A new exhibition at the Dalí Museum on the downtown St. Petersburg waterfront puts Salvador Dalí in direct conversation with the old masters who shaped him, hanging his surrealist visions beside works by Velázquez, El Greco and Goya. Dalí: Disruption + Devotion was scheduled to open Saturday, running through April 18, 2027, after a preview held Friday as part of St. Petersburg Museum Week.
The show is co-organized by The Dalí Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, according to The Dalí Museum, drawing paintings, drawings and prints from both institutions' collections. As WMNF reports, the exhibition features Dalí's work alongside pieces by the great masters who inspired him, exploring how deeply his engagement with art history ran. Admission to the special exhibition is included in the price of gallery admission, per the museum.
A Rebel Who Studied the Masters
Jennifer Cohen, Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Dalí Museum, described Dalí as a radical surrealist provocateur, but also framed him as something more complicated, according to the same WMNF report. Cohen said Dalí was a rebel who studied art history and sought to be a modern old master, a tension the exhibition's six thematic sections are built to explore. Per the Tampa Bay Beacon, those sections include Fantasy and Nightmare, The Last Old Master, Velázquez and the Portrait, Not So Still Life, Higher Callings, and Inexorable Time.
The Beacon's report counts 64 paintings and works on paper spanning five centuries, including pieces by El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Luis Meléndez and Francisco Goya placed alongside Dalí's own canvases. The exhibition is curated by Cohen and Frederick Ilchman, Baker Curator of Paintings and Chair of the Art of Europe Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the museum's site notes.
Velázquez, Nuclear Physics and a Second Infanta
Peter Tush, curator of education at The Dalí Museum and host of WMNF's Step Outside, said Dalí connected contemporary science with the influence of Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, according to the station's report. Dalí combined an interest in nuclear physics with his fascination with Velázquez, a mashup that produced one of the exhibition's more striking works: in the 1950s, Dalí painted a second Infanta, the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain, imploding in colorful particles across the canvas.
Ilchman described some of the paintings in the show as containing puzzling and nightmarish imagery, the same WMNF account notes. A Dalí painting is displayed alongside a work by 17th-century Flemish master Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts, and Ilchman said both paintings may remind viewers of death or the inability to stop time.
Boston's Earlier Take on the Same Pairing
This is not the exhibition's debut. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announced its first Dalí exhibition under the same title in June 2024, according to a Museum of Fine Arts, Boston press release. That presentation paired Dalí's Velázquez Painting the Infanta Marguerita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory with Velázquez's own Infanta Maria Theresa from 1653, displaying Dalí's work alongside pieces from the MFA's European collection.
Sources differ on how many Dalí works appeared in the Boston run. The MFA's own release describes nearly 30 paintings and works on paper loaned from the Dalí Museum, while a Boston Globe review put the count at more than 30 works drawn from the Dalí Museum and private collections. The St. Petersburg presentation expands considerably on that earlier Boston version, now spanning 64 works across both collections.
An Interactive Twist for Gallery Visitors
Beyond the paintings themselves, the exhibition includes an interactive digital experience built by students at Ringling College of Art and Design, according to The Dalí Museum. Visitors can scan QR codes placed throughout the gallery to respond to prompts, with their contributions feeding into a projection inside the exhibit. It's a modern layer added to a show otherwise steeped in five centuries of art history, running in downtown St. Petersburg through next spring.
