Color woodcuts "Salvador Dali:
Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy" in Kaluga Automatic translate

KALUGA. December 19 at 16:00 in the exhibition hall of the Kaluga Regional Art Museum will be the grand opening of the exhibition of color woodcuts "Salvador Dali: Illustrations for the Divine Comedy of Dante."

This is a truly unique exhibition - for the first time in our city a large-scale graphic series of this great Spanish artist will be exhibited - his illustration for the “Divine Comedy” by an Italian poet of the 14th century. Dante Alighieri.

According to researchers of the works of Salvador Dali, illustrations for the "Divine Comedy" - this is the pinnacle of graphic art in the artist’s work.

The story behind this series of woodcuts is quite interesting. In 1951, the Italian government, in preparation for the celebration of Dante’s 700th birthday, ordered Salvador Dali a series of illustrations for the new edition of The Divine Comedy. Unfortunately, due to political tensions in the upper echelon of Italian power, the order was subsequently canceled. But the artist decided to bring the matter to an end. So watercolor illustrations appeared - one for each thousand lines of “The Divine Comedy” from 1951 to 1960. But, unfortunately, the whereabouts of these watercolors are not known today, it is believed that they have been lost for a long time.

Later, by order of the French publisher Joseph Foret, these watercolors were embodied in a series of color woodcuts (woodcuts), which required 55 months of hard work and 3,500 wooden boards to produce 5,000 prints.

The prints of the works presented at the exhibition in our city were made during the life of S. Dali himself (which significantly increases their value characteristic) and have a color of unsurpassed quality that brings the graphic to painting as close as possible.

Being a vivid representative of surrealism, S. Dali does not just illustrate “The Divine Comedy”, but with innovative artistic means characteristic of this master only, he transforms Dante’s visions from a literary source, wrapping them in paper-materialized images of his own subconscious.

The exhibition displays 100 woodcuts of Salvador Dali from a private German collection (none of them are in museums in our country).

All works are accompanied by excerpts from texts from the "Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri.

The exhibition, designed for true connoisseurs of art, allows you to discover unknown to the general public facets of the creative heritage of one of the most revered and most criticized artist of the 20th century.

The exhibition runs until March 2, 2014.

The information partner of the project is the television and radio company NIKA.

The age limit for visiting the exhibition is up to 12 years.

Museum Hours:

daily from 10:00 to 18:00 (ticket office until 17:30), Thursday from 11:00 to 19:00 (ticket office until 18:30). The day off is Monday.

Address: st. Lenin, 104. tel. for inquiries - 8 (4842) 56-28-30.

www.artmuseum.kaluga.ru