The Brilliance of Dali

When I was a kid Salvador Dali was just a weird guy. I did not appreciate his art as surrealism was just above my childish head. Today Russ and I went to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was a fabulous experience.  
The museum, which is the collection of one couple from Cleveland, came to be in St. Petersburg because no major museum would take their collection in the mid 1970’s. The collector, Mr. Morse, ran a full page story in the Wall Street Journal about the fact that no museum would take the collection and it caught the eye of a young lawyer in St. Petersburg who convinced the Morse Family to donate 92 works of Dali art to a new all Dali museum to be built around their collection. Since that donation the museum has gone on to increase the size of the collection to 2100 works of Dali art.

Dali is most well known for his melting clocks and the museum has one of the two melting clocks works. It is fine, but the real highlight of the museum are 8 of the 22 large format works he made in his later years.

One is a portrait of his wife Gala, from the rear, but if you view it for far enough away you realize it is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. These giant format works best viewed in person so yo can see the optical illusions Dali had painted into them.

After a great time discovering the genius of Dali, Russ and I enjoyed a lovely Spanish lunch outside in the garden from the museum cafe. The gazpacho had us right back in Spain. What a treat it all was.