Dali Planet #156:
The Andre-Francois Petit Gallery
In 1977 the Andre-Francois Petit Gallery on Rue Faubourg St Honore in Paris exhibited Dali’s latest works, including the famous trompe l’oeil “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Metres Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln — Homage to Rothko”.
The photo below shows the artist as he appeared in the last Pathe newsreel ever made, in 1970. The strange spectacles he’s holding are perhaps those he sometimes wore at the St Regis Hotel: Each eyepiece had two levels of glass, between which he inserted crumbs of food — or ants, memorably — to get a different perspective on the world.
A decade earlier Dali was wearing in his Catalan beret an “electrocular monocle” developed by an aeronautics company. It transmitted images that could be viewed simultaneously with one’s surroundings. Dali also sought to invent a kind of contact lens filled with fluid that would register images even during sleep. The 1963 painting below, “Fifty Abstract Paintings Which as Seen from Two Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen from Six Yards Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger”, has been referred to as “The Electrocular Monocle and the Paranoiac”.
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