Mae West: Sensation

Salvador Dali and MAE WEST both knew how to make an impression.
• • Writing for the London newspaper The Guardian, reporter Jonathan Jones reports on an element that took root during the 1930s: "It was sexy, weird, and dangerous - - and it's still hugely influential today."
• • According to Jones, Dalí saw no difference between the avant-garde and popular culture, and excelled at the art of sensation: when a surrealist exhibition was staged at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936, it was Dalí who made the papers by giving a lecture wearing a deep-sea diving suit complete with brass helmet - - and collapsing.
• • Dalí projected his dreams so clearly they fascinated fashion designers and Hollywood, where he worked with Alfred Hitchcock and even Walt Disney. He happily designed the lip sofas that feature in the V&A show and, in his one-man museum in Figueras, created an entire room whose furniture forms itself into Mae West's face, with sofa lips.
• • None of this was the betrayal of surrealism that Breton and his comrades accused him of after they threw him out of the movement in 1936, for confessing to a fascination with Hitler. Surrealism was an attempt to release "the marvellous" into everyday existence. Dalí, a clever man, saw that this connected it with architecture, which shapes our everyday environment. His hero was the Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí. At Figueras, you see Dalí's desire to create a total environment of fantasy such as Gaudí's rapturous house Casa Batlló.
• • This is what Dalí's Mae West room, lip-sofa and telephone with a lobster for a receiver try to do: replace reality with fantasy, as Gaudí's architecture does.
• • Nothing could be more surreal. Dalí did it in a way anyone could respond to. Soon designers were making surrealist dresses, Cecil Beaton taking surrealist fashion photos. Dalí travelled far from home and, some say, lost his soul painting portraits of rich Americans. ...
- - excerpt - - -
• • Source: The Guardian
• • printed: Monday - - 5 March 2007
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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