sloth unleashed

surrealism:

Sunday Dalí: promotional photo for The Dream of Venus designed by Dalí, photographed by Murray Korman, 1939. Black and white photo.

The Dream of Venus was Dalí’s pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. You can see several photos and explaniations of the fair in this slide deck [PDF] by Christine Trotter.

One scene in the pavilion (figure 10 in the deck) features a young girl shushing the audience while the nude Venus sleeps, dreaming. Unlike Dalí’s other works where the unreal and the real combine in the mind of the audience, here the unreal becomes real through the use of actresses.

I could never imagine such a spectacle in a public fair today. The USA today hyperventilates over Janet Jackson’s not-quite-exposed breast, yet 73(!) years ago no cries of abuse or indecency rang out even while this young actress was working and mingling with several nude women. It seems like the 1939 USA knew how to react to provocative and beautiful art. Somewhere along the way, sadly, we (Americans) lost that.

(via viomatic)