Dalí sculpture en masse in London

“Dalí’s Universe” is the name of a selling show featuring some 600 sculptures, illustrations, watercolours, objets d’art and a red sofa shaped like a woman’s lips. It can be seen in County Hall, an exhibition space hired by Benjamin Levi, president of the Stratton Foundation which, in 1965, made a contract with Dali to reproduce his sculpture. The space is neither a gallery nor a museum; it is an area divided into three sections, with its own soundtrack and other multimedia accessories. The sofa, dedicated to Mae West’s lips, can be found in the section called “Sexuality and femininity”, with the famous “Buste de femme rétrospectif”, a sculpture made in 1930. The graphic work in the exhibition includes the twelve lithographs from the Romeo and Juliet series and fifteen etchings made for Ovid’s Ars amandi. Christian and pagan divinities can be found in the “Religion and mythology” section, with subjects ranging from “St George and the dragon” to sculpture in the “Yin and Yang” series, to illustrations for the Bible and the Divine Comedy. The third section embraces a world of “Dream and fantasy”, while Dalí’s notorious “soft clocks” can be found here, in “Persistence of memory” and “Profile of time”. The Stratton Foundation’s collection of Dalí’s sculpture is the biggest in the world and in Tokyo it attracted more than half a million visitors in three months. Other curiosities include the two great canvases which stare down in Hitchcock’s film “Spellbound”, and the windows designed for Daum in the 1940s.