Cherylann Mollan
BBC News, Mumbai
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Salvador Dalí is one of the most famous supporters of surrealist art
Although the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí has never visited India, his works should be posted in the country for the first time.
From Friday, an exhibition in the capital Delhi will present a large collection of more than 200 of its original sketches, watercolors and watercolors.
The collection was organized by Christine Argillet, daughter of Pierre Argillet, a French collector who was also the friend and publisher of Dalí.
“Dalí was fascinated by India, in particular, the Fascination of the West for Indian mysticism in the 1960s and 1970s,” Argillet told the BBC.
Some of the sketches in the collection are based on photographs that his father had taken during a trip to India in the 1970s, when the hippie movement was at its peak and young Americans visited India in spiritual quests .
Dalí India offers elephants and temples, but, as with all its works, they are not always easy to spot, having been returned in the surrealist style of the artist’s brand.
In his works, human bodies push flowers of their heads; The eyeballs dance in a matrix of scribbles and cerebral vascular accidents and dismembered body parts interact with animation with the world around them. Look more than a minute and these disconnected forms are starting to form new connections and meanings in the eye of the mind.
“To appreciate Dalí’s art is like taking the layers of an onion; you can continue to find something new to marvel,” explains Ms. Argillet.
Bruno Art Gallery / Road Show Company
Fleurée on the piano, one of the sketches of the collection
Bringing Dalí’s work to India was a long and arduous company, explains Akshitta Aggarwal by Bruno Art Group, the international art gallery presenting the exhibition.
“The project took five years; each sketch and work of art had to be checked for its authenticity,” said Ms. Aggarwal.
Strictly speaking, this is not the first time that Dalí’s creations have come to India. In 1967, Dalí designed a set of fanciful ashtrays for Air India – the country’s national airline at the time – which were distributed to first class passengers.
In return, Dalí demanded not money but a baby elephant. Uttara Parikh, then Air India sales director, said the Times of India newspaper how she initially did shopping for a zoo in the city of Mumbai but returned empty -handed.
She finally bought the baby elephant in a zoo in Bangalore City (now Bengaluru) and Air India stole the animal in Spain, where it was kept in a zoo until its death in 2018. (Dalí had exciting plans For the elephant, like the company a trip through the Alps, but his wife dissuaded him from trying to make them).
Dalí’s demand may seem scandalous, but those who know the artist and his inheritance know that this was very consistent with his personality.
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The persistence of memory is one of Dalí’s most famous paintings (it is not part of the exhibition)
Born in Spain in 1904, Dalí grew up in a world that kissed the avant-garde and responded to the fallout from two world wars. The creatives of his time, like Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and André Breton, found new ways to express himself and their artistic ideas and styles strongly influenced a young Dalí.
The surrealist movement, widely recognized as founded by André Breton, has resonated him the most. Surrealist art pleaded for a form of expression which was “dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason”, according to Breton.
Dalí was also strongly inspired by Sigmund Freud and his theories around psychoanalysis – a method of treatment of mental diseases by focusing on conflicts from a person’s psyche. Dreams take on particular importance because they are supposed to express a person’s repressed thoughts and desires.
Consequently, Dalí’s art reflects many of these ideas – they have an almost dreamy quality and thanks to a free association, the visuals take meanings that are unique to the spectator. There are also visceral images, almost shocking, a bit like prohibited desires of lying hidden in the subconscious mind.
“Dalí was a franc-minigno and he kissed all the facets of the human condition, in particular the taboo and disturbing,” explains Ms. Argillet.
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Dalí has also made sculptures, furniture and collaborated with fashion designers. Here is his famous lobster phone
The artist’s external character reflected his colorful vision of life. He dressed in flamboyant costumes and sported a mustache that pointed so seriously that she seemed in danger of breaking her eyes. In an interview of 1955 with the BBC, Dalí revealed the origins of its famous turned mustache.
“Dates, you know the fruit? At the last moment of dinner, I did not clean my finger and I put a little in my mustache and it remains for the whole afternoon very effectively”, it He said but later revealed that he had used a strong wax to shape his mustache.
In the same interview, he described his mustache as “very gay, very sharp, very aggressive”.
Bruno Art Gallery / Road Show Company
Dalí’s bust is part of the collection that is exhibited in Delhi
Ms. Argillet, who knew Dalí intimately during his childhood and adolescence and often spent her summers in Spain with her father, remembers that Dalí being a humorous person who liked to play pranks and “shock the bourgeois”.
He once encouraged him to take candy from his room and throw them on fishermen on a neighboring beach. Only candies turned out to be cherry bombs, annoying the fishermen and forcing a young MS Argillet to run.
“During one of his parties, he had a turtle carrying an ashtray on his shell,” said Ms. Argillet.
But she adds that he was also a shy, intuitive and observer person who had a talent to read the minds of people. He painted in his studio in short pants and slippers and, according to Ms. Argillet, it was the shyness of Dalí who made him too efficient in public.
“He was misunderstood by many. There were many diapers in Dalí, just like his paintings,” said Ms. Argillet.
“The more you look at his paintings, the more you understand Dalí.”
The exhibition “Dali comes to India” will be held at the India Habitat Center from February 7 to February 13 and at the Masarrat gallery by Bruno Art Group from February 15 to March 16.
