Dali Planet #165: The Staatsgalerie
In 1989 it was an acutely altered world that took another long look at Dali at two major retrospectives at the Kunsthaus in Zurich and at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, 350 works in all, reflecting a social order in flux over the decades of the 20th century.
In 1943 he painted “Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man”, the fresh species of the title emerging from the global egg via a crack that seems to have swallowed America, or perhaps made room for its entrance.
Europe is within his grasp and the swollen Third World waits. The wizened, androgynous figure on the right instructs an infant on the new scheme of things, the child casting a far longer shadow than his forebear and muse.
