Author examines significance of Dali's work

When the World's Fair opened in Queens in 1939, no one was sufficiently warned about the impact artist Salvador Dali would make with his surrealist funhouse, "Dream of Venus."

The freestanding building was "a pile of pink and white stucco ... with [a model of] Venus blown up to about one story in height ... in which you entered between [her] legs," said Ingrid Schaffner, senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Schaffner gave a lecture last night in Logan Hall to an audience of about 325 people about "Venus," one of "the least-known works of one of the best-known artists."

Dali is likely to become even better known in the area soon, thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Dali exhibition, which is timed to coincide with what would have been the artist's 100th birthday.

The presentation included numerous photographs taken by the late Life magazine photographer Eric Schaal, who captured the exhibition with color slides.

Schaffner described the architectural masterpiece as stunning and vivid.

"You could not go into the first quarter because it [was] filled with water. ... There [was] a ubiquitous piano playing ... and the swimmers [were] all topless."

That was only the beginning.

"The next chamber was long and dry, occupied by a 36-foot-long bed, and a beautiful, blonde Venus," she continued.

Venus was the main attraction of the funhouse, which was created by Dali to exemplify Freud's ideas about dreams in art -- "the concrete irrational," Dali called them.

"The corridor is a gallery, with roaming giraffes -- flaming ones -- and a taxi cab with passenger Christopher Columbus," Schaffner said. "Oh, it's raining inside the cab, by the way."

She then directed a puzzling question at the audience.

"Okay, you're the shrink, and your patient has dumped all this on you. Now what?"

Schaffner provided explanations of the symbolism employed in the funhouse, from both Dali's personal life and his political standpoint.

The New York World's Fair was conceived by a consortium of New York City businessmen in 1939 in an effort to jump-start the economy and included a carnival, in which Dali's work stood.

The fair only lasted two years, and by the second opening, Dali's masterpiece had been altered by owners in order to display less surrealism and more sex appeal.

Dali considered it a disaster and left America as soon as the fair opened.

Schaffner's audience was captivated by the presentation, with the pivotal question of the evening being, "Could you talk about the topless women?"

"I heard about [the lecture] through a friend of mine. It was a lot of fun, " Linguistics associate professor Maribel Romero said.

Students interested in seeing Dali's work can see the exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until May 15.

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