Wadsworth Atheneum

On Thursday, March 22, 2007 I visited the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.

Founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth, the Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest public art museum in the country. Their collection includes over 45,000 works of art, including works by some of the most important artists from around the world. The museum developed into a cultural center for history, literature, and art. The "Atheneum" part of the name is after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom since the museum was founded to educate the people about art and antiquities.










I was talking on the phone (yes, using my headset!) while driving to the museum and I got lost (a rare occurrence). The directions from their answering service (I am such a planner, but forgot to print directions before going!) said to bear right at the end of Exit 29A. They forget to tell you to take the left fork when the road splits before bearing right! Lucky for me, I took several left turns around the block and ended up right in front of the museum. I tried the parking around back, to no avail (I passed the entrance twice!), so I drove around the building and found a great spot right up front. Thank goodness I had a ton of quarters (seriously, about $5) to feed the meter for 2 hours. If you live in Hartford, the museum is right on the busline. Many buses stopped just in the time it took me to get out and feed the meter. There were also a couple of school buses, strangely full of elderly people though, who had come to spend their morning at the museum.

I did not take a tour of the museum as there are specific days and hours for the tours (Picasso to Pop is Thursdays in April and Saturdays in May @1:00 pm. Faith and Fortune is available Thursday - Sunday in March, Friday - Sunday in April, and Friday & Sunday in May). The Highlights of the Collections tour is only available Wednesday (1pm) and on the weekends (2:30pm). The talks and tours are free though. I did my own tour; however, and "ooh"ed and "awww"ed my way through all three floors before heading over to the Picasso to Pop Exhibition in the back of the building on the first floor.










<~~~Jackson Pollock!

<~~~Andy Warhol!











<~~~Picasso!

The Atheneum was the first in the country to acquire works by many foreign artists. One I saw while at the museum (and the artist of the piece I selected) is Salvador Dali. I have been to his museum in St. Petersburg, Florida and loved it, so I was surprised but delighted to also see some of his work on display in Hartford.

Salvador Dali was a very interesting and complex man whose interests outside art ranged from nuclear physics to writing. He met Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud, and worked on projects with Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. He died in Figueres, Spain in 1989 at the age of 84.


Dali's works of art reflect his passion for complexity, diversity, architecture, metaphysics, surrealism, and the coastline of Cadaques, in Spain, where he spent the summers of his youth. The piece I chose, "Solitude," was actually the first of Dali's paintings to enter any museum in the world. I realize why it was behind glass (hard to avoid reflections of the numerous doorways though).

Here are some of the photos from my exhibit selection:











The plaque reads: Salvador Dali
Spanish 1904-1989
Solitude, 1931
Oil on Canvas
Purchased through the gift of Henry and Walter Keney 1932.218

Solitude was the first painting by Dali to enter a museum collection anwhere in the world, and it is typical of his earliest, often morose, surreal compositions. A solitary figure by the seashore, suspended between the animate and the inanimate, presses into, or emerges from, the surface of a rock. For Dali, hair was a mysterious and disturbing growth, and here he shows the figures curls metamorphosing into seashells.

"Solitude" is an oil on canvas. I was immediately struck by the rich contrasts in color as well as the hardscape/softscape of the boulders and the ocean and the light/dark. There is a lot of symbolism in the photo. The shadow of the head bothers me a bit. It seems to be going in the wrong direction based on the other shadows. The sun would need to be below him to cast a shadow upwards, but shadows reach up to his shoulders, so I don't know how that could be possible. I like the bold orange of the boulder on the left. I don't know if that is symbolic (rocks are light/warm, dark/cold).

Also, according to the wall plaque, another contrast is that the figure is "suspended between the animate and the inanimate." That is a better way to phrase the landscape mention above. He is animate, consoling himself in an inanimate place - but in close proximity to the living water. The rocks on the very bottom of the painting threw me off. I thought at first glance, that they were legs. Upon closer inspection, I realized they were just rocks.

Another thought, which I don't know if you will be able to clearly see in these photos, is that it looks like the dark rocks underneath the orange boulder may actually be partially submerged? They could be beneath the surface of the water and the boulder perched precariously. It also occurred to me that there is a mark on the orange rock (biblical reference?) that resembles a cross (see close-up below). It is a crude outline, but it does look like one. Also, the boulders' shape resembles that of gravestones.

Some more photos that show a more up-close shot (so you can see the metamorphosis...)

I don't actually think that it looks like a shell, but I read somewhere else that it was actually his mustache that had grown all around. Because of the way the arms appear, it actually just looks like the back of the head to me.

Other works in the exhibit by Salvador Dali:

I hope you enjoyed my visit to the Wadsworth Atheneum! See you after the next one!