We had a good weekend: Salvador Dali exhibit

[thewayne]

They're showing an interesting Salvador Dali exhibit in Las Cruces which we saw Saturday. He was commissioned by the gov't of Italy to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy. Apparently when the Italian people heard of it, the commission was canceled, but the France hired him to complete the series. Personally, I think the French did it to piss off the Italians.

Anyway, there are 100 cantos in Dante's work, Dali did a drawing/painting for each one. Apparently he did not bother with the trifle of reading the source material before he started working. There were something like only 30 copies of the work produced, so it's kind of rare to see a complete set like this.

The art is weird, after all, it is Dali. A lot of it is very cool, it makes one think of the art work for Pink Floyd's The Wall, I have no doubt that the latter's artist was very influenced by Dali. There were several other works of his on display, I'll have to go back and get their names. They also had a couple of pieces by Rene Magritte, I did not know they were contemporaries and apparently friends.

I've always liked some of Dali's work and I definitely want to see more. Maybe one of these days we'll make it to Spain and see his museum and theatre. I also want to see the Guggenheim Bilbao, I love cool architecture.

Magritte was a painter largely unknown to me, I look forward to learning more of his work.

Comments

[ateji.livejournal.com]

Whoa. I didn't know Dali and Magritte were friends, either. (I'm not terribly familiar with even Magritte, but he did come up in an art appreciation course.)

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Click on the link, there's probably a couple of pieces that you'd recognize.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

This Is Not a Pipe, off the top of my head.

I loved Stoppard's play, After Magritte. I recommend it, and because it is more than a little absurd, I recommend seeing it twice so you actually understand what's going on.