One of our favourite things to do in all of our travels is experience art in the area. In the past, we have visited some of the most well-known galleries in the world, but the Salvador Dali Museum in Florida was unlike any other.
Since the gallery didn’t allow photos, I turned to the museum’s website and mobile app for images and information.
Salvador Dali (1904-1989) took bold risks in the art industry, earning him a reputation as a daring innovator. His unique paintings, sculptures, and films are easily recognizable because of how eccentric and memorable they are. He was a leader in the surrealist art period beginning in the early 1920s, part of the classical art period in the 1950s, and continued to work on his art right up until he died at the age of 84. Even after death, his art carries on his name globally and continues to inspire others to push boundaries.
The museum’s design reflects Dali’s fascination with scientific innovation and technology. His ideas about how we interact with the world are clearly woven into the exhibits.
Here are some of our personal highlights featured throughout the gallery:
Augmented reality and VR
Augmented reality made exploring the Salvador Dali Museum a completely unique experience. Using the museum app, we went on virtual tours around the galleries where we could point our cameras to an art piece, and through our phone cameras, we could see the art piece in motion, and hear the explanations about them.
In addition, there was a gallery where we were able to put on virtual reality glasses and immerse ourselves in his famous 1935 painting: Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s “Angelus”.
Spirals
Dali’s fascination with DNA and spirals frequently appeared in his artwork. In honour of this, a unique feature of the building itself was a helical staircase representing the double helical structure of DNA.
Venus De Milo With Drawers (and pom poms)
Dali created this sculpture based on Michelangelo’s Venus De Milo located at the Louvre in Paris. The drawers cut into the woman’s body challenge classical imagery. They likely represent areas of the unconscious that Dali believed psychoanalysis could unlock. When we were in France in 2014, we were lucky enough to see the Venus De Milo statue that Dali based his artwork on, and it was very impressive, to say the least. I found it fascinating to see how one artist was inspired by another and created something new based on it.
The Hallucinogenic Toreador
This was one of our favourite paintings at the gallery. Initially, you can see multiples of the Venus de Milo, but if you look a little longer, you can see the head of a toreador looking out from the centre of the painting. The green skirt of the Venus de Milo forms a shirt and tie, her stomach forms the chin, and her face forms the eye of the toreador. The red skirt represents his cape for bull-fighting, and the bull can be found on the opposite side of the painting drinking from a pool of water. He was inspired to paint this after buying a box of coloured pencils with a picture of the famous Venus de Milo sculpture on it, but decided that when he looked closely he saw the face of a bullfighter.
Daddy Longlegs of the Evening-Hope!
This painting was created in 1940 and was the first painting Dali completed when he came to America during the war. This painting mainly represents what was happening in Europe at the time. Some of these include the inkwells representing the signing of treaties, ants eating the defaced woman draped over the tree representing the destruction “swallowing” Europe, and the cello that looks as though it is melting represents the loss of culture.
Throughout our travels, we have visited many different art galleries that all had different aspects that made them unique. This experience reminded me of the Louvre the most because of the frequent representation of the Venus De Milo. Overall, we were all extremely impressed by the Salvador Dali Museum, and we are excited to continue our quest to experience art internationally!
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