Coffee with a Curator
August 5 @ 10:30am – 11:30am
Dalí, Hitchcock and Hollywood’s Dream Factory
Join us for this month’s installment of our Coffee with a Curator series featuring Elliot King, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Washington and Lee University. In conjunction with our special exhibition Dalí in America, the talk will explore Salvador Dalí’s contribution to Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic film, Spellbound.
For decades, the film’s celebrated dream sequence has been surrounded by rumor, confusion and competing claims. Drawing on early working scripts for Spellbound and producer David O. Selznick’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center, this lecture revisits one of cinema’s most famous encounters between Surrealism and Hollywood, revealing how Hollywood dreamed Surrealism—with and without Dalí.
Location: The Dalí Museum’s Will Raymund Theater (registration required) or live on YouTube (link below).
This event is free with limited capacity. An event ticket is required for entry.
Gallery access is not included.
Please note: This free lecture has limited seating and often sells out. A valid registration ticket—printed or on your phone—is required for entry to the Will Raymund Theater. If you don’t have your ticket ready when you arrive, your entry may be delayed. This ticket covers the lecture only; gallery access is not included. Guests without a ticket to the lecture may be able to watch a live stream of the lecture in the Raymond James Community Room when space allows, though this is not guaranteed.
To watch the live stream from home, click below at the time of the program:
Elliott King is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of Dalí, Surrealism, and Cinema (2007) and co-editor of the collection, Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (2022). His curatorial projects include Dalí/Halsman at the Morohashi Museum of Modern Art and Dalí: The Late Work at the High Museum of Art, and his essays have appeared in catalogues for exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, the Reina Sofía, Tate Modern, MoMA and the National Gallery of Victoria. He is a founding member and current President of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS), and his expertise on Dalí and Surrealism has been featured by AMC+, the Criterion Collection, the BBC, National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal.
