PÚBOL, SPAIN.- In June, 1939, Salvador Dalí designed a remarkable Surrealist pavilion for the New York World's Fair which was built by architect Ian Woodner and called Dream of Venus. From March 15 - June 30, 2002, the Museum of Contemporary Art explores this remarkable space in the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Dream of Venus. The exhibition is organized by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation in Figueres.

Salvador Dalí: Dream of Venus includes Dalí's paintings, drawings, manipulated and documentary photographs, films, and fascinating archival documents, as well as photographs by Horst P. Horst, George Platt Lynes, Eric Schaal and Harlem Renaissance photographer Carl Van Vechten among others. It examines the impact of this installation on the acceptance of Surrealism by the mass American audience. The organizers of Dalí's Dream of Venus pavilion believed it would do more to advance Surrealism in America than "a dozen high-brow exhibitions."

The Dream of Venus pavilion is one of the earliest full-scale installation works, created long before there was a term for this type of art. It also was one of the first multi-media works, as it incorporated sound and performance. The pavilion featured a spectacular façade made up of soft rounded curves and protruding forms vaguely reminiscent of Spain's Pedrera building designed by Antoni Gaudi. Two pillars in the forms of female legs wearing stockings and high-heeled shoes flanked the pavilion's entrance. The exterior displayed such distinctive features as crutches, cacti and hedgehogs. Visitors purchased their tickets from a fish-headed ticket booth and a recording of chanting voices lured fairgoers into the pavilion. Through the openings in the irregular facade visitors could see reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci's painting Saint John the Baptist and Botticelli's Birth of Venus.

Inside, the pavilion included an aquarium in which Dalí staged an aquatic dance show with mermaids in costumes that he designed. Dalí chronicled these surreal creatures with the collaboration of fashion photographers Horst P. Horst and George Platt Lynes. Major modifications arose between the time Dalí formulated his initial ideas and the final result of the project, which led the artist to complain about the Fair's impositions in a pamphlet entitled Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and Rights of man to His Own Madness (also on view in the exhibition).

The New York World's Fair was a landmark in the history of design. Under the direction of Walter D. Teague, the Fair had the participation of such notable figures as Raymond Loewy, Russell Wright and Norman Bel Geddes. The Fair promoted functional architecture, and is considered one of the high points of "streamlined style". Dalí's surrealistic building, with its soft, rounded forms, architectural allusions to the female form, and bold use of primitive and classical elements, stands out as an aesthetic manifesto against the aerodynamic futurist style proposed by the Fair.

Prior to the Fair's opening during March and April of 1939, Dalí was featured in a one-man exhibition at New York's Julian Levy Gallery in which he created controversy by reproducing an altered cover of the exhibition's catalog. The original catalog cover featured the World's Fair's ultramodern sphere and obelisk symbols, while Dalí's version mixed the symbols up in a conglomeration of soft structures, Leonardo da Vinci-style horses, Medusa heads, and classical architectural forms.

Oil paintings included in the this gallery exhibition, including Enchanted Beach with Three Fluid Graces and Telephone on a Tray with Three Fried Sardines at the End of September, and the drawings for Endless Enigma will also be featured in the exhibition at MOCA.