When Salvador Dalí died in 1989, European newspapers seemed only capable of reflecting on his time as a surrealist in their neck of the woods. But half of the artist’s life was actually lived in the United States.
“It was like America was never even part of Dalí’s world to them,” Peter Tush, Curator and Senior Interpreter at St. Petersburg’s Dalí Museum told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
Last May, the museum opened a new exhibit which counters that narrative by tapping into an inventory that is the largest collection of Dalí’s work outside of Europe. “Dalí In America” runs through Oct. 18 and makes the case that the artist did his most imaginative work in the most public of forums here in the U.S.—and showed the country that an artist didn’t have to be a quiet, lofty or elusive figure.
Included in the exhibit are works like Dalí’s Statue of Liberty images, New York-adjacent projects like the work he did on Manhattan’s Bonwit Teller windows and at the Julien Levy Gallery on Madison Avenue, and, of course paintings like “The Ship,” “The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus,” and “Portrait of Gala looking onto the Mediterranean sea which from a distance of 20 metres is transformed into a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.” Another piece in the exhibit is 1976’s “American Clock,” timed for the country’s bicentennial. The photolithograph print features a Dalíean clock, along with a red, white, and blue Lady Liberty bust on a withering branch.
Tush thinks Dalí—a Catalan who died at the age of 84 in his hometown of Figueres—would’ve loved it here, citing, in part, the artist’s affection for disorder and technology.
“He was one of the first artists involved in holography. He loved the idea of painting in three dimensions, and he was super excited by cybernetics and machine processing,” Tush said, citing Dalí’s 1975 lithograph subtitled “Spectacles with Holograms and Computers For Seeing Imagined Objects.”
A little bit like a rapper too gung ho about a beat to clear any samples, Dalí was a sponge always quoting and appropriating from other artists, having fun with inspiration with little regard for copyright. Artificial intelligence, Tush thinks, “would be something he’d go ballistic over.”
This country in the ‘30s and ‘40s also offered a media infrastructure that could feed Dalí’s thirst to be famous. “He came to America ready for a new audience, and he recognized that meant more than a couple new collectors. He wanted the people,” Tush said.
And he reached them.
Dalí scored a Time magazine cover in 1936 and in 1964 brought avant-garde flavor to Boy Scouts of America’s magazine Boy’s Life (now known as Scout Life). There were TV appearances and even collaborations with Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. The artist knew, Tush noted, “that far more people would see a movie than would ever see his paintings.”
Dalí’s work sometimes addressed his own sexual anxieties by fixating on masturbation—thinking about him entering the mainstream c. 2026 is interesting given the polarizing, pearl-clutching, hyper-aware nature of everything.
Tush thinks Dalí would’ve thrived.
“Things aren’t worked out, aren’t clean or clear. There’s a lot of confusion, a lot of gray area, and he seemed to thrive in chaos,” Tush added. “That was really his perfect medium.”
And like many celebrities, Dalí was certainly not immune to controversy.
He painted portraits of the Franco family, and seemed to be hedging bets by playing nice with power (not too unlike rich folks flocking to politicians).
“The very fact that Dalí would even entertain being on Franco’s good side was appalling to most of his former colleagues. But if it had been somebody completely different—a communist who’d won instead—Dalí would have done the same thing. He was very much someone who went with whichever way the wind was blowing,” Tush said. “He didn’t have a strong political identity. He wasn’t fighting in the Spanish Civil War—he was waiting to see who would win, and that’s who he’d try to get close to.”
Despite creating an, at times, unflattering image of Hitler in his Dalí found himself fixated on the monster. The museum even owns “Hitler Masturbating,” a 1973 water-color conversion of an unknown artist’s work on paper (it’s not on display, but could come out in another exhibition in a different context).
Dalí, Tush said, would have been the first to say that if he’d been captured by Nazis, he would have been imprisoned and probably executed.
“He had no illusions about where he stood with them,” Tush said, noting that there was no sense of love or admiration for Nazis. “He just found Hitler so extreme that it became, unfortunately, an obsession.”
It was a fixation that was unacceptable politically, Tush said. But running towards hot-button subjects was a common theme in Dalí’s life. Even his autobiography—raw, transparent and troubling in many places—might’ve made Dalí immediately cancelable.
Tush notes that like many figures from the past, Dalí would not have made it without changing.
“If we look back at Dalí and his views and his values, there’s some that definitely do not line up with our current values or our way of looking at the world,” Tush said. “But I think that he provided so many open opportunities to understand this world really differently—that’s his main contribution. He was having fun at the time he was there, and some of it was about pushing buttons and being edgy and being uncomfortable, especially for people who were not good at being uncomfortable.”
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This article appears in June 25 – July 01, 2026.