Divine Dali and His One-Man Show
By Maria Zabelyshinskaya and Lisa Solomatina
Keep questioning. Humankind has accumulated and created feelings and knowledge over the time to share with us. Experiencing and drawing inspiration from it is the best way to develop and create.
So use every chance to take in the iconic pieces of art.
So use every chance to take in the iconic pieces of art.
One of the most influential movements in 20th-century art – Surrealism – became a household name in large part thanks to its association with Salvador Dalí's paintings. Today, Salvador Dalí remains one of the most popular – if not the most popular – artists in the world, and millions of people visit exhibitions dedicated to his artworks every year.
The display at The Manege Central Exhibition Hall featured over 180 works by Dalí: paintings, drawings, watercolors and engravings.
The display at The Manege Central Exhibition Hall featured over 180 works by Dalí: paintings, drawings, watercolors and engravings.
The exposition allows visitors to enjoy Salvador Dalí's long creative journey, studying every stage of his development as a painter. It's a brilliant opportunity to follow his creative path starting from Impressionist landscapes he made in his youth in the 1910s and ending with his final abstract canvases from the 1980s.
| Experts claim that it's Dalí's 'more mature output", created in his Surrealist and Nuclear Mystical periods, that had a major influence on a global art. These eras are represented in the exhibition by the paintings such as The Invisible Man (1929-32), The Sense of Speed (1931), Millet's Architectonic "Angelus" (1933), Enigmatic Elements in a Landscape (1934), Soft Self Portrait with Grilled Bacon (1941), Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll (1945), Dematerialization under the Nose of Nero (1947), Maximum Speed of Raphael's Madonna (1954) and other masterpieces. All of them made Dalí a world-famous figure and helped shape his inimitable style. |
The exhibition's uniqueness consisted in the representation of Maestro's philosophy.
He chose art in its different forms as a lifestyle and followed it, working in different areas. Dalí was fascinated with fantasy, costumes, jewelry, Hollywood and the stage. There are numerous illustrations and artworks linked to the world of theatre and musicals. Dalí worked on ballets, wrote librettos, set design and costumes; he was a multi-disciplinary artist who was not afraid to experiment with different genres of art. That's why the exhibition contains not only Dali's pictures as distinct works of art but also his brilliant «collaborations» with literature, animation and cinema. One of the exhibition halls showed visitors fragments from his movie and the cartoon.
Special attention deserves the hall dedicated to Dali's illustrations for "The Divine Comedy", a famous Italian poem written by Dante Alighieri. Reading the Poem, Dali got the ideas how to illustrate each chapter. The main feature of this paintings is their seeming simplicity. It looked like it didn't take the artist a lot of time to paint these minimalistic masterpieces: a poor range of colors, the lack of details in the background. However, every work accurately conveys the content of the chapter. If you read "The Divine Comedy", you would have no problem interpreting the images.
However interesting and grabbing the exhibition was, there was one negative aspect that could spoil your enjoyment of art. Crowds: there were so many people that sometimes it was difficult to push through in order to see the paintings.
"Magic art," or "magic craftsmanship," as Dalí called his pictures, implies that the perfection of technique was as important for the 20th-century artists as it was for the masters of the Renaissance: the play of lights, diverse range of colors, unique technics, combination of different forms of art, illusions – it's all about Salvador Dali's artworks. If you want to discover the genius of Dali, you shall definitely visit his surrealistic exhibitions.
Photos made by Maria Zabelyshinskaya and Lisa Solomatina
