Although the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dal\u00ed never visited India, his artworks are set to be displayed in the country for the first time. Starting Friday, an exhibition in the capital Delhi will showcase an expansive collection of more than 200 of his original sketches, etchings and watercolour paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The collection has been curated by Christine Argillet, daughter of Pierre Argillet, a French collector who was also Dal\u00ed\u2019s friend and publisher. \u201cDal\u00ed was fascinated by India, especially the West\u2019s fascination with Indian mysticism in the 1960s and 1970s,\u201d Ms Argillet told the BBC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the sketches in the collection are based on photographs her father had taken during a trip to India in the 1970s, when the hippie movement was at its peak and young guitar-toting Americans visited India on spiritual quests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dal\u00ed\u2019s India features elephants and temples but, as with all his artwork, they\u2019re not always easy to spot, having been rendered in the artist\u2019s trademark surrealist style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his works, human bodies sprout flowers from their heads; eyeballs dance in a matrix of squiggles and strokes and dismembered body parts interact animatedly with the world around them. Stare for longer than a minute and these disconnected shapes begin to form new connections and meanings in the mind\u2019s eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAppreciating Dal\u00ed\u2019s art is like peeling back the layers of an onion; you can keep finding something new to marvel at,\u201d Ms Argillet says. Bringing Dal\u00ed\u2019s work to India was a long and arduous endeavour, says Akshitta Aggarwal of Bruno Art Group, the international art gallery presenting the exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe project took five years; every sketch and artwork had to be checked for its authenticity,\u201d Ms Aggarwal says. Strictly speaking, this isn\u2019t the first time Dal\u00ed\u2019s creations have come to India. In 1967, Dal\u00ed famously designed a set of whimsical ashtrays for Air India – the country\u2019s national airline back then – which were handed out to first class passengers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In return, Dal\u00ed demanded not money but a baby elephant. Uttara Parikh, the then deputy commercial director of Air India, recounted to Times of India newspaper how she initially went shopping for one in a zoo in Mumbai city but returned empty-handed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She finally procured the baby elephant from a zoo in Bangalore city (now Bengaluru) and Air India flew the animal to Spain, where it was kept in a zoo until its death in 2018. (Dal\u00ed had exciting plans for the elephant, such as undertaking a journey across the Alps, but his wife dissuaded him from attempting to carry them out).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dal\u00ed\u2019s demand might seem outrageous, but those familiar with the artist and his legacy know that it was very much in keeping with his personality. Born in Spain in 1904, Dal\u00ed grew up in a world that was embracing the avant-garde and responding to the fallout of two world wars. Creatives of his time, like Pablo Picasso, Joan Mir\u00f3 and Andr\u00e9 Breton, were finding new ways to express themselves and their ideas and their artistic styles heavily influenced a young Dal\u00ed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The surrealist movement, widely acknowledged to be founded by Andr\u00e9 Breton, resonated with him the most. Surrealist art advocated for a form of expression that was \u201cdictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason\u201d, according to Breton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dal\u00ed was also heavily inspired by Sigmund Freud and his theories around psychoanalysis – a method of treating mental illnesses by focussing on conflicts originating in a person\u2019s psyche. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dreams take on a special importance as they are believed to express a person\u2019s repressed thoughts and urges. Consequently, Dal\u00ed\u2019s art reflects many of these ideas – they have an almost dream-like quality and through free association, the visuals take on meanings that are unique to the onlooker. There is also visceral, almost shocking imagery, much like forbidden desires lying hidden in the subconscious mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDal\u00ed was a free-thinker and he embraced all facets of the human condition, particularly the taboo and unsettling ones,\u201d Ms Argillet says. The artist\u2019s outward persona reflected his colourful take on life. He dressed in flamboyant suits and sported a moustache that pointed upward so severely it seemed in danger of piercing his eyes. In a 1955 interview with the BBC, Dal\u00ed revealed the origins of his famous upturned moustache.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDates, you know the fruit? In the last moment of dinner, I [did] not clean my finger and I put a little in my moustache and it remains for all afternoon very efficiently,\u201d he said but later revealed that he used a strong wax to shape his moustache.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the same interview, he described his moustache as being \u201cvery gay, very pointed, very aggressive\u201d. Ms Argillet, who knew Dal\u00ed intimately through her childhood and teenage years and often spent her summers in Spain with her father, recollects Dal\u00ed being a humorous person who loved playing pranks and \u201cshocking the bourgeois\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He once encouraged her to take some sweets from his bedroom and throw them at fishermen at a nearby beach. Only the sweets turned out to be cherry bombs, annoying the fishermen and forcing a young Ms Argillet to run for cover. \u201cAt one of his parties, he had a tortoise carry around an ashtray on its shell,\u201d Ms Argillet says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But she adds that he was also a shy, intuitive, observant person who had a knack for reading people\u2019s minds. He painted in his studio in short pants and slippers and, according to Ms Argillet, it was Dal\u00ed\u2019s shyness that made him over-perform in public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe was misunderstood by many. There were many layers to Dal\u00ed, just like his paintings,\u201d Ms Argillet says. \u201cThe closer you look at his paintings, the more you understand Dal\u00ed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The exhibition \u2018Dali comes to India\u2019 will be held at the India Habitat Centre from 7 February to 13 February and at Masarrat Gallery by Bruno Art Group from 15 February to 16 March. (BBC)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dal\u00ed never visited India, his artworks are set to be displayed in the country for the first time. Starting Friday, an exhibition in the capital Delhi will showcase an expansive collection of more than 200 of his original sketches, etchings and watercolour paintings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":469823,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[688],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-469816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-infotainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469816\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}