Salvador Dalí

Exhibition organized by the Centre Pompidou with MNCARS, Madrid, in partnership with the Gala-Salvador Dalí and the Salvador Dali Museum. The Centre Pompidou pays tribute to one of the most complex and prolific great figures in 20th century art, Salvador Dalí, more than thirty years after the retrospective that the institution devoted to him in 1979-1980. Often criticised for his theatricality, his liking for money and his provocative stance on political issues, Dalí is both one of the most controversial artists and one of the most popular. This unprecedented exhibition sets out to throw light on the full power of his work and the part played in it by his personality and his strokes of genius as much as his outrageousness. Among the masterpieces exhibited, visitors will rediscover some of the greatest iconic works, including the artist's most famous picture, The Persistence of Memory, more commonly called Melting Watches. This exceptional loan from MoMA joins a selection of major works brought together for this retrospective thanks to a close collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and a joint contribution from the Fundació Dalí in Figueres and the Dali Museum in Saint Petersburg (Florida). With more than two hundred paintings, sculptures and drawings, to which are added films, extracts from broadcasts and photographs, the work of the pioneer of the "happening", author of these ephemeral works, is also on show today. Michel Déon, who translated Dali's writings, wanted the artist to be judged on his work. This is precisely the aim of this exhibition. Déon wanted him to abandon his "clowneries": on the contrary, the exhibition shows that they were the acts of a shrewd artist "performer", a pioneer, and full of humour. Dali liked to blend art and science, his famous paranoiac-critical method based on the delirium of performance claimed to treat all areas of creative activity as knowledge, in order to "dalinise" the world. This great media manipulator considered art a global act of communication. In all its facets, Dalí questioned the figure (persona) of the artist in the face of tradition and the world.

Salvador Dalí