PHILADELPHIA, PA “”mdash; The West Coast was well represented at
the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s restrospective exhibition
marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Salvador DalÃ,
the Spanish surrealist known for his iconic painting of melting
clocks. Among those who trekked from the Pacific to see the over
200 works on display were Diane Lipe and her son Matt, on spring
break, who came out from Seattle on what Diane said was their
“cultural vacation.” After hitting Broadway in New
York, the two and other family members made their way to
Pennsylvania, hoping to get tickets to DalÃ. Determined to use
public transportation, the Lipes hopped on the subway and rode from
Chestnut Hill, where they were staying, to the 30th Street station,
one of the closest to the museum and about a half hour’s walk
away. They climbed the roughly 100 steps lining the museum’s
east entrance. At the top late in the morning, they found two small
sandwich board signs announcing the most disappointing news: The
show was sold out. “You can buy presales,” Diane said,
sharing newly discovered information. Matt, a second-year economics
and cinema student at the University of Washington, had been hoping
to see “the one with the clocks.” The “one with
the tigers jumping out is kind of cool too,” he added. The
melting clocks painting, “The Persistence of Memory,”
resides at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which refused to
hand it over to Philadelphia for the three-month exhibit. (Michael
Taylor, the show’s highly energetic curator, said he
considers this a short-sighted move, given the scope of
Philadelphia’s event.) Still, the show that was supposed to
end this week is in high demand and was extended to May 30. Tickets
sell out early, with a steady stream of visitors turned away at the
door. Taylor said even with the $20 charge per adult, he expects
the museum to sell about 500,000 tickets to DalÃ, which
represents about half the number of patrons who peruse the
museum’s halls annually. “He’s got universal
appeal,” Taylor said. “The way he works has that kind
of hallucinatory quality … his kind of paranoid way of looking at
the world.” “I thought (the price) was a bit
high,” he said, “but then the numbers that
they’ve been selling …” Lines snaking around the east
entrance lobby were added proof of the show’s popularity.
Inside, eager patrons craned their necks trying to see over one
another to catch a glimpse of the paintings, photographic in
quality, a testament to the artist’s meticulous style. The
crowds in Philadelphia will likely be mirrored 2,500 miles away
this June when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opens to the
public its exhibit honoring the late King Tut. Though the pharaoh
ruled and died about 3,200 years before the Spanish surrealist was
born, both became centerpieces of public fascination in the earlier
half of the 20th century. Like DalÃ, the boy king of Egypt has
wide appeal, and the museum is bracing for a large influx of
patrons.
From Crowd to Crowd Titled “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age
of the Pharaohs,” the LACMA show is the first stop for a
27-month U.S. show put together by National Geographic, AEG LIVE
Exhibitions, Arts and Exhibitions International and the Egyptian
Supreme Council of Antiquities. Fifty major objects from King
Tut’s tomb ““ including a gold crown and fancy inlaid
canopic coffinette that held mummified internal organs ““ will
be on display from June 16 to Nov. 15. More than 70 treasures and
artifacts from other royal graves will also be at the museum. Tut
first captured public attention in 1922 when the English
archaeologist Howard Carter unsealed his tomb, revealing a slew of
artifacts in mint condition that had been buried for three
millennia with the boy. (Tut’s body was also well-preserved.)
As at the Dalà exhibit, Tut tickets are selling fast and
presales are almost gone for June, sales operators say. To
accommodate heavy crowds, operators at both the Tut and DalÃ
exhibits encourage visitors to buy early. Selling tickets for a
specified hour of the day is one solution the two museums have come
up with to ensure a smooth flow of patrons. The LACMA show will be
the first time in nearly three decades that the King Tut’s
treasures will be in Los Angeles, and tickets weigh in at an even
heftier price than DalÃ: $25 for adults and $22 for college
students on weekdays.
Behind Closed Doors Back in Philadelphia, those lucky enough to
make it into the show might have seen one of Taylor’s
favorite Dalà pieces hanging near the back of the exhibit.
“I’m a big sucker for this very large painting called
“˜The Railway Station at Perpignan,'” Taylor says.
That work, four meters wide and three in height, was
DalÃ’s way of commemorating his “discovery”
in 1963 that the train station at “Perpignan,” in the
French Pyrenees, was the center of the universe. On Sept. 19 that
year, the day he had his revelation, Dalà asked a cab driver
to circle the station, which was cast in the fiery “egg-yolk
yellow and golden red” shades of sunset, according to the
museum’s catalog for the show. Those are the tones that
dominate the piece. At the center is a small, full-bodied DalÃ
suspended at the meeting point of four beams of bright light
““ like a helicopter’s propellers ““ that form the
negative space between the branches of a Maltese cross. On the left
is a peasant holding a hat, facing his wife who has her hands
clenched in prayer at the opposite edge of the painting. While
“Perpignan” fascinates Taylor, critics don’t
always share his enthusiasm. Many challenge DalÃ’s
prominence, saying the work he did in the decade following 1929 was
not only his best, but that it far outpaced his later achievements.
Art savants assert Dalà is shallow, frequently citing his
refusal to take a stance on the Spanish Civil War, the subject of
his 1936 painting “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans
(Premonition of Civil War).” The piece, which
Philadelphia’s museum owns, is widely called
DalÃ’s greatest achievement; yet, with all its
morbidity, depicting the convulsive parts of a human body
continuing to tear itself apart, its artist remained neutral about
the conflict. To Taylor, some of those criticizing
DalÃ’s art are judging in too narrow of terms.
“It’s just this amazing image,” he said,
referring to “˜Soft Construction.’ “It’s
just full of anguish. This is a profound statement.” Taylor
says he arranged Philadelphia’s show more by theme than by
chronology. There is Taylor’s “jewel room,” which
houses tiny paintings, one as small as seven by nine centimeters. A
group of pieces under the title “The Disintegration of
Matter” depict particles making up larger images, ingrained
with a sense of explosive motion reflecting DalÃ’s
inclination toward physics after the United States dropped atomic
bombs in Japan. In “The Sistine Madonna” (1958) and
“Portrait of My Dead Brother” (1963), Dalà applies
a Benday dot pattern, like that which appears when a printed image
is blown up. Part of DalÃ’s “genius” was his
ability to work “ahead of his time,” to anticipate
artists along the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Taylor
says. “I saw the show as sort of an unfolding drama,”
Taylor said. “I wanted every room to have an internal
coherence.”
Left Out in the Cold James Tsay, a Temple University medical
student from San Diego, was at the museum on a Friday afternoon in
late March taking pictures of a giant black-and-white DalÃ
portrait by photographer Philippe Halsman that was reproduced on
the east entrance stairs. Tsay said he was just introducing
Philadelphia to a friend visiting from Los Angeles, but had seen
the show a few weeks before. The crowds were suffocating, but he
appreciated the chance to see the paintings in true form, to view
up close the hidden images layered in the art, he said. (Those
latent images are what make DalÃ’s hallmark
“paranoic critical” method.) Morgan Lipe, another
Temple University student, whose family had come from Seattle for
her and the show, said after living with the barrage of DalÃ
advertising strangling the entire city for months, she was a bit
disappointed at being turned away. “I’m a little
bummed,” she said, standing outside with cold air biting her
nose.