Artforum (2008) - Dalí: Painting and Film
Details
- book review: Dalí: Painting and Film
- author(s): Robert Pincus-Witten
- journal: Artforum (01/Oct/2008)
- issue: volume 47, issue 2, page 378
- journal ISSN: 1086-7058
- publisher: Artforum Inc
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Art exhibits, Gregory Peck, Motion pictures, Museums, New York City, New York, Painting, Salvador Dalí, Spellbound (1945)
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Abstract
Originating in London (at Tate Modern), the exhibition moved on to Los Angeles (to lacma), a natural setting for the show given that it was in Hollywood that Salvador Dalí worked with Alfred Hitchcock on the filmmaker's 1945 thriller Spellbound - at moma, Gregory Peck's dream sequence, which features Dali's huge smoky backdrop, was projected onto a nearly wall-size screen - and on Walt Disney's deservedly forgotten Destino (1946), an oversugared confection in its posthumous completion in 2003. The heroine's toe-suck of Diane Chasseresse (a famous classical sculpture) and her swooning embrace of the aged orchestra conductor - Wagner's Tristan und Isolde comes in for heavy weather in both Dalí-Buñuel films - are gerontophilic surrenders far more shocking than the dutiful anticlericalism of the film's conclusion.
Article
"Dalí: Painting and Film"
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
The Museum of Modern Art was the last stop of a four‑city tour for "Dalí: Painting and Film," a voluminous show that included paintings, drawings, films, and film treatments. Originating in London (at Tate Modern), the exhibition moved on to Los Angeles (to lacma), a natural setting for the show given that it was in Hollywood that Salvador Dalí worked with Alfred Hitchcock on the filmmaker's 1945 thriller Spellbound ‑ at moma, Gregory Peck's dream sequence, which features Dali's huge smoky backdrop, was projected onto a nearly wall‑size screen ‑ and on Walt Disney's deservedly forgotten Destino (1946), an oversugared confection in its posthumous completion in 2003. Dalí and the Marx Brothers were mutual fans. Dalí sent Harpo a harp with barbed‑wire strings. Harpo sent back a glossy of himself with bloodied fingers.
The Dalí Museum in Saint Petersburg, Florida, was also a stopover. And finally New York City, the site of numerous Dalí commissions and stunts ‑ broken store windows, tabloid scandals, and Aquacade extravaganzas ‑ timed to the World's Fair of 1939. Fascinating studies for an unrealized film called Les Mystères surréalistes de New York remain.
A crack curatorial team led by Tate Modern's Matthew Gale rethought Dali's stylistic development, nailing his films not strictly to the two crosses of André Breton's Surrealist manifestos but to an expanded field of popular enter...
