Palace Museum becomes surreal

At seven he wanted to be Napoleon. At 10, he had labeled himself an impressionist artist. And by 25 he was already a master artist with ground-breaking styles and impeccable technique. He is Salvador Dali (1904-1989), one of the 20th century's most recognized artists, and he is currently the featured artist at the National Palace Museum.

Dali is often grouped with Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso as among the best three Spanish artists of the last century and the Palace Museum is privileged to have 38 oil paintings, 47 watercolor and drawings on loan from the Dali Theater Museum of Figueres, courtesy of the Gala Salvador Dali Foundation.

While the palace museum is traditionally a venue to display classic Chinese and Asian art, museum director Du Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) says the Dali exhibition is a unique opportunity for local audiences to appreciate this extraordinary artist's pieces.

Dali displays more provincialism in his works than his peers such as Picasso. He wrote art criticism in Catalan, the local language of his hometown Figueres, where he lived his whole life except for eight years spent in the US between 1940-1948. Despite the regional elements of his work, Dali came to be known internationally as a major artist.

The museum director said Dali's uniqueness lies in his exceptionally innovative ability to challenge custom and subverting traditional aesthetics and social values.

Dali was, for a period, a leading member of the surrealist movement, which began in France in 1920 and was championed by the writer Andre Breton and the painter Rene Magritte. The style was characterized by its subversive investigations into the relationship between dreams and reality, inspired in large part by Freudian psychoanalysis. Dali became known for filling his canvasses with nightmarish, irrational dreamscapes that hint at the subconscious, and broach such taboo topics as sex and death.

Mostly known as a painter and sculptor, Dali also worked in experimental film and theater and even designed windows for department stores and jewelry. He is also one of the rare artists to make a fortune while alive, thanks mainly to his tireless self-promotion.

The Palace Museum exhibition includes a reproduction of one of Dali's classic installations -- a red, lush sofa in the shape of a woman's lips. The Dali Theater Museum of Figueres director Monsterat Agues, was actually so impressed by the Taiwan-made reproduction's semblance to the original that he asked to bring it back to Spain to replace the worn-out original.

Crowds are most likely to swarm to Dali's oil paintings, among them Singularidades (1935), one of the highlight pieces of the show. This piece -- which appears for the first time outside Spain -- contains Dali's signature melting clocks that have come to almost define the surrealist style.

In this painting, the melting clock -- inspired originally by melting Camembert cheese -- is placed to the right of a ghostly-looking woman on a red sofa. The image of the melting clock evokes the concept of a distortion of time, a concept which is typically viewed as rigid and linear. The woman, who lacks facial features, but has straw-like hair, appears to be singing. The image is horrifying, not unlike Dali's other depictions of women, who often have drawers extending from their bodies. The drawers are another form of Dali's exploration of psychology.