This season, we got to do something I have been wanting to do, but could never
convince Kevin it would be fun for him too. Mother Nature even helped out on
this one with providing a raining, gloomy day for us. Ha! So indoors we went .
. . we explored the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Not only
did we get to explore, we got the entire place to ourselves! Now, I know
that's not the case for everyone (and it won't be for us next time either) but
wow! What an experience. We had to be there by 6 a.m. in order to meet with
security, get our filming done and out of there before they opened to the
public. They were very accommodating, and both the museum and us wanted to
make sure we didn't impede visitors' experiences either.
It was incredibly cool, the building alone is a piece of art. Everything Dali
did caused your brain to work. It was a total mental workout! Here's what
Producerman had to say, "This was my first time in an art museum. Call me
crazy but I'm not the artsy fartsy type. I have lived in the Tampa Bay area
for 18 years now and never made the trek across the bridge to see the melting
clock painter guy. Boy was I wrong. We got to meet the guy that knows the most
about the Dali Collection, Curator Peter Tush. He told us so much about the
museum that we couldn't fit it all into one episode, so we made another extra
segment from all the footage." Click
this link
or the YouTube clip below to watch. Check out the full episode of RV There Yet? - Alternate Plans featuring our trip to The Dali Museum.
We got to spend an interesting 10 minutes talking with the Dali Museum
curator, Peter Tush. Here's what we talked about:
When you come into our collection and you start exploring the museum, we have
96 oil paintings that show the sheer gamut of Dali's career. It begins in the
period of impressionism goes all the way through his Madrid days as a student
into surrealism through nuclear mysticism and into some of his very last
pieces. So the beauty of the collection is this immersion into the mind of
Dali. You're really able to experience the sights, the sounds, and the ideas
that he had in a very direct and immersive way.
We have a painting that we acquired once we moved here to St Petersburg. It's
called Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean which when seen from 20 meters
becomes a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Dali was reading Scientific American
magazine from 1973. It was about how much visual information does the mind
need to recognize a face, and so they had some very interesting versions of
familiar images like Abraham Lincoln, the Mona Lisa, and essentially from a
distance just like pixels, these became recognizable but when you got up close
they're very abstract. Dali had the genius idea and he was 72 years old at
this time, that he could create an entirely different composition which would
when seem from a distance would transform from the image of his wife at the
window to an image of Abraham Lincoln.
When people were visiting and he wanted to show it to them he was in a small
room you couldn't get 20 meters away from it, so he had a pair of binoculars,
and he would have people look through the wrong end of the lens to create that
illusion to allow them to see it as if they were at a distance. Dali was a
master of illusion and this was something he was fascinated by. He was aware
of some of the other people who had developed illusions but he had a very
unique perspective and take on them, and I think he just really liked to lead
people to question what they assumed to be the case you know. Maybe the world
looks quite different than the way we're perceiving it. If we just took
another moment. Took a step or a beat perhaps it would be completely different
than we assumed it to be.
I have a painting called the Hallucinogenic Torador. It was painted in 1967
and 68 so a period of time Dali had a lot of fans who were very open to seeing
things differently. It was inspired by the most simple of ideas. Essentially
Dali bought some pencils in an art store started looking at a Venus de Milo
that was on the cover and suddenly he saw a face, and for the next 16 months,
he kept redeveloping it and redeveloping until finally it's this mammoth sort
of conglomeration of all these stories and all these ideas that Dali has about
double imagery, about spanish bullfighting, and about beauty and western
art. From the very center of it where you have all of these venuses,
there's 31 venuses in the painting. You suddenly start to realize there's this
transformation into a face, and once you make that connection, you start
seeing all the other parts of the story. The hidden bull, the other image of
the bullfighter. There's a variety of different things to have your eyes dance
back and forth across.
We've developed something called Dali's Masterworks in Augmented Reality. and
it's on our app. Essentially it allows you to see eight of our paintings, the
large canvases in our collection, and they actually come to life. And for 30
seconds to a minute you see key aspects of the painting suddenly become
animated and start to float or start to hover or become illuminated and then
at the end of that there's four or five different details that are brought out
to share more information about. It's an incredible way to re-imagine the way
that Dali imagined these paintings you know wanting to tell these
stories
It's a comprehensive collection. The most comprehensive in the world that goes
from almost the beginning of his career through 1976 very close to when he
passed. And in that collection there are great examples of all of his key
periods but there's one painting we have that's called The Weaning of
Furniture-Nutrition that I think is really very special. Dali had become a
surrealist. He had become a master of conundrums and finding dream imagery to
share but the special gift that he had is the ability to paint something that
looked like a photograph of something that's completely impossible to imagine.
This painting is one of the most successful because it's subtle. It's not so
much Freudian as it plays with the idea about what is it to wean. He has the
woman who was his nanny as a child who has a hole in her body and there's a
chest of drawers right next to her on a beach and if you look at it? It looks
like it's a hand tinted photograph and yet what you're looking at is
completely impossible, and it's that idea the dedication to his craft but also
showing us something extraordinary that nobody else would have imagined I
think is what makes that painting just so special in the collection.
One of the great pleasures of being here at the museum is that I've had a long
history of being aware of a lot of 20th century movements - a lot of other
artists you really get to see Dali from a very different perspective you get
to discover his ideas, his goals, his aspirations, and see him very
differently than i think we perceived him in the past.
