Triple anniversary for another Year of Dalí

His entry into the world was uncharacteristically discreet, born in the family flat in Figueres to parents mourning the loss of their firstborn son nine months earlier. Some 84 years later, his burial in the museum that bears his name could not have been more public. This year is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Salvador Dalí (May 11, 1904), 35 years since his death (January 23, 1989), and a half century since the inauguration, in his hometown, of the Dalí Theatre and Museum. All of this would normally be enough to declare 2024 the Year of Dalí if it was not for the fact that the artist’s centenary was held two decades ago. The opportunity that this year provides is the chance to take stock of the progress made in developing and disseminating Dalí’s legacy since 2004.

“This will be a year of consolidation,” says Montse Aguer, director of Dalí Museums, who points to the knowledge attained from recent studies, the acquisition of artworks and the compilation of his writings.

The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, created by the artist himself in December 1983 and involving the Spanish State, the Catalan government and the Figueres and Cadaqués councils, was already consolidated as an institution at the time of the Dalí centenary. Since the commemorations in 2004, the foundation’s Centre for Dalinian Studies, set up with Barcelona’s Autonomous University in 1991 by the art historian Fèlix Fanés, has taken the lead in research into the artist. It began with such memorable exhibitions as ’Dalí, afinitats electives’, in conjunction with the Catalan government, and ’Dalí. Cultura de masses’, organised with “la Caixa” Foundation, as well as the publication of all of Dalí’s writings, which are so important for understanding the origin of his imagination and his obsessions.

In the years that followed, under the direction of Aguer, the centre has catalogued the artist’s works online, it has put on retrospective exhibitions of his work around the world, including promoting the use of new technology in art – which Dalí would have applauded – with immersive experiences in Provence, Paris, Madrid, Bordeaux and Barcelona. The centre has also vindicated the role of Dalí’s wife, Gala Dyakonova, as an essential collaborator and a fully-fledged creator in her own right, beyond the stereotype of inspirational muse for artistic genius.

Thus, what is proposed in this triple anniversary year is not the uncovering of hidden facets of Dalí but the re-reading of what is known about the artist and his work in order to “rethink his contributions, his influence in today’s world and his future projection,” as Aguer puts it. This goal is stated in the very title of the lecture series ’Reformulant Dalí. Pensament, ciència i creació’ (Reformulating Dalí. Thought, science and creation), which the Dalí Foundation organised with the Barcelona Humanities Institute. Although six lectures already took place between January and March at the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), it is just the first of the activities planned as part of a commemoration that Aguer says “will continue beyond the 2024” to explore the influence of science and technology on the artist’s work.

Dalí’s relationship with science is one subject the Centre for Dalinian Studies aims to reassess: “His interest in science, perhaps because it most clearly materialised in the latter years of his life has not yet been thoroughly touched upon,” notes Aguer, who sees an under-explored vein in “his approach between the late sixties and early eighties to certain scientific advances, for example, the structure of DNA, which led him to reflect on immortality.” In fact, Aguer says that if she had to point out particularly decisive stages in Dalí’s artistic career – beyond his meeting Gala and his contact with the surrealist core from 1929 – she would opt for the atomic era in the fifties, or his fascination with science in the sixties and seventies.

So often a forerunner, Dalí did not leave a lasting mark on the generation of painters that followed, unlike Picasso or Miró, whose style, technique and symbolism have been appropriated by so many subsequent artists. “It’s very difficult to do Dalí,” says Aguer to explain why so few have tried to follow in his footsteps. Yet the originality of his thought and above all his performative side have been enormously influential on contemporary art. Examples are his designs used by the fashion world by the likes of Elsa Schiaparelli or Christian Dior, or his flirtation with gender ambiguity, adds the director.

Another highlight this year was the display in his theatre museum for the first time of his 1951 painting ’Christ of St John of The Cross’. A six-month loan from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, the painting of the crucifixion, inspired by a drawing by the 16th-century Spanish friar John of the Cross, returned to Scotland on April 30 before it begins a new loan period in the Vatican in May. A view of the crucifixion from above, the painting shows an idealised Christ hanging from the cross above a landscape inspired by Catalonia’s Empordà region, “this privileged place where the real and the sublime almost touch”, as Dalí described it. During its stay in Figueres, the painting was displayed as Dalí himself wished: against a background of red velvet and alongside his still-life, ’Basket of bread’, “the most enigmatic oil I have ever painted”, as he confessed to Antoni Pitxot. Having seen the two paintings side by side, Aguer testifies to how they share the same tone and sculptural form, so that “Christ’s left shoulder could be mistaken for a crust”.

Dalí’s religious side, in a man who admitted to having no faith, is a facet that arouses the most doubt among some critics, who interpret it as a flirtation with Franco’s national Catholicism. The truth is that Dalí’s mystical stage coincided with his fascination with science, whose advances, rather than contradicting the existence of God, pushed him to consider, as he said, how improbable it would be for a superior being not to exist. That this spiritual phase coincided with an interest in the Franco dictatorship might be better interpreted as Dalí using the situation for his own purposes, as a shocking form of spectacle, albeit with sinister undertones.

What cannot be denied is the shock caused by this painting that Dalí considered one of his masterpieces. “It’s a lesson in painting,” says Aguer: “It’s impressive how silent the room falls when people approach it, a reverential silence full of emotion.”

feature Dalí anniversary

feature Dalí anniversary