DALI STIRS KOLKATA, YET AGAIN

The Spanish artist's two etchings relating to Shakespeare's Macbeth are on display at Victoria Memorial Hall

- Sudipto Mullick From Kolkata.

Heritage monument cum museum, The Victoria Memorial Hall (VMH) is presently exhibiting two rare original colour etchings of Catalan surrealist giant, Salvadore Dalí, which will run till the end of July.

It’s the only Dali artwork available anywhere in India on a permanent basis — be it a gallery or a museum. The only other major exhibition that comes to mind was the recent “Dalí Comes to India” at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre and thereafter to Massarrat by Bruno Art Group spanning February 23 to March 16, but both were timed exhibitions.

SURREAL SHAKESPEARE

Displayed in the Central Hall of the museum, the etchings are as such untitled, however VMH has coded them as R7695 and R7696. Both the etchings, are a part of Dalí’s ‘Macbeth series’ and are made on copper plates, printed on Japanese rice paper with cotton threads and signed by the artist in pencil. Dalí is known to have created this series comprising 12 illustrations in 1946 for Doubleday & Company’s reprint of “Macbeth’ by William Shakespeare, which feature surreal and eerie interpretation of the bard’s tragedy. Though small in size (average about 12 inches X 18 inches) one can still adduce his characteristic signature surrealism iconography comprising dreamlike imagery, symbolic landscapes, and distorted figures, which in the case of these series commensurate with themes of ambition, guilt, violence and the supernatural.