Contessa Gallery Explores the Work of Salvador Dali

Contessa Gallery owners Steve Hartman and Contessa Tscherne discuss this week’s cover artist Salvador Dali and their exciting retrospective of the surrealist’s work, opening Friday and Saturday, July 25 and 26 from 5-8 p.m., July 27 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and running through September 30.

A Chat with Contessa Gallery on Dali

Tell me about this show.

This is a very, very extensive retrospective on Salvador Dali’s work. We have original paintings. We will have tapestries by the famous French Aubusson tapestry makers of his works, and we will have limited edition hand-colored etchings which make each piece unique. We will have a lot of his most famous images, including “Argus,” “Flower Women with Soft Piano,” “Place Furstenberg,” “Women in the Waves,” “Nude with Garter” and “Parrots,” which are some particular highlights.

Can you talk about Dali the artist and what a unique figure he was in the history of art?

Salvador Dali was very learned, very educated. He studied literature, poetry, and many other forms of artistic expression extensively. He was quite a renaissance man. Dali was unquestionably the most famous man on the planet during his heyday, people like Walt Disney, people like Alfred Hitchcock, he didn’t go visit them. They visited him. In addition to his art, he was noted for his furniture, jewelry, filmmaking, lace and table settings, candelabra — so he was really the first artist to commercialize in a sense of going beyond just the field of art. He merged art and film, art and technology, art and fashion, art and design, which all made him quite a unique character in the world at that time. Without Salvador Dali, there never could have been Andy Warhol, and Warhol really followed Dali’s playbook, in the sense that Dali did film, so Andy wanted to do film. Dali did so many different things, and thus Andy, with the factory, tried to mimic the commercialization that Salvador Dali was really at the forefront of in the history of art.

Why show Dali now at this moment?

Dali, obviously was one of the greatest painters in history, and he, along with Rene Magritte, are clearly the most important surrealists. There was a Magritte painting that sold recently for $121 million and I think that Salvador Dali’s works are very undervalued, and we like to pick art that we love, that has historical significance, as well as things that we think are undervalued for our clients. Thats why we’re doing such a show to this extent right now, because we want to get our clients into Salvador Dali at great pricing.

Provenance is extremely important when it comes to collecting Dali. How do you guys authenticate all the work you have?

That’s a very important part of this show. We work with one particular collection, and we’ve worked with the collection for well over 25 years. There was a gentleman by the name of Pierre Argillet, who was Dali’s most important financier, collaborator and publisher. And Pierre would commission Dali to illustrate important bodies of literature, things like mythology or Venus in Furs or Apollinaire and many others. … With Salvador Dali, you have to be guaranteed where the work is coming from, and that’s why we have always concentrated on this narrow collection that was done mostly between 1960 and 1972. There really were never any problems with provenance or things like that with Dali until well after 1972 at that time when Dali wanted to take some shortcuts and do print media that wasn’t as extensive and as important as he had done previously. Pierre Argillet said, “Dali, I wish you well, but I don’t want to go into publishing things that I don’t deem as important by you.” So I think that’s a really important facet of this show, that people are getting Dali’s best works.

Do you have anything to add?

Another important facet to the show is that this is the 100th anniversary of surrealism as a genre in art. And I would also say that Dali was one of the greatest draftsmen in art history. And in my opinion in the art historical pantheon, you have artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Albrecht Dürer, Picasso and Dali — I feel those were probably the six greatest draftsmen in art history, and that’s something that we’ve always rewarded as a gallery. We value artists who have technical merit and gift. But you can’t just be technically good in a sense that if you’re doing derivative work that is just a regurgitation of things that everybody else has done or is doing, we don’t see value there. With Dali, he had such a unique iconography and signature style. We look for artists who have that vision, where you can just look at a work and say, “That’s a Salvador Dali.” And he clearly had his own unique visual language that added to art history through his work.

100 Years of Surrealism: The Salvador Dali Perspective is on view from July 25 through September 30 at Contessa Gallery in Southampton (9 Main Street). Learn more at contessagallery.com