Dali Planet #114:
The daddy longlegs that grew
Dali’s new style of “nuclear mysticism” was the subject of a series of lectures he gave in cities in Texas, Florida, Iowa and Missouri during 1952. Touring with him and Gala were Reynolds and Eleanor Morse of Cleveland, by now the world’s foremost collectors of his work.
The Morses were married in 1943 and treated themselves to a Dali painting, “Daddy Longlegs of the Evening — Hope!” (shown here, click for a larger image), part of a Cleveland Museum of Art retrospective. Dali refused to sell the picture without its frame.
Reynolds acceded, even though the frame cost him more than the painting, but the couple continued to buy more Dalis, until their collection quickly outgrew their home. In 1971 they opened America’s first Dali museum adjacent to their business, Injection Molders Supply, on Commerce Parkway in Beachwood, Ohio. Dali, who would have preferred to see the museum in New York — in a building with “walls that breathe and pulse imperceptibly” — was nevertheless present for the opening.
That facility in turn became so popular that by 1980 they had to find a still larger place.
A St Petersburg attorney proposed his Florida hometown, and both the city and the state helped pave the way for the Salvador Dali Museum’s opening there that same year. In 1989 King Juan Carlos of Spain presented the Morses with the Cross of the Officer of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, the highest honour possible for non-Spaniards. Reynolds died in 2002; Eleanor today chairs the board of the St Petersburg museum.
One of Dali’s more grotesque creations, “Daddy Longlegs” depicts a mutilated figure with his own head stretched over a tree limb, the spider of the title — considered a good omen in France — crawling on his face. In the chaos surrounding this glimmer of optimism is an indictment of war and a prophecy that World War II will be a hollow victory for any victor.
