Dali Planet #115:
Teaching the teachers
Cedar Rapids’ Iowa State Teachers College, as the University of Northern Iowa’s College of Education was then known, was among the stops on Dali’s February 1952 lecture tour, which also took in Kansas City, Dallas and Florida’s Winter Park. The subject: “the new cosmogony”. The real reason for attending: It was Salvador Dali speaking, although his English was limited and his Catalonian accent so thick that few could understand him. Translations were forthcoming, if not interpretations.
“Nuclear Cross”, above, which Dali painted in 1952, is another echo of the atomic-weapons testing taking place half a world away in the Pacific and as close as the Nevada sands. The same deconstruction was at work in “Galatea of the Spheres” and “Madonna in Particles”, below, both from that same year.
Added January 2008: Roy R Behrens, a graphic designer and professor of art at the University of Northern Iowa, has several fascinating articles online that he’s written for Bobolink Books. Among them is an engaging account of Dali’s visit to the university.
Behrens reports that the 1952 lecture Dali gave at the Iowa State Teachers College was the first of 10 slide-and-chalkboard talks on this tour, and that in Iowa he was actually a replacement for the now-revered television newsman Edward R Murrow, who’d had to cancel. Dali’s fee: a hefty $1,000.
The article is accompanied by photos from the occasion and many more details, including the reason why Dali didn’t pull the biggest crowd possible, and a funny ending to his Cedar Rapids press conference.
