Salvador Dalí & Film at Tate Modern

Written by Rae Kestler Wednesday, 09 February 2011 22:07

LONDON - Opening in June 2007, Dalí & Film brings together more than one hundred works including paintings, photographs, drawings and films by Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989) in an unprecedented exploration of the central role of cinema in his work. Revealing the artist’s cinematic vision across all forms of his prodigious and controversial output, this exhibition will also be the first time that Dalí’s paintings have been seen alongside his films. On exhibition 1 June – 9 September 2007.

Dalí came from the first generation of artists for whom film was a formative influence and a creative outlet. In the era of silent movies distributed worldwide, he grew up admiring the inventiveness of the slap-stick Hollywood comedians, such as Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton. He saw this mass entertainment as anti-artistic in its disregard for the pretensions of high culture and this became a model for his own work. What distinguished Dalí was that he moved seamlessly in his enormously varied output – exploring and transposing his images across all media.

The two films that he co-wrote with Luis Buñuel in 1929-30 Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’Or are marked by Dalí’s vivid imagination and engagement with the Freudian theories that energised Surrealism. They include images already explored in major paintings of that moment, such as Apparatus and Hand and Inaugural Goose Flesh, just as in subsequent paintings Dalí employed a new cinematic atmosphere. At times he promoted film over painting, though he also declared ‘the best cinema is the kind that can be perceived with your eyes closed.’

Dalí imagined films throughout his life, producing poetic texts and sketches, scenarios and paintings. His dream-like vision proved ideal for Hollywood in the 1940s where he seized the opportunity to work with Hitchcock on Spellbound (1945) and with Walt Disney’s studio on Destino (1946). The famous dream sequence for Hitchcock’s thriller brought to a grand scale the imagery of contemporary paintings such as Melancholy, Atomic, Uranic Idyll, 1945. On the cinema screen total immersion in Dalí’s imagination became possible for a mass audience.

Dalí& Film is conceived with the collaboration of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation in Figueres. It brings together a team of scholars who will contribute to the comprehensive catalogue: Dawn Ades (curator of Salvador Dalí: Centenary Exhibition), Montse Aguer (Director of the Centre d’Estudis Dalinians), Félix Fanès (curator of Dalí: Cultura de Masas) and Tate curator Matthew Gale (author of Dada and Surrealism). The exhibition will tour to Los Angeles County Museum of Art 7 October 2007 – 6 January 2008 and then to Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida 4 February – 21 May 2008 (to be confirmed)

Visit the Tate Modern at : www.tate.org.uk/modern/ Open every day from 10.00 – 18.00 and late night until 22.00 on Friday and Saturday.