2023-10-25 18:29:43
The first thing was the trembling of the legs. Glare, dizziness and emotional overflow. Like Stendhal in Florence, only in the Lefevre gallery in London and in the 20th century. «Still bewildered, I returned to the painting and the crowd. My main difficulty was how to marry the theme of the painting with the philosophy of art and the public statements of Dalí just as I remembered them. […] The painting seemed from another time; “a work of unashamed romanticism in an age of eclectic classicism,” said Tom Honeyman, director of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.
And, immediately afterwards, he did the only thing he could do: he took out the municipal checkbook and gave Salvador Dalí £8,200 of the time, from 1951, to obtain that painting of “shameless romanticism.” An ecstatic Christ that provoked another more earthly one (we’ll get to that later) and that seems to float above the Portlligat bay. “Seeing the painting physically produces a feeling of pleasure and cultural inflammation,” now highlights the president of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Jordi Mercader.
The good news is that, for a few months, you won’t have to cross the English Channel to come face to face with ‘Christ’ (o ‘The Christ of Saint John of the Cross’, depending on who you ask), since until next April it will remain hanging in the artist’s Theater-Museum in Figueras.
A unique opportunity that returns to the starting box an oil painting more than two meters high that has not been exhibited in Spain since 1952, when Dalí sent it to the I Biennial Hispano-American Art along with ‘The Madonna of Portlligat’ and ‘The spike of Saint John’, among other paintings.
Unpublished sketches
«I want my next Christ to be the painting that contains more beauty and more joy than anything that has been painted to date. I want to paint a Christ that is absolutely the opposite of the materialistic and wildly antimystical of Grünewald!” exclaimed Dalí himself before embarking on a project that is now documented between photographs, unpublished sketchbooks, and a book, ‘Why Dali?’ (Planeta), in which Javier Sierra, Antonio López and the director of the Dalí Museums, Montse Aguer, reflect on the figure of the Empordà artist and his Cristo de Portlligat.
Sketch and photography for Dalí’s ‘Christ’ GALA-SALVADOR DALÍ FOUNDATION
“It is an iconic painting that Dalí has had in mind since 1942, when he wrote ‘The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí’,” says Aguer. He is looking for faith, but he does not find it. ‘The Bread Basket’ (1945) is also from that time, a painting that Dalí conceived almost as a dialogue with his crucified Christ and which is exhibited for the first time alongside him. “The artist himself relates them, since he is unconsciously thinking about the Eucharist,” details Aguer.
Dalí, adds the director of the Figueras museums, follows tradition and at the same time breaks it. He is reflected in Velazquez but, at the same time, look for something different. «It is a time of transition in which he talks to us about quantum mechanics and religion. Dalí flees from the expressionist Christs and wants to capture a beautiful, athletic and enigmatic Christ,” explains Aguer. Hence, even though the first creative flash came to him after seeing in Avila a ticket in which Saint John of the Cross had painted an ecstasy (“the idea of perspective and trance stays inside him,” says Javier Sierra), the model chosen to make the final version of the painting was Russ Saunder, a gymnast and stuntman provided by Warner Bros. .
The exhibition also has an audiovisual complement EP
Unpublished photographs now demonstrate that, at least, there was another model, although it is unknown what role he had in the execution of the painting. Of course: it is suspected that, to perfectly capture the position and muscles, Dalí hung him (or them) from the ceiling with short breaks every twenty minutes. It is also known that he started it in the summer of 1951 and that by November of that same year he had already finished it.
In Figueras, where the work is exhibited for the first time, they have built a “contemplation” chapel and an audiovisual wall that explains the history of the painting. The occasion, at least, deserves it. “Dali would have very much liked it to be seen here,” says Aguer. Furthermore, ‘The Bread Basket’ will not leave here, so we are talking about a unique exhibition.
Criticized and attacked
In Glasgow, a city in which ‘The Christ’ has been exhibited almost uninterruptedly since the mid-fifties, the work has become a jewel in the artistic crown and one of the great claims, if not the greatest, of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Its landing, however, was anything but placid: its purchase in 1951 provoked a bitter controversy among the city’s inhabitants, who considered that the exorbitant sum invested (and Dalí initially asked for 12,000 pounds) should be used for exhibition spaces to local artists. A decade later, in 1961, a visitor attacked the painting with a brick and left a wound whose scar is still visible.
That same year, Princess Margaret visited the museum and, according to Duncan M. Dorman, head of museums and collections for the city, “she was unenthusiastic and commented that the painting had left her quite disconcerted.” There it is in all its splendor, that enigmatic and contortionist beauty that Dalí sought for one of his most famous religious works. “The quiet contemplation it provides may offer space for broader reflection on spirituality,” Dorman concludes.
Now, with almost two million visitors a year and a collection that has been left lame without great appeal, surely the Scottish museum is counting the hours until Dalí reassembles the Christ in Glasgow.
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