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Salvador Dalí and magazines
The exhibition contains 77 items: 74 magazines and newspapers and 3 printed papers with interventions of Dalí. The theme of the exhibition is the varied and extensive collaboration of Salvador Dalí with the world of magazines and print media in general.
Dalí did not restrict himself to writing articles; he also designed covers and advertisements as well as illustrated his own writings and that of others. He also used magazine for collages in his own work and as a source of inspiration whereby a cover, an image, a text from a magazine or a newspaper could be - and in some cases were - transformed into a different image, a different reading, and became works of his own. This led him, at various times of his career, to design pages for magazines and even an entire publication of its own entitled the Dali News.
Wishing to reflect this intense and passionate intervention of Dalí in the written media -that he also used to consolidate his artistic image-, we organized this exhibition following the structure of the magazines themselves, starting with the covers, followed by the articles and adverts , and ending with the overall design. Both the exhibition itself and the catalogue have therefore been structured in a series of sections, providing a complete overview of Dalí's relationship with periodical publications:
1. Covers designed by Dalí
Covers reproducing work by Dalí
Covers where Dalí appears as a character
2. Illustrated articles
3. Advertisements
4. Towards total design: Dali News and Vogue
5. Participation in manuscripts and texts in magazines
6. Collages
7. Comic strips, where Dalí and his works appear.
We can conclude with the words of the photographer Philippe Halsman: "Dalí is a surrealist. But despite that, he is himself the most surrealistic of all his creations". This is the spirit in which we have to understand his intervention in the world of magazines, particularly in the 1940s. And the way that Dalí and his oeuvre (especially the famous soft clocks) were portrayed in many comic strips, often time with a certain irony, is only a proof of his undeniable fame at the time.
