3rd public display ever for rare Dali etchings at Victoria Memorial Hall
Times of India | 29 June 2025
Kolkata: The Victoria Memorial Hall has put on display two colour etchings of Salvador Dali, the only originals of the Spanish Catalan surrealist master that any museum or gallery in India possesses. The twin Dali works were among 83 original drawings, etchings, lithographs, and opaque watercolours that the New York-based Kolkata-born artist Bimal Banerjee had donated to VMH authorities in 1990. The etchings in colour are on copper plates, printed on Japanese rice paper, and signed by the artist in pencil. This is only the third time that they are being displayed in public. The two previous occasions were in 1993 and 2014. The exhibition is currently drawing art lovers and will be on till the end of July. "The two untitled colour etchings of the ‘Macbeth Series' signed by Dali have been displayed in the central hall to celebrate the enduring legacy of museums and the genius of one of the most iconic artists of the 20th century," Victoria Memorial Hall secretary and curator-in-charge Anurag Kumar told TOI.
Apart from the Dali etchings, his donation to VMH included works by Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, who founded the Scuola Metafisica Art Movement that profoundly influenced the surrealists; French artist Sonia Delaunay and her husband Robert Delaunay, who co-founded the Orphism Art Movement; French painter Georges Braque, known for inventing Cubism; and Swiss German painter Paul Klee, whose lectures and writings on colour theory and form and design theory published in English as the ‘Paul Klee Notebooks' are considered as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's ‘A Treatise on Painting' for the Renaissance. Banerjee, an accomplished artist, told TOI in 2014 that Dali presented him with the etchings. He said he donated the works to VMH to ensure that budding artists could get a chance to view original masterpieces by modern European masters.