It's a chilly December morning when I meet Van Phrasavath, a member of the architectural team that designed the new Dalí Museum, for a tour of the museum's swanky new home. The sleek building and its surroundings offer a postcard-worthy picture of St. Petersburg, complete with sunshine glinting off a waterfront filled with tethered boats and palm fronds rustling in the breeze. Though a bit too windswept on this particular morning, the Lincoln Center-esque plaza between the museum and its next-door neighbor, the Mahaffey Theater, will make a great picnic spot with the arrival of spring (aka February).
Outside the Dalí, a museum devoted to the most famous Surrealist artist ever to live — no hard feelings, Man Ray — chunks of limerock sourced from a quarry near Ocala dot the landscape in an effort to evoke the rocky shores of coastal Spain where Salvador Dalí lived throughout his life. Combined with a garden of tropical plants and a walkable labyrinth, the museum's exotic exterior hopes to put visitors in a Dalí state of mind. But if the flora doesn't persuade you, there is the small matter of a giant glass blob that appears to ooze out of the concrete building — an architectural calling card that is, like the museum's namesake, formidably wacky without being cheesy.
"We didn't want it to be too thematic, too Disney," Phrasavath says of the building.
On Tuesday — that's 1.11.11 — the new Dalí Museum makes its public debut. Somewhat tucked away between Alfred Whitted Airport and the Mahaffey on downtown St. Pete's waterfront, the museum's construction has proceeded quietly over the past two years as other Bay area institutions like the Chihuly Collection and the Tampa Museum of Art have opened to great fanfare. Now that the Dalí's big day is here, the 66,450-square-foot museum at the foot of Beach Drive is ready for its own moment in the spotlight.
Never a museum inclined to excessive sobriety, the Dalí is pulling out all the stops for its opening week. [CL was there for the festivities: Follow the links to read about Editor David Warner's interview with Susan Sarandon during a special members' event, and see photos of the surreal procession on 1.11.11.] For starters, each of the 95 oil paintings by Salvador Dalí that the museum owns will be on view, giving visitors a chance to ogle Dalí's cryptic paintings and dream-like imagery as never before. On Tuesday, Infanta Christina of Spain, the younger daughter of that country's reigning monarchs, cuts the ceremonial ribbon following a community parade from the old to the new museum. And throughout the week, the winning entries of a surreal photo competition judged by John Waters will be on display.
For longtime St. Pete residents like Phrasavath, who grew up in the 'burg and attended the respected visual arts program at Gibbs High School, the museum's changing identity is a reflection of the evolution of St. Pete, and Tampa Bay more generally, as a cultural community. On our tour, we head inside the building and ascend the helical staircase at the center of the museum's lobby — in a tribute to Dalí's fascination with optical illusions and the double helix of DNA, the concrete spiral appears to swirl upward endlessly toward the glass roof overhead — reminiscing about the old Dalí, which both of us visited as kids.
"I grew up with it," Phrasavath says. "To have the opposite perspective, to be part of the new design, was very fulfilling."
In a room off a corridor inside the museum, assistant curator Dirk Armstrong — another longtime resident of the 'burg who happens to be a childhood friend of Phrasavath's — reframes a painting. It's a small landscape by Dalí of waterfront Cadaqués, the coastal Spanish town where the artist regularly spent time in his youth, rendered in the style of Impressionism. The back of the canvas reads 1918-19, years when Dalí would have been a teenager of 14 or 15. Placing the painting in its new frame, Armstrong shows off the old frame, hand-built by Reynolds Morse, the art collector whose penchant for Dalí's works — shared by his wife Eleanor — laid the foundation for the museum.
Armstrong leads the way to the museum's new vault along the same corridor. The vault knows the curator, who has worked at the Dalí for 18 years, by his thumb; a biometric scanner next to the door checks for the right fingerprint and the right body temperature.
"It can't be my dead hand," Armstrong jokes, opening the door.
Inside, the vault holds works by Dalí from a collection that spans the artist's prolific life — from early paintings like the Cadaqués landscape to later, large-scale Surrealist masterpieces like The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968-70), sculptures (including the lobster telephone), prints, drawings, cast glass, films and exhibition posters. With the largest and most comprehensive collection of Dalí's art outside of Europe, the museum gets a call virtually any time another museum in the U.S. wants to organize a show of the artist's work. Though a handful of institutions in the U.S. own a piece or two — e.g., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which owns The Persistence of Memory, the painting famous for depicting a series of melting pocket watches (the Dalí owns a similar painting, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory) — no one except the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres, Spain, has an inventory like the St. Pete museum's. With its gallery space doubled (to approximately 15,000 square feet) in the new building, the Dalí plans now to exhibit much more of its collection on a regular basis.
Protecting that unique collection was the main rationale for constructing a new building in the first place. Biometric vault security notwithstanding, hurricanes, not thieves, were regarded as the primary threat to the Dalí and its holdings at the museum's former site. That other waterfront building, less than a mile south of its new home, was in essence a converted warehouse; in contrast, the new museum sports 18-inch thick concrete walls that can withstand a Category 5 hurricane. While on display in galleries on the building's third floor, the collection will rest high above even the highest of flood lines, and a massive generator housed on the second floor will keep climate control churning in the event of an emergency. Even the glass blob can take a hit — it's rated to withstand a Cat-3 storm.
Robustness was the architectural team's primary goal in working with museum staff on a design.
"We said, it's a treasure box and you want to preserve that treasure," says Yann Weymouth, lead architect at HOK.
In 1943, Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, then a newlywed couple living in Ohio, purchased the first piece of that treasure after seeing an exhibition of Dalí's work at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Soon to become major collectors of the artist, the Morses purchased Daddy Longlegs of the Evening, Hope! (1940), a painting that shows a gangly spider crawling across the face of a feminine figure whose flesh stretches like silly putty over the branches of a tree as she plays a cello (which also melts). Like many of Dalí's works, the painting presents viewers with a puzzle of dream-like imagery — a deathly white horse leaping out of a canon, two inkwells poised atop the figure's stretching torso, a bevy of ants swarming its face — all rendered with Dalí's superb skills as a draftsman in a realistic style that makes the painting's unreality all the more unsettling. The purchase turned into a serious habit for the Morses, who developed a close friendship with Dalí and his wife, Gala, and eventually created a museum in Ohio to share their collection with the public, relocating it to St. Pete in 1982.
In the nearly three decades that followed, the Dalí Museum grew to attract an average of 200,000 yearly visitors, a number that the museum hopes eventually to double at the new building, according to director Hank Hine. About a quarter of the Dalí's visitors come from outside the U.S., and an increasing number of them are 18-to-24-year-olds who, in some cases, weren't even alive during Dalí's lifetime (he died in 1989). Dalí's continuing appeal around the world, and especially to young audiences, may have something to do with his rejection of modernism's dry formalism in favor of combining traditional drawing and painting techniques with mind-bending ideas about human nature and existence, and with what Hine calls Dalí's "youthful irreverence."
When Eleanor Morse died last summer at age 97 (her husband died in 2000), she left behind a request that the new museum bear a geodesic dome — the kind invented by Buckminster Fuller, whom Dalí knew and admired — like the one at Fundació Dalí in Spain. Call the Glass Enigma — the proper name for the architectural feature I keep calling "the blob" — an irreverent take on Bucky's dome. Against the stability of the concrete museum, the globular Enigma stands out as an avant-garde flourish: a dash of mischief layered on top of solid tradition.
"Without being too imitative, it's an example of the two principal ideas of Dalí," Hine says.
The museum would have been hard-pressed to find someone more qualified to take the helm on design than Yann Weymouth, a Tampa-based architect who worked with I.M. Pei on the famous glass pyramid addition to the Louvre. With his staff at HOK, Weymouth has completed a handful of other Florida art museum projects in recent years including the Ringling Museum of Art's Searing Wing and the St. Pete MFA's Hazel Hough Wing, added in 2008. Morse's request gave Weymouth an excuse to pay homage to Bucky and Dalí by working with Novum Structures to design and engineer an irregularly shaped dome unlike anything previously constructed in the U.S. (One other dome on the planet, located in Milan, and another under construction in China belong to this small family of globular geodesic domes.) Chucking the matching triangles of glass out of which a normal geodesic dome would be constructed, the architects used computer-assisted design to build the blob from an array of cut glass pieces as individual as snowflakes.
"There are 1,026 different panes of glass in the structure, and not one is identical to another. That's the way nature works," Weymouth says.
The Enigma stretches all the way from the museum's ground floor up the side of the building to its third floor galleries, where the museum's architectural formula abruptly becomes quite simple: white walls, 18-foot ceilings, polished concrete floors and movable wooden partitions. Here, some understated features — like the concealed "light cannons" that filter a very small amount of daylight from skylights onto Dalí's masterworks — may go unnoticed by all but the geekiest museum buffs. As a result of the cannons, Dalí's largest paintings, housed in niches that lend the viewing experience a bit of intimacy, will look slightly different at different times throughout the day depending on the quality of light outside the museum. Unlike the Enigma and the helical staircase, the galleries' subtle features are designed to disappear.
"At that point, the architecture must take a backseat to the art, because the art is remarkable," Weymouth says.
Now that the new building has secured the collection's safety, the museum's next big strategic goal is to mobilize Dalí's legacy to save the world, Hine says. He's not kidding, exactly. The director hopes the museum will become a center for avant-garde conversations and potential partnerships between the institutions that constitute Tampa Bay's brain trust. (So far, this vision has led to conversations with USF, the Poynter Institute and SRI about how they might partner with the Dalí.) Hine sees this devotion to avant-gardism in the broadest sense as a continuation of Dalí's polymath obsessions as an artist who, though not an expert, felt compelled to grapple with questions of cutting-edge science (e.g., in the form of psychology or DNA), math and technology in his work across artistic media. On April 22, the museum will host TEDx Tampa Bay, a local spin-off of TED, the internationally known conference devoted to big ideas across disciplines. And next week during the museum's opening, the Dalí will showcase the results of an unusual partnership with the creators of the Hipstamatic iPhone app. Inside the wildly popular app, which lets iPhone users apply retro visual effects to the photos they take with their phones, users can purchase a $0.99 upgrade called the Dalí Museum GoodPak, which enables double exposure and painterly color effects. All sales of the GoodPak — 50,000, so far — benefit the Dalí. On Tuesday night, the museum will project on its exterior the winning entries from an online photo competition run by Hipstamatic last fall and judged by filmmaker John Waters. (Entries had to be taken with an iPhone using the GoodPak effects.) Some of the contenders — from a Dalí homage titled The Hallucinogenic Guitarist to Post Lunch Remains, a kind of Rorschach blot composed of bread by an artist identified as ctaylor863 — are even kind of cool-looking.
Hine calls the iPhone snaps "the most current of contemporary art" (not so far-fetched in an age when the Guggenheim exhibits videos drawn from YouTube), but from where I'm sitting, they look more like evidence of marketing — and fundraising — genius. In either case, one thing's clear: the Dalí Museum is ready for the future.