■ WHAT IS A DALÍ SCULPTURE? WHAT WAS DALÍ’S INVOLVEMENT? HOW WERE DALÍ SCULPTURES CREATED?
A.) HISTORICAL BACKGROUND – SALVADOR DALÍ AND SURREALIST SCULPTURE A. Reynolds Morse, the late President of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, describes Dalí’s initial involvement in the creation of threedimensional artworks in his text, “The Dimensions of Surrealism” (written specifically for Mr Beniamino Levi and to be used in any of his catalogues):
Salvador Dalí often stated that while he studied sculpting at school in Madrid, and could sculpt as well as any of his contemporaries, still he did not consider himself a sculptor. He told us that instead he specialised in ‘transformations’. He emphasised over and over that it was the IDEA – the surrealist idea – of seeing something new, especially in extraneous objects, which made his work in three dimensional forms unique. Dalí’s sculptures are the very epitome of Surrealism, as it lived on beyond its allotted time and in the lengthening shadows of its original founders: the last souls struggling for identity between two great wars. Thus, it was Dalí’s own sort of private surrealism, living on into other subsequent eras, including AbstractExpressionism, Pop Art, Op Art and the New Realism that is the real trademark of his genius and so, his objects can honestly be said to reflect his great paranoiac-critical method of creating ‘new ideas’. The exhibition of Dalinian objects is thus incontrovertible and living proof that Salvador Dalí was always ahead of the times in which he lived. His ‘objects’, however produced, by whom or in what quantities, are clear-cut proof that ideas are more important in art than even craftsmanship, for the latter is a mere mechanical skill and does not involve the difficult process of real creativity. Today vast ‘art’ industries are still trading for enormous profits, using nothing more than Dalí’s ideas reproduced in countless ways. (A. Reynolds Morse, late President of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, in his text “The Dimensions of Surrealism”) Dalí himself, in his famous article “Hommage a l’Objet”, which appeared in the ‘Cahier d’Art’ in 1936, wrote “The surreal object is impracticable; it serves only to move man, to innervate and then to confuse. Therefore the surrealist object is made only to honor thought.”
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