Coffee with a Curator
December 2 @ 10:30am – 11:30am
Dalí: Disruption + Devotion
Join us for this month’s installment of our Coffee with a Curator series, where Museum staff or invited guests speak on a range of Salvador Dalí-inspired topics. This month, Dr. Jennifer Cohen, director of curatorial affairs at The Dalí Museum, introduces our special exhibition, Dalí: Disruption + Devotion, exploring its central argument: that Dalí conducted his most serious art history in paint. Co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition places Dalí’s work alongside that of the European artists he studied from boyhood, including Velázquez, El Greco, Goya, Gentileschi and Bruegel.
Dalí is remembered as a rebel of the avant-garde, yet he returned throughout his life to the techniques, compositions and subjects of the painters who came before him. He followed the old masters and disrupted them in the same gesture, borrowing a pose or a composition and then bending it toward his own obsessions. After World War II, that devotion to art history joined a second devotion, his public return to the Catholic faith. In this lecture, Cohen will trace how Dalí used the Old Masters against the orthodoxies of his own time while writing himself into their tradition, and she will take us through the pairings that bring that conversation across five centuries into view.
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:
Jennifer Cohen is Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Dalí Museum. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago, and she was formerly Curator of Provenance and Research at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her exhibitions and publications have focused on Surrealism and its legacies. Some of her favorite projects include Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears (2023) and c/o Tender Buttons (2021–22) at the Art Institute, and Robert Motherwell and Multiplicity (2023) at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT. Her research has been supported by the Mellon–Council for European Studies, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Dedalus Foundation. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas and numerous exhibition catalogs.
