Visiting The Dalí Museum: Visiting The Dalli Museum

Visiting the Dalí Museum is always an enchanting and haunting experience. I had been several times previously simply due to my love of art and how close the museum is to my home in Florida. Every inch of the museum was constructed with Salvador Dalí in mind- from the outside appearance of the building to the infinite spiral staircase ascending the three levels to the immense floor to ceiling window that encompasses an entire side of the museum. The museum offers a permanent collection of Dalí’s work in addition to another collection that changes three times a year. For this paper, I focused on the permanent collection of artwork by Dalí. One thing that is apparent in viewing Dalí’s paintings is that his transition from a normal painter to

The painting illustrates a looming bald head, waxy and yellow, with holes that are reminiscent of swiss cheese. The head is empty except for some with tiny shells and pebbles. The way the figure’s head is bowed with eye closed and no ears to hear shows how the figure is not interested in the external world at all. Dalí is depicting how he views his father, with whom he had a strenuous relationship. Dalí’s father was, in fact, a bureaucrat, and this painting also speaks about other government officials and is meant to convey Dalí’s dislike of their intense “logic” and “rationalism.” In the far background, the viewer can see a minuscule image of a father and child walking hand in hand which represents the once good relationship Dalí had with his father. This painting continues to showcase Dalí’s interpretation of surrealism and his dreams by altering known images to result in unnerving looking objects and

This visually demanding picture causes the viewers’ eyes to go back and forth between the woman in the front on the left and the two slaves in the center dressed in 17th-century Spanish costumes. The slaves also form the bust of a man, Voltaire, if one looks hard enough. Voltaire was an 18th-century enlightenment philosopher whose rationalism was the antithesis of Dalí’s efforts to explore the mysterious world of the unconscious. Dalí believed that most people were enslaved to rational thought. Double images like this one force viewers to confront the possibility that reason may not lead us to the truth. Dalí is letting the viewers decide which image is more accurate: the bust or the slave