Nestled next to the bay in St. Petersburg is the Salvadore Dali Art museum. Mackenzie needed to go to an art museum for one of her college courses and asked me to tag along. I am so happy she did. All I really knew about Dali was the weird handlebar moustache and his even weirder paintings like The Disintegration of Persistent Memory, or as we all know it, the melting clock.I was so buzzed after going I am now a new fan of Dali.
Our museum holds the world's largest collection and how we got it is a nice story. A couple in Cleveland had bought many Dali's for their home and soon ran out of room. They built a place in Ohio near his business but it, too, began to be space prohibitive. They sent out a nationwide notice to interested cities if they would like to house the artwork. The one caveat was that the works could never be split up and/or sold. Many museums dropped out because of that stipulation except a visionary group here in St. Pete who took up the monetary challenge and was awarded the project. A new Dali museum is being built now and move-in date is around January 2011.
The setting is beautiful with scores of craft docked in the marina.
Dali was at the forefront of the surrealist movement. We are likely aware of his melting clock kind of artwork. However, he was also a classicist in the traditional way as we will explore in Friday's entry. Here is a 5 minute video of Dali and towards the end some of his paintings which are bizarre, strange, eerie, ludicrous, beautiful images of dreams and nightmares.
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