The Dali Museum - St. Petersburg, FL

I made the short drive to The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg this week.  The museum houses the private collection of Salvador Dali paintings collected by A. Reynolds Morse and Eleanor Morse from Cleveland, Ohio. When the collection became too large to keep in their house and business offices, they looked a new place to showcase them.  They found a new home in St. Petersburg.

From SalvadorDaliMuseum.org:

As an artist, Salvador Dali was not limited to a particular style or media. The body of his work, from early impressionist paintings through his transitional surrealist works, and into his classical period, reveals a constantly growing and evolving artist. Dali worked in all media, leaving behind a wealth of oils, watercolors, drawings, graphics, and sculptures, films, photographs, performance pieces, jewels and objects of all descriptions. As important, he left for posterity the permission to explore all aspects of one’s own life and to give them artistic expression.

I enjoyed all the paintings, but two stood apart from the crowd. Oddly enough, they are nothing alike at all.  One very simple and the other tremdously complicated and detailed.

Basket of Bread (1925) and The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1969-1970) 

I'm no art critic to be sure, but I think those two paintings demonstrate the vastness of Dali's work and the diversity of his interests.  In the beginning he studied the masters and by the end of his career he had become one of them.

If you visit the museum, I recommend taking the time for a guided tour.  It will cost you no more than a few minutes of time and, if you're like me, you'll gain a lifetime of appreciation for this wonderful and complicated artist.

To read more about the artist what better way than to read his diary?  It's available in the museum gift shop and on Amazon.com.