Much Ado About Shakespeare

Presented as part of a Shakespeare Festival in collaboration with area arts organizations featuring concerts, films, visual art, theater and more.Beginning Friday, January 11, 2013 the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, which holds the largest collection of Dalí in the Americas, exhibited 31 works and two illustrated books inspired by the works of William Shakespeare. This exhibition, came from the Museum’s collection and was on display through April 28, 2013. The exhibition was curated by Joan Kropf, the Dalí Museum’s curator of the collection.

Although best known as a painter, Dalí also was a prolific writer, producing the remarkable autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the witty painter’s handbook 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, numerous essays and critical works including The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus, and even the novel Hidden Faces. His involvement in the world of literature enabled Dalí to be highly sympathetic in bringing to life a diverse range of literary classics including Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Goethe’s Faust, and Lewis Carroll’sAlice in Wonderland. But the one writer Dalí repeatedly returned to was William Shakespeare.Shakespeare (1564-1616) is widely regarded as the greatest dramatist in English literature. Dalí is widely regarded as the 20th century’s greatest artist of dreams. This exhibition features two suites of drypoint engravings (a method in which the design to be printed is scratched directly into a plate with a sharply pointed instrument) and two illustrated books in which Shakespeare’s most celebrated creations are reimagined by Dalí. Much Ado About Shakespeare (1968) includes 15 drypoint engravings and Shakespeare II (1971) includes 16 drypoint engravings. Dalí engraved the plates with fluidity and energy to depict Shakespeare’s protagonists and convey his feeling for them.The exhibit also features two bound books of Shakespeare classics –Macbeth (Doubleday, 1946) and As You Like It (London, Folio Press, 1953), which are examples of Dalí’s illustrations for texts. Compared with the emblematic quality of the engravings, these book illustrations depict specific passages from the text. Macbeth features some of Dalí’s most elaborate illustrations, photomechanical reproductions of original works on paper, whereas As You Like It is illustrated with reproductions of Dalí’s drawings of costumes and sets for a 1949 stage production of the play.

About the Festival