Dali Planet #93: Ballet and baubles
The Art Club of Chicago, now in its own building on East Ontario Street, was renting space in the south tower of the Wrigley Building in 1941 when Julien Levy’s Dali exhibition came for a visit. The Art Club opened in 1916 and has also hosted shows by Picasso, Braque, Chagall, Rodin, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec. Shown here is “Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach” from 1938.
Meanwhile a small exhibition of surrealist painting at New York’s New School for Social Research had no work by Dali, but it did have a garbage can with his name on it. A Museum of Modern Art director even fumed about Dali’s “lack of dignity” in the catalogue for the show there.
Still, Dali proved irresistible, with his ballet “Labyrinth” opening in New York and his first jewellery collection being unveiled. One source has him designing the jewellery for the Duke de Verdura, another for US millionaire Cummins Catherwood, who sold them to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, which sold them in 1981 to a wealthy Saudi, who sold them to Japanese collectors, who sold them to the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, where they remain today. Shown here is a brooch called “The Eye of Time”.
