Salvador Dalí would consider it a divine comedy that, 22 years after his death, his work is inferno-hot. The latest evidence: "Dalí Illustrates Dante's Divine Comedy," a recently opened exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens.
For those who've been hiding under a melting clock, the attention-loving Spanish surrealist was the subject last year of the High Museum of Art's "Dalí: The Late Work" exhibition, an Oglethorpe University Museum print show and a local gallery display. And the beat goes on: This year has brought the opening of a larger location of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., and, through June at Emory University's Marcus Hillel Center, an exhibit of color lithographs portraying the epic history of the Jewish Diaspora and the return to its homeland.
Now the recently expanded Georgia Museum on the University of Georgia campus gets on board the Dalí train with prints of 101 watercolor illustrations created between 1951 and 1960 by the prolific artist to illustrate Dante Alighieri’s "The Divine Comedy."
The Italian government commissioned the project to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth and then bailed following howls that a Spaniard was selected. Undaunted, Dali kept working on his illustrations of all three of "Comedy's" parts -- "Inferno," "Purgatory" and "Paradise" -- and found a Parisian publisher to produce the suite. Between 1959 and 1963, engravers carved 3,600 separate wooden blocks used to create the prints, peppered with Dalí's unique imagery -- rhinoceros horns, skulls and literary allusions such as to Millet's "Angelus."
"He stayed active, didn't he?" asked Elliott King, the High's "Late Work" curator who will speak Thursday at the Georgia Museum. "He painted about 1,200 oils, but when one considers the sculptures, drawings, graphics, theater designs, jewelry designs, books and articles he was doing at the same time, it's really extraordinary."
Also extraordinary is the title of the UGA talk by King and Italian literature scholar Arielle Saiber: "Hyperdimensionality in Salvador Dalí's Illustrations of Dante's ‘Paradiso.'"
The Colorado-based King reassured that behind the admittedly "rather heavy sounding" lecture title, there will be reasonably straightforward points to grasp.
"The crux of our presentation is what distinguishes Dalí's illustrations from those done by previous illustrators is that Dalí was able to envision a ‘hyperdimensional' heaven, thanks to his reading of modern science and religious mysticism," King said. "As such, he -- like Dante -- concluded that neither reason, nor faith, nor even art or language could describe the true nature of that which lies beyond human comprehension and the human sense of dimension.
"In short, what Dante presented in ‘The Divine Comedy' was beyond human reason," King concluded, "and Dalí was one of the few artists who could really capture that in illustration. It's a great set."
On view
"Dalí Illustrates Dante's 'Divine Comedy'"
Noon–5 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; noon–9 p.m. Thursdays; 1–5 p.m. Sundays. Through June 19. Free (suggested donation, $3). 90 Carlton St., Athens. 706-542-4662, www.georgiamuseum.org.
Dalí scholars Elliott King and Arielle Saiber speak at the museum, 5 p.m. Thursday.
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