THE DIVINE COMEDY
SALVADOR DALI
November 17th 2010 – January 31th 2011
The exhibition starts on a world tour from Bulgaria Salvador Dali’s graphic oeuvre is presented in a joint project by the National Gallery for Foreign Art and the Museum Gallery of Modern Art
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The National Gallery for Foreign Art presents the Divine Comedy cycle by Salvador Dali, on loan from a private collection in the USA. This is a complete bibliophile edition consisting of 100 coloured wood engravings after the watercolours series of the Spanish Surrealist artist.
The Divine Comedy exhibition was opened by the Minister of Culture, Mr Vezhdi Rashidov, and Archduke Dr Geza von Habsburg, art historian of world renown. Present at the event were Ms Denitsa Atanassova, president of the Museum Gallery of Modern Art, prominent public figures, diplomats, artists and friends of the National Gallery for Foreign Art.
This is the most important exhibition of graphic works by Dali staged so far in Bulgaria. The first one of 1990 held at the National Gallery showed 42 etchings by the artist from the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague. After an interval of two decades the present show is the second devoted to the art of the great Spanish master and is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the Gallery.
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There will be on display for the first time selected decompositions (colour analyses) of several prints from the Divina Commedia illustrating the consecutive stages in the process of creating the individual engravings.
Salvador Dali is doubtless one of the most widely known figures in twentieth-century art whose magic appeal has not waned until the present day. The object of antipodal judgments, his oeuvre is unfailingly stupefying the public by its scope and the temerity of gesture, which commands the obsessively spectacular manifestations of his personality.
In Dali’s works of his mature Surrealist period the artist’s imagination combines the three-dimensional absurdness of dreams with the metamorphoses of familiar objects and hallucinatory fragments of images from his own surrounding reality, ‘nailed down’ in the perspective of monumental metaphoric visions.
The artist’s life-work encompasses a countless body of paintings and sculptures, drawings, prints, illustrations, stage sceneries, eccentric aesthetic theories and writings, as well as his activity as film script-writer, director and artist and, indeed, the creator of a perfume bearing his name.
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Dali’s watercolour illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri after which the engravings were made were originally commissioned by the Italian government in 1953 to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the great Italian poet’s birth. For a number of reasons this project was dropped and somewhat later two French publishers, Joseph Foret and Jean Estrade, undertook the publication of the series in a six-volume bibliophile edition comprising the full text of the poem in French. The realization of this project took some ten years and the publication appeared in two variants: a deluxe edition in 33 copies, and an ordinary one in 4765 copies. Under the artist’s direct supervision, the illustrations were reproduced by a team of experienced engravers in the medium of the coloured wood engraving.
For the transfer of the watercolour illustrations, separate woodblocks are cut for each colour area, the final image being the result of the progressive overlaying of the colour impressions taken from the blocks. Interim impressions were taken from each colour or combinations thereof (so-called decompositions), which show the state of the image at a given stage. Examples of these (11 each from three illustrations) are also shown at the exhibition, accompanying the entire suite.
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In Dali’s illustrations, the classic watercolour wash is translated into the language of the wood engraving, which imparts to it its specific subtlety. The text of the poem itself is interpreted in a novel and unconventional way especially if compared to the sombre grandeur of Gustave Dore’s classical illustrations or the exquisite poetry of Botticelli’s drawings. Dali’s imagination follows the familiar shadows of Dante’s poem inscribing them into strange compositions frequently mingled with elements of his own phantastic imagery. Thus their eternal meaning is brought closer to our time, while the spectator embarks on an extraordinary journey in the world of two geniuses.
This remarkable project, realized by the two galleries, offers the Bulgarian audience an artwork of all-European relevance. Thanks to the kind support of Globul and UniCredit Bulbank, Salvador Dali’s graphic masterpiece will delight the lovers of modern art until January 17th 2011.
The Divine Comedy cycle will start on its world tour from Sofia, a fact, which renders the event all the more significant not only to the Bulgarian audience, but also to the art loving public in other cultural capitals. Works of this important for the Spanish artist series are on display in the permanent exhibition of the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueras.
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