infinite improbability

in which kathryn plays at being an art critic

This past weekend I made a visit to the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Pete. I'd been there once before, while I was taking CHOW Art and Music, and went this time because my brother needed to go to some sort of Spanish cultural event for the Spanish class he's taking at the community college.

When most people think of Dali, the first thing that comes to mind are his surrealist works, but interestingly, his surrealist period was relatively short (1929-1939), and from around 1940 to his death in 1989 is considered his classical period. In the end, he gave up on surrealism because he saw it as ultimately meaningless.

It was in fact in the early 1940s that he turned away from the atheism of his father and returned to the faith of his mother, converting to Catholicism. Particularly fascinating is the change in the tone of his work around that time. His earlier surrealist work, while full of symbolism is depressingly empty--the world he depicts is, for lack of a better word, random. His later works, while still being totally his style, have something different in them, something that is difficult to describe except perhaps as a sense of hope. The world of his paintings is no longer random (even the painting which at first seems random is actually ordered around the golden section), there is something guiding the world. A number of his later works involve, in some way, either DNA or an attempt to represent both what we see, and the underlying atomic nature of things. In a quote from the 1950s, Dali said that he saw physics, with the development of things like quantum mechanics, as coming closer than science ever had to proving the existance of God. I find it quite amazing that, after the path that Salvador Dali had taken, that he ended up seeing God in the intricacies of quantum mechanics, where many others look and see randomness.

[as a side note, I think that it's interesting that Dali looked at the theories of modern physics and saw God, while R.C. Sproul spends an entire book (Not a Chance) attempting to debunk modern physics because he sees those same theories as anti-God]