Dali's folly: Salvador Dali's critically neglected 1939 World's Fair pavilion, site of an erotic underwater fantasia, recently reemerged in a show of rarely seen documents and photos - Annals of Surrealism

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Lewis Kachur

Salvador Dali spent considerable time in New York in the 1930s, cultivating an audience and a market. These efforts culminated at the 1939 World's Fair in a giant Surrealist folly containing a grotto with erotic all-female tableaux vivants, some of them staged underwater. His pavilion, the Dream of Venus, was an astonishing realization of what Dali had termed the "terrifying and edible beauty" of Surrealist architecture, then unprecedented on American shores. Entered through a spread-leg archway, it contained such features as a ceiling of inverted umbrellas and a new version of the artist's famous Rainy Taxi (1988). Its bulbous, writhing facade, riven with holes and cracks, opposed the polished, streamlined Art Deco architecture of the national and corporate pavilions of the fair's optimistic "World of Tomorrow." (The latter included the official fine arts galleries and WPA-sponsored murals.) Limblike forms protruded from a front wall festooned with stylized womanly torsos in plaster and giant two-dimensional figures reproduced from Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Leonardo's St. John the Baptist (with the face from his Mona Lisa). This anti-machinism referred ultimately to nature, and to biomorphic forerunners like Gaudi's Casa Mila or the "palace" of Facteur Cheval. Seen at night, the structure became quite spooky.

Yet the business interests involved compromised the Dream of Venus as a work of public art. The art world largely turned its back, and until recent years this enterprise was nearly undocumented in Surrealist studies. It is still marginalized in some quarters as "a publicity stunt with more or less commercial sidelines." (1) A spate of recent publications and exhibitions suggests, however, that the Dream of Venus is undergoing something of a rediscovery and revival. Its dive into the murky waters of popular culture seems less problematic these days, while its collaborative and performative elements on a life-sized scale proved to be intriguing heralds of contemporary performance and multimedia installation. This summer, 63 years after the pavilion was razed, a show of visual documentation--offering a chance for fresh appraisal of Dali's work--appeared at the one surviving 1939 World's Fair structure, the New York City building, now the Queens Museum of Art.

Showmanship was apt, therefore, and the Queens Museum expanded the exhibition previously mounted in Figueres, Spain (1999-2000), and North Miami (2002) in three main ways. First, by commissioning Polish artist Urszula Trudnos to paint a three-quartersized mural of the facade, dramatizing the consider able scale of the original. Second, by capitalizing on the recent emergence of previously unknown period photographs. Third, by drawing on the Queens Museum's own vast collection of 1939 World's Fair material. Through such means, Dali's Dream of Venus was fully contextualized. The 17 amphibious "liquid ladies" hired to enact Dali's interior tableaux were very much akin to performers in other racy shows in the Amusement Zone, the pavilion's specific locale. (2) (One would have expected the Surrealists to be more on the cutting edge in investigating Eros.) At the Queens Museum, photos and a souvenir program from Gypsy Rose Lee's "Streets of Paris" spectacle documented one of several groups of unabashedly topless young women who entertained in the Zone.

The panoply of photographs in the exhibition attested to Dali's stature as a media-savvy self-promoter. Some photographers were commissioned to record the project, some were independently drawn to the offbeat quality of the Dream of Venus and/or the charisma of its darkly handsome chief creator. The famous photomontage portrait by George Piatt Lynes, showing Dali's head at the hip of a nude model figleafed by a lobster, transcends its original publicity purposes. Lynes and Dali were no doubt brought together by their dealer, Julien Levy, who came to the studio session with his own camera. Levy's numerous snapshots, exhibited for the first time in the Queens installation, take us behind the scenes of a playful collaboration between artist, photographer and model. And they reveal the prosaic fact that the nude stood on a stool.

In another session attended by Dali and Levy, Vogue photographer Horst P. Horst focused on seafood as "fashion." In one shot, a seated model's breasts are imperiled by a necklace of fishhooked shellfish, and she sports an eel belt. On this most eroticized of Surrealist photographs, Dali inked a swimsuit--featuring large breast-and-navel-baring gaps--over the masked nude. In effect, he designed Surrealist swimwear. Seafood as fashion was such an intriguing concept that Dali tried it out with several other photographers--none of whom, however, produced the same frisson as Horst.

The pavilion's plaster exterior and its interior displays, in all their lurid splendor, come to life in a set of recently rediscovered color slides by Eric Schaal, among the first photographers to use Kodachrome film. Schaars images, 24 in color and 72 in black and white, are featured in a lavish new book by critic and curator Ingrid Schaffner. (3) Schaal, a German-born photojournalist, was the most devoted documenter of the Dream of Venus campaign--from Gala Dali's forays as an assistant, to the water-weary swimmers in their cramped dressing room. (Three of these pictures appeared in Life magazine at the time; (4) the rest remained largely unpublished until the Figueres catalogue, which includes 34 Schaal black-and-whites among many other images.)