Dalí by Halsman Presents a Selection of Eighty-Eight Photographs of Salvador Dalí

FIGUERES.- The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí inaugurated Dalí by Halsman, this year’s temporary exhibition at the Gala Dalí Castle in Púbol, which will be on show until 31 December 2011, when the house-museum is closed to the public until the following March.

The opening ceremony was presented by Mr. Joan Pluma, General Director of Cultural Heritage of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Ramon Boixadós, Chairman of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Antoni Pitxot, Director of the Dalí Theatre-Museum and Vice-Chairman of the Foundation, and Montse Aguer, Director of the Centre for Dalinian Studies. Philippe Halsman’s heirs, Irene Halsman and Steve Bello, also attended the opening.

2011 marks the seventieth anniversary of their encounter — the painter and the photographer met for the first time in 1941 in the United States — and the foundation felt this was the right time to organize the exhibition Dalí by Halsman in Púbol Castle.

Dalí by Halsman presents a selection of eighty-eight photographs of Salvador Dalí taken by Philippe Halsman (plus a gouache by Dalí painted on a photograph), in all of which Dalí’s involvement was both physical and conceptual. The pictures shown in this exhibition were kept by Dalí throughout his life. They are reminiscences of his collaboration over thirty-seven years, from 1941 to 1978, with another alchemist of the creative process.

Organizers have selected those photographs that are most closely linked to experimentation, with the capacity for innovation and surprise, and, in some cases, such as the unpublished images from Dali’s Mustache, the least known.

In the exhibition they are shown in chronological order, in four thematic and conceptual blocs:

— Portraits (1941 to 1965)
In this series we have included powerful images in which Dalí is the main character. Of note are the unpublished images of Dali’s Mustache. A Photographic Interview.

— Dalí Atomicus (1948)
A series of photographs inspired by Salvador Dalí’s oil painting Leda Atomica in which the photographer set out to capture the idea of suspension and to photograph the artist painting in mid-air, with an assortment of objects also hanging suspended.

— Light Sculpture (1950)
A series generated on the basis of a photograph by Gjon Mili in which Picasso is seen painting a Minotaur in space using a small flashlight for a brush.

- The Skull (1951)
Also known as In Voluptate Mors. This series is based on a double image of a painting by Dalí, with seven naked women posed to form a skull.

All of these series bear witness to the work of two exceptional creative artists, two ‘conceivers’ of ideas, two thinking machines linked by a constant will to keep searching that, through the use of new languages, was to take shape in an experimental, different, provocative oeuvre. These photographs frame the two artists in a particular contemporaneity, that which was concerned with the creative intention, that which began with Marcel Duchamp and set itself to registering ‘all that the human eye cannot see’, that which believed in the expressive capacity of the new technological resources, and, in the specific case of the works in this exhibition, knew how to take advantage of the technical and conceptual possibilities of photography.

The exhibition in the Púbol House-Museum is curated by Montse Aguer, author of the introduction to the catalogue. Also collaborating with this edition are Irene Halsman, Oliver Rosenberg Halsman, Steve Bello, David G. Torres and Rosa Maria Maurell. The catalogue, sponsored by “La Caixa”, is published by Distribucions d’Art Surrealista and designed by Àlex Gifreu of Bisdixit. The exhibition montage was designed by Pep Canaleta, 3carme33.