Installation of the exhibition 'Salvador Dalí. Robert Whittaker. 1967-1972', at the Dalí Theatre-Museum.
The image used to open this brief perfectly summarizes the new temporary exhibition Salvador Dali. Robert Whittaker. 1967-1972: the eye of the surrealist painter seen through the eye of the photographer who flirted with surrealism (see the grotesque Yesterday and Today album cover that ended up being censored by the Beatles' own record label) .
Or is it perhaps the opposite, Whitaker through the eye of Dalí? (If you look closely you will see the figure of the photographer reflected in the pupil and iris of the universal artist born in Figueres).
Three extreme close-ups (mouth, eye, ear) those of the photo of the installation that, beyond portraying parts of the painter's face, are a prototype of the technique perfected by Whitaker in the 90s called Whitograph (36 exposures of a roll of film to create a single image).
Portrait? self portrait? Meta-self-portrait? It does not matter, what really transmits the snapshot of the eye is the close trust emerged between them as a result of the historian and collector Douglas Cooper presenting them in 1967.
"When I met Dali, I told him that he wanted to get inside his head, photograph every hole he could find. I started by photographing his ears, then inside his mouth and above his nose ", this is the phrase with which they remember in Whitaker's official biography the first contact between the two.
Dalí was not new to Whitaker, rather to anyone from the first world, if we take into account that two years earlier the Spanish had already exhibited at the MoMA in New York ; neither was Bob for Dalí: the Briton was recognized as the Beatles' camera photographer and worked as a photojournalist for Time and Life magazines.
Salvador Dalí before his work 'Tuna Fishing' (1966-67), a portrait by Robert Whitaker.
THE EXHIBITION
This and other photographs -until a total of 27 portraits of Dalí made by Whitaker between 1967 and 1972– will remain on display in the Sala de las Loggias of the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres for a year, to the good fortune of lovers of two of the most significant artists of the 20th century.
Taken mostly in the painter's house-workshop in Portlligat, as well as in Paris, the portraits belong to the collections of 707 images recently acquired by the Dalí Foundation from the photographer's family. And the peculiarity of the exhibition lies in the fact that, despite being all known, they had never before been exhibited together.
Salvador Dalí at the Hotel Meurice in Paris with an iconic image of John Lennon in the background.
Another detail of the portraits is that they are much more than that, they are real staging in which every detail brings meaning and significance, such as the one made at the Hotel Meurice in Paris, where Dalí stayed when he went to the French capital, and in which he shares the spotlight with an iconic image of John Lennon hanging on the back wall .
Provocative, ironic, scoundrels, these are the 27 portraits that serve to better understand the surrealist universe that surrounded Salvador Dalí, but also the Robert Whitaker's ability to testify times and characters.
Salvador Dalí portrayed by Robert Whitaker in Porlligat, Girona.
One of the 27 portraits made by Robert Whitaker of Dalí and which make up the exhibition 'Salvador Dalí. Robert Whittaker. 1967-1972'.