Dali Planet #158:
Academie Francaise des Beaux-Arts
In May 1978, the same year he underwent prostate surgery in Barcelona, Dali was inducted into the Academie Francaise des Beaux-Arts in Paris as an associate foreign member. The actual initiation, as pictured, took place the following year.
At the same time he was discovering Rene Thom’s theory of catastrophe, and New York’s Guggenheim Museum was displaying his first hyper-stereoscopic painting. Executed in pairs of paintings close to being mirror images, one such work, though left unfinished in 1973, is seen above: “Dali from the Back Painting Gala from the Back Eternalised by Six Virtual Corneas Provisionally Reflected in Six Real Mirrors”.
In 1979 there was a large retrospective at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, which drew 800,000 visitors, and the following year another at the Tate Gallery in London, but Dali had done enough. His hands shaking and weakened with Parkinson’s disease, he was forced to retire from public life and created little artwork thereafter.
