Spain begins Salvador Dali centennial

BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 4 (UPI) -- A celebration of the centennial of Spanish artist Salvador Dali's birth began this week with an exhibition "Dali and Mass Culture" at Barcelona's Caixa-Forum.

The show of 300 of the surrealist master's works in film, fashion, advertising, and photography will travel to Madrid's Reina Sofia National Museum of Art in June, then to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., in September and the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in February 2005.

Other cities in Spain are planning exhibitions, film festivals, concerts, publications, symposiums and lectures relating to Dali this year and next.

The centennial's definitive retrospective of the eccentric painter and printmaker's work will be mounted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Feb. 15, 2005, through April 15.

Dali spent considerable time in the United States, had an exhibition pavilion of his own at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and lived in New York from 1940 to 1948.

In addition to the museum devoted to his work in St. Petersburg, there is a Dali museum in Figueras, Spain, his birthplace.