A Little Less Ordinary at the Salvador Dalí Museum

Some museums ask you to step inside. The Salvador Dalí Museum offers an Enigma first. That’s the name of its soaring glass entryway, a fitting introduction to an American art museum devoted to the Spanish surrealist. For art lovers exploring St. Petersburg, Florida, this downtown waterfront stop pairs serious collecting with the pleasure of having your expectations gently scrambled. Start with the building. The paintings will take it from there.

An Enigma with a Practical Side

Designed by HOK with Yann Weymouth and built by the Beck Group, the museum makes surrealism an architectural proposition. The Enigma rises 75 feet and encompasses a spiral staircase. Its large glass entryway and skylight use glass 1.5 inches thick. Subtle entrance? Not exactly.

There’s a wonderfully pragmatic counterpoint to all that glass: the remaining walls are 18-inch-thick concrete, designed to protect the collection from the hurricanes that occasionally hit the region. The building gets to be expressive; the art gets a protective shell. Even an Enigma can have its sensible side.

The waterfront museum, next to the Mahaffey Theater, opened on January 11, 2011. In 2012, the AIA’s Florida Chapter placed it on its Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places. list. Consider the exterior part of your looking, rather than merely the wrapper.

From a Living Room to the Waterfront

The collection’s story begins with Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, who attended a Dalí retrospective at the Cleveland Museum of Art shortly before marrying in 1942. His subject matter intrigued them; his draftsmanship impressed them. A year later, they bought their first painting.

That purchase began a 40-year relationship with Dalí as patrons and friends. Until 1971, the Morses displayed their collection at home in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s quite a leap from finding room for a painting to finding room for a museum.

In March 1971, they opened a museum beside their office building in Beachwood, Ohio, with Dalí presiding. By the decade’s end, overwhelming visitor numbers prompted another move. A Wall Street Journal article, “U.S. Art World Dillydallies Over Dalí,” caught St. Petersburg’s attention, and the community rallied to bring the collection south. The museum opened in a rehabilitated downtown marine warehouse on March 7, 1982, remaining there until 2010.

It’s quite a leap from finding room for a painting to finding room for a museum.

Give the Paintings Some Breathing Room

The collection includes 96 oil paintings, more than 100 watercolors and drawings, and an extensive archival library, alongside graphics, photographs, sculptures, and objets d’art. That breadth is an invitation to think beyond a single image or medium. Let your curiosity wander a little.

Among its large-scale paintings are The Hallucinogenic Toreador, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, The Ecumenical Council, Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. Even the titles make a case against rushing.

Permanent collection displays rotate periodically, and the museum mounts several temporary shows each year. Its mission also reaches beyond presenting Dalí: it promotes understanding, enjoyment, and scholarly examination of art through his work and that of artists with a similar vision. Enjoyment belongs in that sentence right alongside scholarship. You needn’t turn every encounter into an exam.

Look Again—Then Step Inside

For another way into the paintings, the museum’s augmented-reality exhibit puts its largest works in an app. Standing before a painting, visitors can scan it with their phone camera to see elements highlighted, watch them move, and learn more about the figures. Your phone gets an art assignment.

Dreams of Dali in Virtual Reality takes the invitation further. Wearing VR headsets, participants enter Dalí’s Archeological Reminiscences of Millet’s “Angelus,” walking through the desert, up towers, and into hidden rooms. Looking at a painting and moving through its imagined spaces become distinctly different propositions.

The museum also offers performances, workshops, films, and lectures, with outreach and education opportunities for local schools and the community. Opera at The Dalí brings opera singers to the helical staircase. A staircase with a performance role feels entirely appropriate here.

For your own visit, leave room for both approaches: the close attention a painting invites and the playful curiosity these other encounters encourage. The collection is serious. Your enjoyment doesn’t have to wear a serious expression.