New Britain Museum of American Art

This post is a break away from my usual subjects. This past Saturday, my daughter orchestrated a family outing for my Dad's 82nd birthday. We went to the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, PSRK, followed by lunch at the Greek festival at St.George's Greek Orthodox Church. We have been to this festival before, and the food is outstanding! I had some souvlaki, orzo, and spinaka, and then for dessert some loukamades. The main reason for going to the museum was to see some Shaker items my cousin had on display from the South Family of Enfield, PSRK, for the Shaker exhibit. For those that don't know, The Shakers were a religious sect that did not believe in traditional marriage and procreation, but relied on religious conversion to grow their ranks. A good description of them can be found here. They were prolific craftsmen that built everything they needed and their engineering was amazing.

The main exhibit at the museum was of this guy's work:

Salvador Dali     May 11, 1904 to January 23, 1989

Now I am the last guy to care much about art. Frankly I normally just don't get it, and for some of his work that was certainly the case here. But I also found some of his stuff really neat, and he had a GREAT mustache! For example; a painting of Christ's crucifixion looking down on Jesus' head gave a new perspective, and a printed description next to the painting says that if you look at two copies side by side through a stereoscopic viewer, you see a self portrait of the artist. Cool! A painting of his nude wife from 20 meters away becomes a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The whole "Alice in Wonderland" series of illustrations were creepy but definitely interesting. The best part was the photo shoot of how he did this photograph:

Called “In Voluptas Mors” (“Voluptuous/Desirable Death”) it was done using seven nude women on a specially built black wooden platform and black drapes and took over 3 hours to align and photograph in 1951.