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In a flat desert, a man lifts a white grand piano like it's fabric. A boy watches. An old man in the foreground sits and looks past next to a man in a bowler hat laying on his side reading the news. On the right, a flower-faced woman in an orange dress looks forward. In the distance, there's a woman in white. In a flat desert, a man lifts a white grand piano like it's fabric. A boy watches. An old man in the foreground sits and looks past next to a man in a bowler hat laying on his side reading the news. On the right, a flower-faced woman in an orange dress looks forward. In the distance, there's a woman in white.

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In the 1930s, Spanish artist Salvador Dalí made his dramatic appearance as a singular artistic force and true movement of one, distinct from the international Surrealist group. 

By <a href="https://www.artic.edu/authors/29/jennifer-r-cohen" rel="author">Jennifer R. Cohen</a>

An artist who courted controversy and relished publicity, Dalí grew in notoriety while paradoxically undertaking a series of vanishing acts, both metaphorical and literal. Much of his exploration of disappearance played out in his virtuosic painting practice, where he experimented with techniques that impart a ghostly presence, motifs of consumption and decay, and ambiguous images that ask us to question what we’re looking at. In his sculptures, this exploration grew increasingly literal; he sometimes used materials that degraded over time and created uncanny voids in the human figure. 

The Art Institute exhibition Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears, now open in Gallery 289, focuses on the groundbreaking work of this decade. Given Dalí’s wide renown and the museum’s deep holdings of his paintings—some of which joined the collection as early as 1943—it may be surprising to learn that this show is the first here devoted solely to his work, and it’s been nothing less than thrilling to be part of this momentous project. In preparing for it, co-curator Caitlin Haskell and I carefully selected the best companions for these works from collections across the world, seeking to highlight the density of Dalí’s repeating figures and motifs. Together with colleagues in Conservation and Science, we made multiple discoveries that have informed our understanding of the images in and beneath the surfaces of these works. The most exciting of these is a fragment of a mural that reappeared as a painting in our collection 50 years later, which you’ll read about in this issue. 

Exploration and discovery drive our exhibitions and installations across the museum, and this spirit permeates so many of our offerings this spring. From new insights into the well-known works of Dalí and Van Gogh to revelations from the archives of renowned photographer Kwame Brathwaite and the first-ever museum show dedicated to Bahamian textile artist Gio Swaby, you’ll see familiar works in a new light and confront fresh perspectives, encountering images that stay with you long after you leave.

—Jennifer R. Cohen, curator, provenance and research

A light-skinned woman with light-brown hair in a gray linen shirt stands to the right of Salvador Dalí's painting "Inventions of the Monsters."

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