Dalí: Painting and Film

This exhibition brings together more than 100 works by Salvador Dalí (1904·89) including major paintings, photographs, drawings, and films to explore the central role of cinema in his work as both an inspiration and an outlet for experimentation. Film was a passion for Dalí and cinematic vision became a model for his own work. The exhibition will display collaborations between Dalí and legendary filmmakers including Luis Buñuel, Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, and the Marx Brothers alongside his paintings to show the way ideas, iconography, and pictorial strategies are shared and transformed across mediums. The exhibition will include some of the most provocative works of the early twentieth century including Un Chien Andalou, a film made with Buñuel, which features the almost unwatchable sequence of an eye being slit by a razor; L'Age d'Or, another collaboration with Buñuel and one of the landmarks of surrealist film; as well as such important paintings as The First Days of Spring and Illumined Pleasures. The exhibition will also consider Dalí as a consumer of popular culture, he loved the bizarre slapstick humor of Hollywood comedians, such as Harry Langdon, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, and saw such mass entertainment as an antidote for what he perceived as the pretensions of high culture.

The exhibition will extend into MoMA's theaters, where examples of the popular and avant-garde motion pictures Dalí treasured, those that he made, and the films created by his fellow surrealists, will be screened. The exhibition will also be on view at Tate Modern, London, England (June 1–September 7, 2007); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (October 14, 2007–January 6, 2008); and the Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida (February 1–June 1, 2008).

Coordinated for MoMA by Jodi Hauptman, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings; the film exhibition is organized by Anne Morra, Assistant Curator, Department of Film.

The exhibition was organized by Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, Spain, and The Museum of Modern Art.

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí

Major support is provided by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the

Salvador Dalí: Painting and Film

Ort: The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery, sixth floor

Kuratoren: Jodi Hauptman, Anne Morra