Thursday, December 10, 2009

Retrospective Bust of a Woman by Salvador Dali at the MOMA





Tucked away in a corner on the fourth floor of the MOMA (in the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Painting and Sculpture Gallery) is this delightful sculpture called Retrospective Bust of a Woman by Salvador Dali. The accompanying exhibition tag describes the sculpture as follows: [It] "not only presents a woman as an object but explicitly as one to be consumed. A long phallic baguette crowns her head, cobs of corn dangle round her neck, and ants swarm along her forehead as if getting crumbs." Maybe it is just me, but I see Marie Antoinette during the Flour Wars.

This is one of a small grouping of surrealist sculptures on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until January 4, 2010 in an exhibition entitled "The Erotic Object: Surrealist Sculpture from the Collection" curated by Anne Amland assisted by Veronica Roberts.

I lingered over these sculptures drinking in their quirky and often humourous point of view. Also on display is the infamous fur-lined tea cup by Meret Oppenheim and Taglioni's Jewel Casket by Joseph Cornell.