Dalí Vs Vezzoli

Judging from the crowds of people gathering in the two main rooms of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet the Dalí Dalí med Francesco Vezzoli (Dalí Dalí featuring Francesco Vezzoli) exhibition is a raging success. Visitors entering the surreal world are invited to walk around the first room in which Dali's works are exhibited in a traditional museum context. Here, it is possible to admire Dalí’s studies in surrealism through Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone(1938), the provocative Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933), and Sleep (1937), in which a disembodied head with its eyes closed is held upright by a series of wooden crutches.

Surrealist architecture is also analysed in this room through The Architectural Angelus of Millet (1933) and A Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds (1937), though one of the best paintings in this section remains The Enigma of William Tell (1933), in which a Lenin-like character with raw meat on his deformed buttock is stretched over a wooden crotch representing Dalí’s father, as the artist himself explained in an interview given to the Swedish television in 1967 – “I hope everything is perfectly clear but, if it’s too clear, you can call me and I will try to make it more obscure.”

The second room of the exhibition space dedicated to Dalí’s works is a bit like a wonderful surrealist playground: ample space is given to the artist’s Dream of Venus pavilion – a sort of funhouse created for the 1939 New York World Fair – but this part of the exhibition also features sculptures, catalogues, adverts, objects of design, jewels, perfumes and films. Illustrators will enjoy Dalí’s posters for the French railways or the Eurovision contest and his ads for Bryan Hosiery published in Vogue in 1945; photography fans will be able to admire Dalí’s work with seminal photographers such as Man Ray or Philippe Halsman. The latter in particular created unique portraits of the painter, such as the Dali Atomica series, inspired by Dalí’s painting Leda Atomica (1948) and showing a painter’s easel, three cats, a bucket of water and Dalí himself floating in the air.

Among the highlights on display that will have fashionistas rejoice are a few Vogue covers (June 1939; April and December 1946); a sketch for Elsa Schiaparelli’s shoe hat (1937); Schiaparelli’s silk crepe Tear Dress (1938), a white evening dress characterised by trompe l’oeil rips and tears, worn with a long veil with real tears; the silk organza Lobster Dress (1937), both on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the futuristic “Costume for the year 2045”, a jersey aqua dress developed with Christian Dior in 1949-50, accessorised with a crutch. Print designers will find Dalí’s experiments with textiles interesting, such as the furnishing fabric Beste Elenique (1954).  
Dalí’s passion for film is also explored in the exhibition with the two films he produced with Luis Buñuel, Un chien Andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’or (1930), Dalí’s dream scene for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound(1945), the six-minute cartoon Destino developed in collaboration with Walt Disney, and a few television commercials.  

The rear wall of this second room, covered in wallpaper inspired by grand baroque theatres such as the Teatro Carignano in Turin, features Francesco Vezzoli’s embroideries, tapestries, posters and videos. Chiefly focusing on celebrity cult and Hollywood glamour – through images of Anita Ekberg, Mae West and other assorted portraits of smiling stars weeping glittery tears – Vezzoli challenges the visitors and the museum spaces with his photographs, collages and pastiches, suspending his work between fashion and cinema. A dialogue is attempted between Vezzoli’s works and Dalí’s pieces, but, while the latter’s aim was to disturb and surprise in a wide range of genres, Vezzoli’s works often leave you cold, making you feel as if the artist was perfectly at ease in that same superficial and banal world he claims he is trying to parody and satirise. Yet Vezzoli’s work also proves that Dalí’s multifaceted oeuvre is still influencing modern artists.   

“What do you think will happen to you when you die?” journalist Mike Wallace asked Dalí in a 1958 TV interview included in this exhibition. “I myself do not believe in my death,” the artist replied, explaining, “I believe in general in death but in the death of Dalí absolutely not. Believe in my death becoming very – almost impossible.” Rarely did a prophecy become so true.  

“Dalí Dalí featuring Francesco Vezzoli” is at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, until 17 January 2010.