“I try to create fantastic things, magical things, things like in a dream. The world needs more fantasy. Our civilization is too mechanical. We can make the fantastic real, and then it is more real than that which actually exists.”
–Salvador Dalí, 1940

Dear Friends,

Almost exactly 100 years ago, André Breton announced the Surrealist movement, a literary and artistic endeavor that strove to tap into the desires and visions of the collective unconscious to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) remains one of Surrealism’s most notorious practitioners, the man and his provocative persona enduringly famous. Melting watches, bizarre objects, and lurid shapes in barren dreamscapes; optical illusions, the artist’s iconic mustache, and outlandish statements–when we think of Dalí, a self-proclaimed genius of the modern age, we think of someone utterly breaking with tradition to the point of sacrificing serious art to celebrity.

“Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” here at the MFA gives you an entirely new perspective on the artist, his influences, and the arc of his work. This is the first Dalí exhibition ever shown at the Museum—and it’s going to astound you.

A broad range of Dalí’s best-known works from the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, are in brilliant dialogue with paintings and prints from the MFA’s collection by Dürer, Goya, El Greco, Velázquez, and many others. Visitors can imagine a young Dalí in Madrid, honing his immensely accomplished drawing and painting skills by studying these artists at the Prado. Comparisons yield direct connections and homages to the great artists of the past in Dalí’s work (even hinting that Velázquez might have been a possible model for the famous mustache). From 16th-century mystic nightmarish visions to Velázquez’s masterful portraits, from Dutch still life to Dalí’s modern nuclear-age fantasies and religious revelations, this exhibition shows an artist mining past generations as he confronts enduring questions of time, memory, beauty, mortality, dreams, temptation, and destruction.

One of the things I like best about the installation are the quotations by Dalí—one of the great artist-provocateurs of the 20th century—interspersed throughout.

“The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”
–Salvador Dalí, 1942

And that it shows us Dalí reinventing the art of his forebears by embracing the ideas of the 20th century, illustrating that radical, innovative ideas and ways of seeing often have their roots in engagement with the past. I urge you to take in every detail of “Dalí: Disruption and Devotion,” which the Boston Globe called “beautiful and profound.” I promise the experience and the journey will be well worth it.

Matthew Teitelbaum
Ann and Graham Gund Director

Select Past Director’s Messages

• Letter from Boston Museum Directors in Support of the NEA
• MFA Director on Black Lives Matter