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Off Topic: Hartford Goes Surreal As Crowds Say 'Hello, Dali'
Reuters - March 15, 2000
By Matthew Lewis
HARTFORD, Conn. (Reuters) - It may sound surreal but an unusual exhibition of works by Salvador Dali is attracting record
crowds to a museum in Hartford, a small New England city best known for its insurance industry.
Since it opened in late January, more than 40,000 people from 28 states have descended on Connecticut's capital city to ogle
at the alternately frightening, comic and offbeat images in "Salvador Dali's Optical Illusions."
The show, gathering 73 of the Spanish surrealist's works from museums and private collections in the United States and
abroad, is the first U.S. retrospective of his work since 1942. Organized by Dali expert Dawn Ades, who teaches at
England's University of Essex, it seeks to strip Dali of his familiar trappings as mediagenic clown prince and repackage him as
a virtuoso painter with surprisingly refined technical skills.
The public seems to be responding -- so much so that the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art has instituted
"time-ticketing" (admissions every 30 minutes) to control crowds for the first time in its nearly 160-year history.
"Dali has name recognition and a tremendous support base," said Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, acting director of America's
oldest public art museum, founded in 1842.
The Dali exhibition is on track to become its best-attended show ever, surpassing a 1989 exhibit of controversial American
photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which drew about 70,000.
Hartford Was Hotbed Of Surrealism.
If it seems absurd that this city of 130,000 would celebrate the provocatively mustachioed and caped Spaniard who died in
1989, museum officials point out that Hartford was once a hotbed of Surrealism.
"We were the first museum to buy a painting by Dali and he spent important moments of his career in Hartford," Kornhauser
said. She noted that the artist visited several times and lectured at the museum, whose forward-looking director, the late A.
Everett "Chick" Austin Jr., bought Dali's painting "Solitude" in 1932 for the grand sum of $130.
The Atheneum contributed three of its own Dali works to the current exhibition, which will end on March 26 before moving to
the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and then the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.
The Atheneum was the first U.S. museum to show Surrealism, which seeks to portray the workings of the unconscious mind
through dreamlike imagery and unexpected juxtapositions, in its 1931 exhibition "Newer Super-Realism."
And it was at the Atheneum in 1934 that Dali first uttered his trademark witticism, "The only difference between me and a
madman is that I am not mad."
To underscore Connecticut's long dalliance with Dali, the exhibit's entrance displays some 1939 photographs of a dashing Dali
at a private home in nearby Farmington, Connecticut.
In addition to championing the works of the pioneering Surrealists, the Atheneum was also the first American museum to
acquire works by Caravaggio, Joan Miro, Alexander Calder, Piet Mondrian and Max Ernst.
Well-Known Among Art Lovers
With almost 50,000 pieces in its permanent collection, with a particular strength in Hudson River School landscapes, it is
well-known among art lovers but not necessarily among locals.
"Hartford residents don't think of going to Hartford as a destination place (for entertainment)," Kornhauser said. "We don't
get casual visitors at the Atheneum -- we get people who drove in to see us."
Still, the museum has successfully raised its profile and boosted attendance over the past few years, thanks partly to special
exhibitions focusing on Caravaggio, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keefe and Pieter de Hooch.
"The museum has had its peaks and valleys but we've never seen this kind of consistent excitement until the last three years,"
Kornhauser said. "A lot of it has to do with the originality of our shows. We organize our own shows and they are rooted in
our permanent collection."
After Dali leaves town, the museum will mount exhibitions by Calder, the French Impressionists, Gauguin, and Picasso.
It will also present a show by Hartford-born Sol LeWitt, a pioneering minimalist and conceptual artist who is now the subject
of a major retrospective that recently opened in San Francisco and will travel to Chicago and New York.
Copyright © 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved.
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