Dali: Painting And Film

Comprising a gallery presentation of more than 130 paintings, drawings, scenarios, letters, and films in The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery on the sixth floor of the Museum and a six-part program of more than 50 films in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, the exhibition explores the central role of cinema in Dali's work as both an inspiration and an outlet for experimentation. The exhibition is on view from June 29 to September 15, 2008, with the first film program beginning on June 20.

The exhibition is organized by Tate Modern in collaboration with The Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation. It is coordinated for MoMA by Jodi Hauptman, Curator, Department of Drawings; the film exhibition is organized by Anne Morra, Assistant Curator, Department of Film.

Ms. Hauptman states: "Dali homed in on cinema's seemingly contradictory ability to combine the real and the surreal, the actual and the imaginary, the objective and the imaginative, the prosaic and the poetic. Whether still or moving, painted or shot, Dali's works are meant to wholly intoxicate their viewers, offering an experience provoked by an image but played out in the mind."

Ms. Morra states: "The first cinema in Dali's home town of Figueres opened just seven months after he was born—a curious convergence that foreshadowed his enduring relationship with the cinema. The cross-fertilization of ideas, influences, and new cinematic technology created a truly modern means of artistic expression for Dali and his colleagues; his was the first generation of artists who engaged the emergent medium as a fundamental component of their aesthetic process."

Film was a passion for Dali and cinematic vision became a model for his own work. In the sixth-floor galleries, collaborations between Dali and legendary filmmakers, including Luis Bunuel, Walt Disney, and Alfred Hitchcock, are projected on large screens alongside his paintings to show the way ideas, iconography, and pictorial strategies are shared and transformed across mediums. The installation includes some of the most provocative films of the early twentieth century, including Un Chien andalou (1929), a film made with Bunuel, which features the almost unwatchable sequence of an eye being slit by a razor; L'Age d'or (1930), another collaboration with Bunuel and one of the landmarks of Surrealist film; and such iconic paintings as The First Days of Spring (1929), Illumined Pleasures (1929), and The Persistence of Memory (1931).

MoMA's presentation of Dali: Painting and Film is distinguished by a six-part film program in the Museum's theaters that features examples of the popular and avant-garde motion pictures Dali treasured, those that he made, and the works his innovative aesthetic influenced. The six programs are:

• Salvador Dali: Creator/Collaborator (June 20–28) includes such films as Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), which features a dream sequence by Dali, and Manuel Cusso- Ferrer's Babaouo (2000), a film based on Dali's 1932 Surrealist scenario.

• Dali Laughs (July 7–16) features the comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, whose bizarre slapstick humor Dali loved, as well as a rare 1954 silent home movie of Dali mimicking the mannerisms of film comedians.

• Salvador Dali and Three American Surrealists (July 23–28) features films by Harpo Marx, Walt Disney, and Cecil B. DeMille.

• Salvador Dali: Consumer/Consumed (August 4–24 and September 10–15) explores the pictorial and cinematic iconography produced by Dali that also became the catalyst for a distinct visual language consumed by other filmmakers.

• Dali in New York (September, dates to be announced), which focuses on Dali's curious personal and aesthetic relationship with New York City, includes footage of Dali's 1939 World's Fair pavilion, The Dream of Venus, and Jack Bond's Dali in New York (1966).

• Salvador Dali: Creator/Collaborator Redux (September 10 and 15) is an encore presentation of Un Chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930). -- www.moma.org