Dally with Dali

Kimberley McGee

Wednesday, March 1, 2000 | 9:35 a.m.

Salvador Dali

What: "Dali's Millennium Premiere Celebracion."

When: Through April 30.

Times: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays.

Where: Las Vegas Art Museum, 9600 West Sahara Ave.

Cost: $10 general admission; $7 for local residents with ID.

Information: Call 360-8000 or 1-800-ASK-DALI.

He was a devil, a controversial instigator and one of the most renowned painters of the 20th century.

Salvadore Dali continues to draw attention with his dream-inspired paintings and trinkets.

The Las Vegas Art Museum hosts one of the largest exhibitions of Dali works running through April 30. Considering the source, it will be one of the most exciting exhibits ever in Las Vegas, LVAM curator James Mann says.

"He's virtually a cult figure," Mann said. "His work pays homage to the irrational. Why he's so famous and other surrealists are not is perhaps simply a function of his skill in motivating the media to report on him."

And his legacy is making for quite a display at the LVAM.

"There are 200 separate works altogether," Mann said. "Then, counting limited edition books with illustrations by Dali and suites of lithographs, things like a chess set, it comes to 500 (pieces)."

Among the festivities will be a Dali-inspired performance.

A little history: Dali was born April 11, 1904, in Barcelona. He started honing his craft with oils on canvas from an early age at his parents' home. He traveled to Paris in 1924 to become an artiste and was a major influence on the surrealist movement of the 1920s. He died in 1989 after being badly burned in a home fire.

"His work has a very powerful appeal, he had great traditional skill of an academic sort in doing a picture of anything," Mann said.

In the '20s, during the early stages of his career, Dali illustrated a book published in the middle of the 19th century, "Les Chants de Maldoror" by the Count of Lautureamont. It was found by surrealists of that time to be a precursor for their work and movement.

"He'd draw a picture of totally bizarre things and it would be very skillfully depicted in terms of three-dimensional drafting," Mann said.

The daring Dali allowed for no snobbery in his art -- it didn't throw anyone for a loop; it was what it was, Mann said.

"There's no other artist who has quite this type of appeal to persons who otherwise might not be interested in fine arts at a high level," Mann says. "He had a wide-seeking imagination that veered off into any human area in any given time."

A personal Dali oil-on-canvas favorite of Mann's is "Christopher Columbus Discovering America."

"It is a totally weird painting," Mann says. "It has a theatrical air about it that is inflated and almost silly. But there is complex imagery that is introduced, a whole little painterly universe in the painting."

Dali is probably more well-known for his eccentric behavior. He purportedly looped his handlebar mustache into stiff, thick curls with his own, personally cultivated, ear wax.

"He was one of the first celebrity artists in our culture," Mann says. "He was in Life magazine, he was in advertisements, he wrote advertisements -- he played the media for all it was worth."

Outrageous performances were Dali's signature and helped to get his long face with the wild eyes ingrained in the public's psyche. Anything for art. "He rode a white horse up the staircase of a New York hotel," for an opening, Mann said.

Not one for understatement, Dali continued his style of making a memorable entrance, arriving at an art show premiere carrying a goat. Two small children brought up the rear with little wings strapped to their backs.

"He was an entertaining figure," Mann says. "He was always giving the media entertaining things to report on."

A 1936 surrealist art show in London gave Dali the opportunity to show his depth of oddball behavior when he clambered onto the stage clad in an old-fashioned deep-sea diver's suit.

"The glass door on the front of the suit slammed shut and he almost suffocated," Mann said. "He was flopping around on stage until someone realized it was real and opened the glass."

At least he was dressed, which was not always a given with Dali.

"He lectured once in the nude with a loaf of bread tied to his head," Mann said.

Dali's dreamlike art continues to affect those who gaze upon his work because he thought outside of traditional parameters, Jerry Schefcik, director of the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery at UNLV, said.

"People look at him and like the way that human forms have been manipulated or transformed or morphed into other entities," Schefcik said. "It's a curiosity. How could someone imagine something like that and then sculpt it?"

Dali began as a wild card with his over-the-top paintings, but he played that card well. "His career started out as surrealist and he got a lot of attention," Schefcik said. "It went to his head."

Whereas other artists continued to change and develop in other areas, Dali stayed with what worked to keep himself in the public eye. "The work that he did later is not as significant as his earlier work," Schefcik said. "He got into a mindset or a routine and the work he became noted for became a (formula)."

Still, it worked. The dripping watches and naked figures in extraordinary scenes speak to viewers' subconsciousness. "Dali is the corner of the mind where you don't usually go," Schefcik said.

That's part of what makes Dali so fascinating, said Paul Chimera, editor-in-chief of the Salvadore Dali Collectors Quarterly. "There was something about Dali, the mad genius," Chimera said. "He wasn't really (mad), but he played at being the mad genius. He was a great nonconformist and did what he wanted to do when on his own terms."

And Dali was not just a painter. He knew a bit about good public relations. "He liked to play at being Dali," Chimera said.

However, the artist took time from playing Dali to concentrate on his work in meticulous detail. "He made the unreal real by portraying unbelievable dream imagery, things no one had ever seen before, with such a technical skill that he was able to pull it off," Chimera said. "He almost painted works so they looked like photographs."

Although Dali had his idiosyncrasies, he was a dedicated, creative man. "He was an evil, maniacal, flamboyant man," Chimera said. "He was also a great artist. He tapped into deep, deep recesses of the subconscious."

Some of Dali's work has been described as provocative, just as the artist himself has been perceived. "His ideas were sometimes disturbing," Chimera said. "When you start digging into the subconscious, people who don't understand Dali will say it's really weird stuff. But the purpose of surrealism was to paint your dreams."

And what would Dali think of Las Vegas?

"The skyline of the Strip would be very inspiring to Dali" he said. "It has flamboyance and color. That shaped his life, that's what he was all about."

Bruce Hochman, owner of the Salvador Dali Gallery in Pacific Palisades, Calif., said that he thinks it's time for Dali to come to Las Vegas.

"This is the largest we've done, it's bigger than the show we did in L.A. in '92," Hochman said. That show drew 4,000 people in three days.

A private collector, David Pearson of Pearson Foods in Grand Rapids, Mich., had gathered a lot of Dali's work over the years and wanted the public to experience the original art. But the local museum in Grand Rapids dismissed the Dali proposal.

"It's a sort of pride of ownership to see it in a museum," Hochman says. "(Collectors) like that they can share it with a lot of people. These are not the kind of folk to say 'My doors are open, come in and see.' "

But the secure, respected conditions of the LVAM opens the doors private collectors can't. "There are more Dali collectors than any other artists in the world," Hochman said. "People just get hooked on Dali."

And the more there is to see, the more the Dali fever is fed. "They get revitalized when they visit an exhibit," Hochman says.

Both coasts are hungry for Dali: A large exhibit in Wadsworth, Conn., has drawn acclaim, as well as crowds. "They've gotten tremendous crowds, 12,000 people, and they are selling tickets on a time basis," Hochman said.

Dali was not just an artist; he was a designer who did set design for Disney, wrote an opera, wrote his autobiography ("The Secret Life of Salvadore Dali") and "Diary of a Genius."

"He was not just a person who was an artist, he had the technical skill to be a draftswman," Hochman says. "He could sketch on plates, backwards, and work with (metal)."

The LVAM was the catalyst for bringing the show to Las Vegas after Hochman's gallery donated a 1918 painting, "Vision of Hell," to the museum in 1998.

"People were asking for more -- we thought, 'Why not?' " Hochman said.

Hochman wondered how anything in the future could be as over-the-top as Dali:

"What can we do to top this?"