Dali Planet #103:
Fukuoka Art Museum
“The Madonna of Port Lligat” from 1950 hangs at the Fukuoka Art Museum.
Dalí found religion and went extremely large with it in this work, all the components floating like the elements of an atom and zeroing in on the nucleus of the infant Jesus (Juan Figueras, a Cadaqués lad, was the model) and the bread of the Eucharist hovering at his centre, the very core of the universe, “a tabernacle”, Dalí called it. Gala becomes the Virgin and, off to the right, a string of angels.
Joining the surrealistic “sacraments” on the altar that are also found in the 1949 “Madonna of Port Lligat” is a rhinoceros, a beast in whose horn Dalí believed lay the essential shape of nature.
There are several more dramatic oils by Dalí in Japan today, including the “‘Geodesic’ Portrait of Gala” from 1936, which is at the Yokohama Museum of Art.
Below left is the expressionistic “Palladio’s Thalia Corridor” from 1937, which hangs in the Mie Prefectural Art Museum in Tso (a version from ‘38 is at West Dean College in England). “Venus and Sailor (Homage to Salvat-Papasseit)”, below right, from 1925 at and can be seen at the Ikeda Museum of 20th-century Art in Shizuoka.
