Dalí

I am coerced into going to the Dali museum in St. Petersburg. It is a rainy Thursday evening, when admission is $10 instead of the usual $24. Everybody is there. Everybody.

Dali cafe chair

Lis and Lisa immediately head to the galleries. Because I have been coerced and am a frown on two legs, I start my visit in the cafe with a cup of mediocre coffee in an unremarkable mug. The chairs are beautiful. I read a couple of chapters of Crisscross by Lynne Rae Perkins. I sigh and decide to go up to the galleries. I make sure I have a good glower plastered on my face.

There are a few reasons I don’t really care about Dalí. Bum is the word I use to describe artists whose work I don’t admire. They may be good or great artists but if I don’t like them they’re bums. Examples are Ron Martin, Clyfford Still, some of the Stellas. To me, Dalí is a bum.

My mother liked Dalí’s work. She had books and prints. This was way back in the old days before the problems with attribution and shitty quality prints being hocked around the world. The painting The Temptation of St Anthony terrified me. Does still. I am scarred for life. Among other frightening things in it (a man’s butt, backwards hooves on a rearing horse) there is a line of elephants. The elephants’ legs are impossibly long and thin. From the first moment I laid eyes on that work, at some tender innocent impressionable age, I have been waiting for those legs to snap in a million compound fractures, blood and shattered bone blown all over the landscape.

Plus I am not so much a fan of Dalí’s brand of Dada. Or eccentricity.

Mona Lisa at the Louvre

So up in the galleries it is like the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Way too many people. Most of them, thanks to the free audio tours, are standing slack-jawed all over the place, staring into space as they listen to some pablum. There is a temporary exhibit about Dalí and Disney; this has dragged in numerous art lovers. I ask a docent if The Temptation of St. Anthony is here. It is not; it’s hanging in New York. The docent tells me that next time I come it may have rotated here. I shudder. Side note: all the security guards have black toupées or shockingly bad black dye jobs.

I am having an unlovely time until I reach the room with Dalí’s early work, which I like very much—sensual delicious impasto.

detail of Port of Cadaques (night) 1918-19

I am back downstairs a bit early for my meet-up with Lis and Lisa so I wander the gift shop which is packed with a wide range of Dalí crap. I continue to glower, but then I see a display of Barretinas, the Catalan caps very similar to an elongated Phrygian cap, which I happen to know about and admire except when they are on the heads of Smurfs. I hate Smurfs.

I make Lis try one on. She is a toque connoisseur and I cannot see any reason why she should not have one. She does now.