The Salvador Dali museum

The Salvador Dali museum houses the most important collection dedicated to the spanish artist. Located in St.Petersburg, fForida, it holds priceless treasures.

Collection

The Salvador Dali Museum includes 96 oil paintings including The Persistence of Memory, a lot of original drawings, manuscripts, works, photographs and an impressive amount of files. The works are chronologically organized in order to understand the artistic journey of the painter. Visitors will also have the chance to see the artist in all its facets through films, photographs, works on paper and objects.

The founding of the museum

The collection was founded by the couple Eleanor and Reynolds Morse. In 1942, Reynolds Morse went to a retrospective of Dali's work at the Museum of Cleveland, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Morse became totally fascinated by the work of the artist and bought in March 1943, their first work of Salvador Dali. This was the first of a long series of acquisitions culminating forty years later as the largest collection of Dali's work in America.

The Morse couple met Dali and his wife Gala in April 1943 and quickly became friends. Reynolds and Eleanor will regularly visit Dali at his villa in Port Lligat, Spain. The collection was first installed in the house of Morses in Cleveland until 1971 when the first museum was inaugurated by Dali himself in a suburb of Cleveland. The building proved too small very quickly. The Museum of St. Petersburg was opened in 1982. Too often prey to tropical weather; a new building resistant to storms was built a few hundred meters away, accessible since 2011.

The new building

Designed by architect Yann Weimouth, the Salvador Dali Museum combines the rational and the fantastic. It consists of a simple rectangle from which springs a round shape, free, made of glass triangles reminiscent of the Dali museum’s dome in Spain. On the inside, there is a single staircase, spiral, reminiscent of Dali's obsession with spirals and helical forms of the molecule of DNA. The Garden of Dali is placed around this building, a good place for inspiration and tranquility. The building has a library, the gallery itself and a retail space.

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“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”
See more quote by Salvador Dali