Púbol and Portlligat, 12 March 2008
Coinciding with the reaponening of the Houses-Museum in Púbol and Portlligat, the Dalí Foundation inaugurated this year’s temporary exhibition Salvador Dalí and Magazines at the Gala Dalí Castle in Púbol, where it can be seen until 31 December 2008.
The inauguration ceremony was conducted by Rafael Nadal, Director of El Periódico daily newspaper, Ramon Boixadós, Chairman of the Dalí Foundation, Antoni Pitxot, Director of the Dalí Theatre-Museum, and Montse Aguer, Director of the Centre for Dalinian Studies.
The exhibition contains 77 items: 74 magazines and newspapers and 3 of Salvador Dalí’s own works on printed paper. The theme revolves around the collaboration of Salvador Dalí in the world of magazines and the print media in general, which is varied and extensive. Dalí did not restrict himself to writing articles, but also created covers and advertisements and illustrated his own writings and that of others. He also used the press in collage form as a medium for his own work and as a source of inspiration, whereby a cover, an image, a text that had appeared in the press could be – and in some cases were – transformed into a different image, a different reading, so becoming works of his own. All this activity led him, at various times over his career, to design pages and even an entire publication, the Dali News.
Out of a wish to reflect this intense and passionate intervention by Dalí in the written media, which he also used to consolidate the artist’s image that he had himself been constructing, we present this exhibition following the structure of the magazines themselves, starting with the covers, followed by the articles and adverts to be found inside, and ending with the overall design. Both the exhibition itself and the catalogue have therefore been structured into 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
Dalí the personality covers
2. Illustrated articles
3. Advertisements
4. Towards total design: Dali News and Vogué
5. Contributions to manuscripts and magazine articles
6. Collages
7. Comic strips, depicting Dalí and his work.
In conclusion, the words of the photographer Philippe Halsman sum up this presence: “Dalí is a surrealist. But despite that, he is himself the most surrealistic of all his creations”. This is the spirit in which his intervention in the world of magazines has to be understood, particularly in the 1940s. And the way he is portrayed in many comic strips, in which Dalí and his oeuvre (particularly the familiar soft clocks) are treated with a certain more or less amiable irony, the result in any case from his undeniable fame.
