Tag: dali museum

Antiques Magazine Cover by Salvador Dalí (1904– 1989), 1974. Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida, gift of A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, © Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, Florida, 2017. Salvador Dalí is a figure who transcends fine art and popular culture. Known as much for his assertive mustache as for his fantastical paintings— such as the melting clocks of The Persistence of Memory—the Catalan artist was a shrewd manipulator of his own image and was fascinated by celebrity, iconography, and mass media. Part pop artist, part avant-garde visionary, part madman, Dalí took the everyday and transformed it into the surreal. Dalí’s vision was of a world without boundaries— houses made of dreams, sofas in the shape of lips, telephones with lobsters for handpieces. He created jewel-encrusted brooches in the shape of sea creatures for wealthy art collectors, but he also cut up magazines to make collages. Nothing was too mundane to escape his manipulation. Perhaps his most famous collage is Mae West’s Face which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment, in which he transformed the sultry performer’s hair into curtains and her lips into a stylish divan. Other experimentations with magazines were unearthed during the 2004 exhibition Dalí and Mass Culture: doodles of ants upon crossword puzzles and a Life magazine cover wherein he added anatomical detail to two female sculptures. The extent to which Dalí used magazines in his work is difficult to ascertain, as these creations seem done in haste and with ephemerality. Salvador Dalí [sic] with ocelot friend at St Regis by Roger Higgins for the World Telegram and Sun, 1965. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division. Thus, it was not until very recently that many of us on the ANTIQUES editorial staff became aware that Dalí employed