Dali in St. Pete

“You’ve been to the Dali, now come to the Deli.” So said the little sign inviting people in the parking lot of the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg to come to a little restaurant next door. I’m glad someone was able to use that punage. Yuriko went into the museum first, so I went there with the kids and fed them. It was a very warm, almost hot day in St. Pete, our last full day in Florida.

We’d taken a walkabout in the area on our first full day in the state, spending time in parks along the waterfront, in view of hundreds of docked boats. That was a warm afternoon, too, and St. Pete proved an agreeable place to lounge around in a park under copse of palm trees, or do as much lounging as one can do with a quick two-year-old out to investigate the place, including the adjacent streets.

The day we went to the Dali Museum, the Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg was being held, which complicated parking a little. Later I learned that part of the track included a general aviation airport not far from the museum, along with a few blocks of streets nearby. It sounded like a lawn mower race off in the distance to me, but that only shows how little I know about that realm of motor sports.

Housed in a mid-sized, appropriately modernist building, the Dali Museum is all Dali, all the time, as it should be. It’s enough to say that I like a lot of his work, and am impressed because there really isn’t anyone else like him; otherwise I’ll leave art criticism to minds more inclined to it. Equally interesting to me, however, was the question of how a museum solely dedicated to the work of Salvador Dali came to be in a small Florida city, far from the ambit of the flamboyant Catalonian.

Short answer: interested parties in St. Petersburg saw to it that enough scratch was raised to build a place to house the sizable collection of an Ohio industrialist. And why not? Places like New York or Paris or Barcelona have enough art. In any of those cities, Dali would be just another little museum. In St. Pete, he’s a big fish.