Art opening of the week: Florida’s new Dalí museum: A ‘formidably wacky’ fortress

The nation’s premier Salvador Dalí collection finally has a worthy home, said Lennie Bennett in the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times. Built along St. Petersburg’s picturesque downtown waterfront, the new $36 million Dalí Museum, which opened in mid-January, provides ample room to display its “world-class” holdings in their entirety. Unlike its shed-like predecessor, established in 1980 just down the road, the new structure is a veritable fortress, engineered to keep the artworks safe even in a Category 5 hurricane. And while any good building stays upright, a great one “looks good while doing so.” This stunning edifice gamely marries style with function, beginning with a whimsical, amorphously shaped glass structure that seems to ooze out of its monolithic concrete core. (The architect calls it “the Glass Enigma.”) The overall effect is “fabulously eccentric, in true Dalí tradition.”

The surreal fun starts before you even hit the entrance, said Megan Voeller in Creative Loafing Tampa. Chunks of limestone, sourced from nearby Ocala, “dot the landscape in an effort to evoke the rocky shores” of the painter’s native Spain. There’s a walkable labyrinth, a garden of tropical plants, a pathway flanked by misters that create foggy surrounds. Such cleverly deployed atmospherics get visitors in “a Dalí state of mind” from the outset. Then there’s “the small matter” of the Great Enigma—“an architectural calling card that is, like the museum’s namesake, formidably wacky without being cheesy.” An “irreverent take” on the geodesic domes invented by Buckminster Fuller (whom Dalí admired), it’s a marvel of engineering, built from 1,026 glass triangles cut to be “as individual as snowflakes.”

If the jaw-dropping exterior packs a wallop, said Chelle Koster Walton in The Miami Herald, “the interior trumps it.” The building’s 63-step, three-story spiral staircase, which affords stellar bay views, captures Dalí’s trademark “snail and DNA symbolism and seems to defy all laws of physics.” The collection, too, has never looked better, thanks to expert lighting and spacing decisions. “The old museum was crowded and cramped and overloaded sensorywise. Here, natural light bathes the masterworks in softness,” and every canvas gets room to breathe. “The short distance around the galleries takes the visitor through the life of Dalí and the landscape of his mind with dreamy, sexual, often hallucinogenic images—some tricking the eye, some messing with the mind.” The great surrealist would have been proud.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up