The First Major Show of Salvador Dalí Opens in India

The first major exhibition of work by Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) has touched down in New Delhi, India, featuring over 200 pieces by the Surrealist master. It’s drawn from the collection of the artist’s long-time collaborator, collector, and print publisher Pierre Argillet (1910–2001), and curated by his daughter, Christine Argillet.

A dedicated supporter of the Surrealists, as well as Dadaists and Futurists, Pierre Argillet began working with Dalí in the 1930s, before his daughter was even born. The younger Argillet grew up in the orbit of the artist, who nicknamed her the “The Little Infante,” as reported by the .

“My earliest memories are of my summers spent near Dalí’s house in Port Lligat, Spain, from 1961 to 1973,” Argillet told me in an email. “Dalí invented all sorts of games and stratagems to amuse us and himself. One day it was with mustache cologne and a herb he picked on the hills behind his house that, when mixed, allowed him to hold his mustache straight and he could even wave them without moving, another time he showed us how with flowers resembling jasmine he could induce fantastic dreams.”

“Salvador Dalí: The Argillet Collection,” which opened earlier this month at the Visual Arts Gallery at the India Habitat Centre, and is now on view at Massarat Gallery, thanks to the Bruno Art Group, is free to visit. The works on view range from etchings to watercolors to tapestries, all based on a close collaboration between artist and publisher.

“We saw Dalí every day, and it was the only way for my father to get the works he had commissioned,” Argillet said. “If we were not there, Dalí had no qualms about selling the editions for which he had a contract with my father.”

The artist never visited India himself, but the exhibition does highlight his connections to the country.

“Dalí was fascinated by India, especially the West’s fascination with Indian mysticism in the 1960s and 1970s,” Argillet told the BBC.

In 1967, Air India hired Dalí to design porcelain ashtrays for first class customers. The edition of an estimated 500 featured an ingenious design in which the legs of the tray appeared to be both elephants and swans, but were actually the same form inverted.

In return, he asked for—and received—an elephant as payment, writing that “I wish to keep him in my olive grove and watch the patterns of shadows the moonlight makes through the twigs on his back.” (Instead, the elephant lived at a zoo in Barcelona until its death in 2018.)

And when Argillet and her father visited India in the 1970’s, the photos he took became the basis for “Hippies,” a series of 11 prints by Dalí.

“His idea was to present a set of works relating the spiritual quest of young Westerners sometimes leaving barefoot for India or Nepal,” Argillet told me. “Dalí always showed a very open-mindedness for all cultures.”

The exhibition features examples from many of the etching series that Dalí produced with Argillet, including “Faust” (1969), based on the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe play; and “Mythologie” (1963–65), inspired by stories from Greek mythology such as Icarus, Theseus and the Minotaur, and Leda and the Swan.

Argillet remembers the creation of some of these works: “He immersed an octopus found on the beach in acid to form the imprint of ,” she said. “Everything was subject to discovery and experimentation.”

There are also the 50 prints Dalí designed for his 1934 edition of Comte de Lautréamont’s , a bizarre and violent 19th-century French poetic novel that became something of a group obsession for the Surrealist movement.

Argillet told me she hopes that exhibiting these works in India and around the world will help make Dalí’s prints better known: “My father was an excellent publisher, but a bad manager.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com