Long before Salvador Dalí’s name became practically interchangeable with Surrealism, the Art Institute of Chicago acquired several of his works, becoming one of the Spanish artist’s earliest institutional champions in the United States. As curator Jennifer Cohen says, the museum has had “Dalís on our walls consistently from the 1940s to today.” Still, “Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears,” on display now through June 12, marks the museum’s first retrospective of the artist.
However, it’s a narrow one, and intentionally so. The Art Institute focused “The Image Disappears” on a single chapter of Dalí’s life: the 1930s, the decade “Dali becomes Dali,” according to co-curator Caitlin Haskell. “He’s making his grand appearance on the scene in the United States—showing in American galleries, working in Hollywood and fashion, making a huge splash,” she says. “At the same time, as we studied our paintings, we noticed all these different kinds of disappearance happening. . . . We were really interested in drawing out that contradiction.”
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The Art Institute borrowed 11 artworks from other collections for the occasion and took its own Dalís off the walls for closer study—which, in one case, led to the biggest Dalí-related breakthrough in decades. Below is a guide to a half-dozen of the 50 Dalí works in the exhibition, including the one about which Cohen and Haskell made their big discovery.
Source: artnews.com