WHAT IS THERE
TO SEE?

Over 300 works from Beniamino Levi’s private collection have been on display in the museum for more than 25 years: Sculptures, paintings, drawings, etchings, watercolours, lithographs, prints, furniture and household objects.

Dalí was inspired by the greatest artists of his time from a wide variety of fields: Design, fashion, theatre, cinema, and literature. He also used the old masters, mathematics, physics, alchemy, philosophy, and religion as sources.

Form and deformation, the metamorphosis of the material, reality and dream, the conscious and the unconscious were his themes. From this, he developed symbols that run like a common thread through his works. The melting clock, for example, which symbolises that time is relative and for which he was inspired by a Camembert melting in the sun (!). The human bodies with drawers, inspired by his reading of Freud. The egg, a Christian symbol of resurrection, purity and perfection, but also the contrast between hard shell and soft interior.

The Venus with Drawers (or “Woman on Fire”) can be seen here in Paris, as well as illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, Don Quixote, Romeo and Juliet and the Divine Comedy. The well-known motifs of the elephant with its spindly legs, the melting clock, the lobster telephone (both lobsters and telephones had strong erotic connotations for the artist…) and the lip sofa can also be found here. One cannot help but wonder what characterised this ingenious and crazy mind.

Throughout his life, Dalí was influenced by the fact that his parents had lost a son before him, who was also called Salvador.

“All my eccentricity, my incoherence… I want to prove that I am not the dead brother, but the living one,” he once wrote.

Another major influence: his wife Gala, whom he met in 1929 when she visited him in Cadaqués with her then husband Paul Eluard. The two fell madly in love, she became his muse – and also his accountant… 🙂 She negotiated all the contracts, as Dalí had no sense of money.

Living and working with Dalí must have been a challenge, as Beniamino Levi also testified: “Even in the simplest conversations, it was difficult to follow him. He expressed his creativity by using a very original vocabulary. (…) His hyperactive imagination led him to change subjects in rapid succession: from philosophy to astronomy, from the Old Masters to modern art…”

On the other hand, Dali obviously managed to keep himself in check to a certain extent – and also drew inspiration from this. After diagnosing himself as “paranoid”, he used psychoanalysis to grant “the shadows the right to their own existence” and transformed them by giving them artistic expression.

The natural sciences may have served as a stable framework for him to orientate himself in the flow of his consciousness and thus his art. He even used mathematics to define his own place among the great artists: he drew up a table in which he rated Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, Raphael, and others using a points system for technique, inspiration, colour, subject, genius and so on. He rated his own genius quite immodestly with 19 out of 20 points.

Rightly so? The best thing to do is to see for yourself because – in our opinion – the museum is worth it, despite the comparatively high price of EUR 16. There are so many details to discover in each work that you can’t stop marvelling and reflecting. One could almost say that the mind is inspired to wander freely, to associate, to dream – an effect that Dalí would certainly have enjoyed.