Hello Dalí!

Today after work I walked the lovely route through the Barbican, past St. Paul's Cathedral and across the Thames on the Millennium Bridge to the Tate Modern to see the new Dalí & Film exhibit. I first started enjoying the work of Salvador Dalí as a college student in Madison; several posters of his art ended up on my walls.

This exhibit featured the early Surrealist films Un Chien andalou and L'Age d'or, plus a dream sequence for the Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound. But a highlight for me was the I-never-knew-it-happened collaboration with Walt Disney on a short animation, Destino. It was started in the late 40s but only recently finished by Disney animators. I watched it twice. It's clearly a Dalí film - it repeats much of his common imagery like ants crawling on the palm of one's hand, melting clock faces, bearded men riding bicycles with French bread on their heads, cracked eggs, and of course the sandy landscapes with distant rocks - but there's a recognisable Disney look in the face of the girl and her movements.

I knew some paintings were included in the exhibit, but I didn't expect the collection I found: it was practically Dalí's Greatest Hits. Some of my college posters were there, and many more from a coffee table book I have, most on loan from other museums. Even The Persistence of Memory, the famous melting-watch painting, the Mona Lisa of Surrealism, was on loan from MoMA in New York, where I'd seen it last summer. The gallery wasn't crowded at all, so it was a neat experience to stand right in front of original paintings that I'd first encountered as reproductions decades ago. (And sometimes you have to stand right in front of them - some aren't much larger than postcards.) But it was a great surprise to see many of the best works of one of my favourite artists collected in one place.