High Times

Gotcha! This post is about art...at the High Museum in Atlanta, that is! One of my Christmas presents this year (thanks, Mark!) was tickets to see the Dali exhibit at the High - something I've been wanting to do since I heard it was coming. I think the last time I'd been there was probably on a school field trip of sorts, possibly middle school? Who knows. It's been a while. I was very surprised at the crowd we encountered - the place was packed! I'm sure it had something to do with it being the last week of the exhibit, but nevertheless I was amazed and just happy to be there. Since we already had tickets (thanks again, Mark!) we were able to march right past the line that snaked around the building - and that's a good thing because it was COLD, y'all!

Once we were finally up to the exhibit, I realized that this was a showing of Dali's "late work" (i.e. the last 40 years of his career - not the stuff you'd see if you did a Google image search of "Dali paintings", with the exception of Persistence of Memory, arguably his most famous painting, pictured above).

The collection featured everything from film and photography to drawings and paintings. My favorite painting was The Maximum Speed of Raphael's Madonna (see left). Apparently, Dali became fascinated with nuclear physics and much of the work from this period in his career dealt with what he called 'nuclear mysticism'. It would've been nice if there were less people to maneuver around, but overall it was really interesting and fun. Dali was such a zany guy. I think he's great, even if he was a shameless self-promoter. Ah, to have the confidence to say this:

“Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy – the joy of being Salvador Dalí – and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?” – Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí

What wonderful things will YOU accomplish today?

Oh, and one last thing - this is, officially, why I love Salvador Dali:

"Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache," Dali said. "It is better for the health." Dali was known for carrying fake mustaches in a cigarette case, so instead of offering people a smoke, he would offer them a stache from his stash  :)