Member Tour: Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears

Due to popular demand, this tour will take place in two Sessions. Session 1 will begin at 9:00am, and Session 2 will begin at 9:30am. Please consult your confirmation email for your Session number.

SCA Members are invited to join for a viewing of Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears with Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Director, Ray Johnson Collection and Research Caitlin Haskell.

During the pivotal decade of the 1930s, Salvador Dalí emerged as the inventor of his own personal brand of Surrealism.

This exhibition of 25 paintings, drawings, and surrealist objects—the first devoted to the Spanish Surrealist at the Art Institute—explores this critical period, considering Dalí’s work in light of two defining, if contradictory, impulses: an immense desire for visibility and the urge to disappear.

The artist cultivated these notions in a variety of ways: in path-breaking experiments with materials and palette, in depictions of exotic and mundane edible items, in surrealist fashions and sculptures with spaces for hiding, and in optically dynamic visual illusions or “double images.”

Examining this series of “disappearing acts” undertaken by the artist at the height of his fame, the exhibition brings together icons of the Art Institute’s Surrealism collection—such as Inventions of the Monsters (1937), Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936), and Mae West’s Face Which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment (1934–35)—alongside celebrated loans from around the world. New technical analysis illuminates further hidden and disappearing imagery within Dalí’s works that offer veiled personal meditations on his wry, sophisticated, and ultimately paranoid approach to art making.

The exhibition is curated by Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Director, Ray Johnson Collection and Research, and Jennifer Cohen, curator of provenance and research, Director’s Office.