BY CAMILA HARRIGAN-LABARCA

In print | Published January 27, 2005

The first time I met Salvador, I was eight years old. My mother and I were at Borders Books and I was sitting on the floor of the Art section. I enjoyed flipping randomly through the various art books, and on this day I was struck by one in particular: a collection of the paintings of Salvador Dali. His strange pictures shocked me and the images have stayed with me ever since. His work now elicits different sentiments within me, sentiments beyond fear and confusion. His vision of the Spanish Civil War, depicted in a piece called “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans,” displays mangled body parts with a breast being horrifically squeezed by some other unrecognizable piece of flesh.

As a surrealist painter, Dali creates works of art that toe the line between comfortable reality and a dream world of harsh landscapes and distorted figures. He takes familiar elements of everyday life — a watch, a tree, a nude human body — and combines them with the hallucinogenic surroundings of his inner thoughts to paint an indecipherable paranormal world. It’s a little bit discouraging that his dreams and his waking experiences are more interesting than even my craziest fantasies, but that’s all the more reason to indulge in his (exponentially more entertaining) imaginary world.

Swarthmore college students will be excited to hear that the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be bringing Dali’s surrealist art to Philly in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Spanish painter’s birth. From Feb. 16 until May 15, Salvador will be visiting America to infiltrate people’s minds with his dream-like, sometimes nightmarish paintings. PMA will be the only American museum to host a major centennial retrospective exhibition on Dali. That’s not to say that other museums haven’t shown Dali’s work, but this is the most work ever to be in one space in the United States. We are extremely lucky to be so close to such revolutionary art.

The exhibition will feature not only Dali’s most well-known work, but also his early cubist-influenced pieces and some of his late works, in which he experimented with optical illusions. No less than two hundred works will be shown. Paintings such as “The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition” (1934), “Still Life-Fast Moving” (1956) and the famous “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans” (1936) will be on display, among others.

Up until now everything I’ve mentioned sounds great, doesn’t it? But there is a catch. The cost to view Dali’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is $17.00 for students (that’s you, Swatties). This will leave a dent in your pockets, but I for one plan to cough up the cash for a ticket. There’s no way of knowing when something like this could come to the U.S., much less Philadelphia, again.

I hope that those of you who have never had the opportunity to see Dali’s work on canvas will join the art lovers of Philadelphia to see this exhibit. For the curious and avid Swarthmore mind this should be a wonderful experience.

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