Dali Planet #41: Super “realism”
and beyond
New York dealer Julien Levy bought “The Persistence of Memory” at the 1931 Paris show for $250, calling it “10x14 inches of Dali dynamite”, and loaned it to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, for its year-ending “Newer Super Realism”. Dali’s work was the star of a show that also included Ernst, Miro, de Chirico, Duchamp and Man Ray, and grabbed national headlines.
Levy offered to sell the painting to Atheneum director Chick Austin for $350, but Austin opted instead to buy “La Solitude” (detail here) for $300, making that piece the first Dali painting to enter any museum’s collection. Levy took “The Persistence of Memory” back to his own gallery for a show in January 1932. It still had a busy touring schedule ahead of it over the next few years. During its 1934 exhibition here at the Museum of Modern Art, which bought the painting, one critic urged his readers to “page Dr Freud” if they wanted to decipher its meaning.
Dali himself would come to the Wadsworth — America’s oldest public art museum — in 1934, accompanying another show and giving a lecture on art as well.
