A visit to the new surreal fantastical Dali Museum in St. Petersburg Florida

A visit to the new surreal fantastical Dali Museum in St. Petersburg Florida

By Kevin Dayhoff - http://www.thetentacle.com/author.cfm?MyAuthor=41

http://kevindayhoffart.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-visit-to-new-surreal-fantastical-dali.html

Labels: Art Artists Dali-Salvador,

On Wednesday, February 20, 2013, I took advantage of the opportunity to visit the new Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

I had previously had the opportunity to visit the Morse collection of Dali’s work in its former location in February 2009 - http://kevindayhoffart.blogspot.com/2009/03/tentacle-spellbound-by-salvador-dali-by.html

I wrote about that visit in The Tentacle: Spellbound by Salvador Dali by Kevin E. Dayhoff on March 25, 2009

http://www.thetentacle.com/ShowArticle.cfm?mydocid=3078 http://tinyurl.com/c67b3f

I have also written about my February 20, 2013 visit. That article is scheduled to be published on Wednesday, February 27, 2013… Find it here: http://www.thetentacle.com/author.cfm?MyAuthor=41

Some excerpts of that column may be found below, along a number of photographs…

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Wednesday, February 27, 2013

The new Dali Museum in St. Petersburg Florida

Kevin E. Dayhoff

The new Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida has now been open for over two-years. The much-anticipated fantastical $36 million, 66,450 square foot museum doubled the capacity of the previous 1982 building that I had the opportunity to visit in February 2009.

The original museum had opened in a renovated marine warehouse March 7, 1982. According to a number of media accounts, the new museum – which is the home of 2,140 pieces of Salvador Dali’s art, including 96 oil paintings and eight huge master works - opened on the auspicious date of January 11, 2011 (1/11/11) at 11:11 a.m.

The museum in downtown St. Petersburg houses one of the most extensive collections of the art of Salvador Dali in the world. It began in Cleveland, OH, in 1942 where collecting Dali’s art was the lifelong passion of industrialist A. Reynolds Morse, and his wife Eleanor Reese Morse.

Alas, sadly my winter schedules in the last number of years have not included a visit to the Dali Museum, Tampa, and St. Petersburg or the opportunity to seeing the local sights such as the Sunshine Skyway – completed in 1987, it spans the mouth of Tampa Bay and is the world's longest cable-stayed concrete bridge.

This year I was able to juggle my schedule to see what the buzz is all about at what many are calling one of the world’s top-ten art destinations.

As you approach the HOK-designed museum, you are immediately impressed with the enormity of what appears at first glance to be a huge introverted enigmatic cubist-snail on steroids. The internationally recognized architect Yann Weymouth led the design team.

The museum structure is a magnificent adaption to a site with many design constraints, including but not limited to the fact that it houses one of the foremost collections of art in the world in a hurricane zone, just feet above sea level with a profound flood hazard…

++++++++ Related: 

The Tentacle: Spellbound by Salvador Dali by Kevin E. Dayhoff

The Tentacle: Spellbound by Salvador Dali by Kevin E. Dayhoff March 25, 2009

Last month I enjoyed a bit of respite from Maryland’s winter by visiting Florida. Finding myself within reasonable driving distance of St. Petersburg, I jumped at the chance to visit the Salvador Dali Museum.

Located on the waterfront in Barboro Harbor, it is the “largest collection of Dali’s work outside of Spain,” according to Peggy McKendry, the assistant to the director of the museum.

The museum, which opened in a renovated marine warehouse March 7, 1982, is the home of 2,140 pieces of Salvador Dali’s art, including 96 oil paintings and eight huge master works.

This collection began in Cleveland, OH, in 1942. Collecting Dali’s art was the lifelong passion of industrialist A. Reynolds Morse, and his wife Eleanor Reese Morse.

[…]

In recent years, I have visited art museums – from San Diego, Salt Lake City, Anchorage, Boston, Washington, and Baltimore – and I found the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg to be one of the friendliest exhibitions I have ever seen.

Everyone from Ms. McKendry, to the extremely knowledgeable docents, and even the museum guards went out of their way to make sure you knew that the museum was there to serve, entertain, and educate.

Such accessibility is critical if you are to have a meaningful experience exploring 20th century contemporary art – especially the work of Salvador Dali.

[…]

While I was doing some additional research on Dali, after I visited the museum, I had the great fortune to talk with Dan Twyman, the senior art consultant for the “Salvador Dali Society,” in Redondo Beach, CA, the owner of the website, www.salvadordaliexperts.com and a volunteer expert for the website http://www.allexperts.com/ in the fine art category.

[…]

Read the entire column here: Spellbound by Salvador Dali
Kevin Dayhoff writes from Westminster. E-mail him at kevindayhoff AT gmail.com.

http://www.thetentacle.com/ShowArticle.cfm?mydocid=3078
http://www.salvadordalimuseum.org/home.html
20090325 TT Spellbound by Salvador Dali ttked

Photo credit: 1965 Salvador Dali with ocelot and cane
Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c14985
By Roger Higgins, World Telegram staff photographer

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