L.A. plays host to surrealist’s exhibit
By Jessica Wong
Oct. 11, 2007 9:02 p.m.
Hollywood, a universal metaphor for commercial glamour, may seem an unfitting location for Spanish surrealist Salvador DalÃ’s complexly disturbing, iconoclastic work. Yet Los Angeles may be the most fitting city to host an exhibition that explores DalÃ’s deep connection with film as an artistic medium.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents “DalÃ: Painting & Film,” the first exhibition to focus on the profound relationship between the artist’s paintings and his films.
Visible to visitors approaching LACMA’s entrance, the Hollywood sign becomes a strangely appropriate background for the exhibition of DalÃ’s work.
As a screenwriter, filmmaker and art director, Dalà worked with movie greats such as Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney and the Marx Brothers.
“It’s very paradoxical because he continued to paint in an era when painting was becoming increasingly old-fashioned. But at the same time he was very interested in modernity, in the modern world, and in film,” said Dawn Ades, curator of “Salvador DalÃ: Centenary Exhibition” at London’s Tate Modern and art history and theory professor at the University of Essex.
The exhibition brings together 131 pieces, including 40 to 50 paintings, seven films, two sculptural objects, photographs, and texts.
Some of his most well-known paintings such as “The Persistence of Memory” (1931) owned by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus” (1937) from the Tate Modern will be on view alongside the artist’s major film projects such as “Un Chien Andalou, L’Age D’or” (1929-30), “Spellbound” (1945) and “Destino” (1946), as well as examples of the later films he created himself, “Chaos and Creation” (1960) and “Impressions of Upper Mongolia” (1976).
DalÃ’s notorious impulse for painting shocking imagery seeps into these perplexingly nightmarish films.
“Un Chien Andalou,” a landmark of avant-garde cinema made with director Buñuel and considered by some the first truly surrealist film, is a maelstrom of dreamlike imagery featuring a woman’s eyeball being sliced with a razor and a hand infected with ants.
“For us what is interesting is to see the way cinema becomes an experimentation and how that later translates back into his paintings. And so it’s basically a battle between the two media,” said Sara Cochran, LACMA’s assistant curator of modern art.
The exhibit aims to show that DalÃ’s relationship to modernism was closely linked to his relationship to film and purposefully reminisces on the local history of Hollywood’s glitzy past.
During the 1940s, Dalà began to move out of the realm of avant-garde films to work on major studio productions in Hollywood, including Walt Disney Studios’ “Destino,” an animated voyage through the fantastical dreamscapes of DalÃ.
The film, for which Dalà contributed many drawings, was abandoned for years and finally completed in 2003, decades after DalÒs death.
“He was always interested in the psychological narrative in his paintings, and I think the animated film allowed him to explore the double images that were a part of his paintings. He paints images that you can read in multiple ways,” Ades said.
Around the world, Dalà has been the subject of a number of major postmortem retrospectives in the past two decades, few of which have been dedicated to his contributions to film.
“More perhaps than other modernist painters, his paintings are about an interior world,” said Cochran. “I think his vision was uniquely suited to cinema, and this is something I hope people will see and understand when they finally see the show.”
