):

Victory - Woman Metamorphosing into a Boat with Angels (1945):

The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946):

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952-54)

The Maximum Speed of Raphael's Madonna (1954):

Crucifixion (1954):

The Infant Jesus, (1956):

The Meditative Rose (1958):