AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

In preparation for the 2023 exhibition Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears, paintings conservators, scientists, and curatorial colleagues at the Art Institute of Chicago took a deep dive into the museum's holdings of oil paintings by Salvador Dalí (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989). The team carried out examinations, scientific analysis, and archival research to understand how Dalí created pictures in the early 1930s. While most of the museum’s works from this period are small in scale and populated with figures, animals, and objects painted with tightly detailed brushwork, one painting stood out with its uncharacteristic loose brushwork, rubbed surface appearance, and relatively empty composition. Known for many years as Visions of Eternity, this unusually large Dali painting has been a true cornerstone of the Art Institute’s collection of modern and contemporary art since its acquisition in the late 1980s. However, gaps in the provenance and decisive differences in the materials and handling, distinguished this work from the others, raising questions about the origin of the painting. In tandem with the ongoing research, the painting was treated to remove a discolored coating and layers of overpaint. The conservation treatment proved instrumental to the understanding of the painting, revealing condition issues that served as clues to its history, and fueled the collaborative research that ultimately resulted in a new title, a new creation date, and a new origin story. This paper describes the results of the technical examinations of the Art Institute’s Dali paintings, and elaborates on the series of unexpected conservation and curatorial discoveries that revealed Visions of Eternity to be a long-forgotten portion of a famous mural from Dalí’s 1939 New York World’s Fair surrealist pavilion,Dream of Venus.