Today, The Grandma has received wonderful news from Mayte, her closer friend who has spent some days in Figueres and has visited the DalíTheatre and Museum.
The Dalí Theatre and Museum, in Catalan Teatre-Museu Dalí, is a museum dedicated to the artist Salvador Dalí in his home town of Figueres, inCatalonia.
Salvador Dalí lived there from 1984 to 1989, and is buried in a crypt below the stage.
The heart of the museum is the town's theatre that Dalí knew as a child. It was where one of the first public exhibitions of young Dalí's art was shown. The old theatre was burned during the Spanish Civil War and remained in a state of ruin.
In 1960, Dalí and the mayor of Figueres decided to rebuild it as a museum dedicated to the town's most famous son.
In 1968, the city council approved the plan, and construction began the following year. The architects were Joaquim de Ros i Ramis and Alexandre Bonaterra. Themuseum opened on September 28, 1974, and it expanded through the mid-1980s. The museum now includes buildings and courtyards adjacent to the old theatre.
The museum displays the single largest and most diverse collection of works by Salvador Dalí, the core of which was from the artist's personal collection. In addition to Dalí paintings from all decades of his career, there are Dalí sculptures, three-dimensional collages, mechanical devices, and other curiosities from Dalí's imagination. A highlight is a three-dimensional anamorphic living-room installation with a Mae West Lips Sofa, a custom sofa that looks like the face of Mae West when viewed from a certain spot.
The museum also houses a small selection of works by other artists collected by Dalí, ranging from El Greco and Bougereau to Marcel Duchamp and John de Andrea, In accordance with Dalí's specific request, a second-floor gallery is devoted to the work of his friend and fellow Catalan artist Antoni Pitxot, who also became director of the museum after Dalí's death.
A glass geodesic dome cupola crowns the stage of the old theatre, and Dalí is buried in a crypt below the stage floor. The space formerly occupied by the audience has been transformed into a courtyard open to the sky, with Dionysian nude figurines standing in the old balcony windows. A Dalí installation inside a full-sized car, inspired by Rainy Taxi (1938), is parked near the centre of the space.
The Dalí Theatre and Museum holds the largest collection of major works by Dalí in a single location. Some of the most important exhibited works are Port Alguer (1924), The Spectre of Sex-appeal (1932), Soft self-portrait with grilled bacon (1941), Poetry of America -the Cosmic Athletes (1943), Galarina (1944–45), Basket of Bread (1945), Leda Atomica (1949), Galatea of the Spheres (1952), Crist de la Tramuntana (1968), and Dalí Seen from the Back Painting Gala from the Back Eternalised by Six Virtual Corneas Provisionally Reflected by Six Real Mirrors (1972-73).
There is also a set of works created by the artist expressly for the Museum,including the Mae West room, the Palace of the Wind room, the Monument to Francesc Pujols, and the Cadillac plujós.
A collection of holographic art by Dalí, and a collection of jewellery he designed are on display. Another room contains a bathtub and a side table with an open drawer and a lamp, all of which Dalí had installed upside-down on the ceiling.
An extension to the museum building contains a room dedicated to optical illusions, stereographs, and anamorphic art created by Dalí. The artist's final works, including his last oil painting, The Swallow's Tail (1983), are on display here.
I want my museum to be a single block, a labyrinth, a great surrealist object. It will be totally theatrical museum. The people who come to see it will leave with the sensation of having had a theatrical dream.
After visiting Mayte in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, TheGrandma has continued her tour across Girona counties. Today, she has visited Figueres, the capital of AltEmpordà with JordiSantanyí. Figueres is the city where Salvador Dalí located his own museum and they want to visit it. Later, they have visited Cadaqués, one of the most beautiful towns of the Costa Brava.
Salvador Dalí was a closer friend of Federico García Lorca one of the greatest poets of the Generation of '27, a poet who was killed by the Spanish fascists on a day like today in 1936. The Grandma wants to remember the friendship between Lorca and Dalí and she also wants to homage this exceptional poet whose body is still buried in somewhere of the Andalusian lands, in the same way that more than 120.000 people are still waiting to be found, to be dug, to be identified and to be recognized as a victims of the fascism. Their descendents and the UNO reclaim it constantly and it is a human right and a debt with the historic memory.
Jordi has explained lots of new information to The Grandma about the friendship between Lorca and Dalí and how this friendship influenced their writings and paintings. Before arriving to Figueres, TheGrandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms.Excel course.
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca (5 June 1898-19 August 1936), known as Federico García Lorca was an Andalusian poet, playwright,and theatre director.
García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27, a group consisting of mostly poets who introduced the tenets of European movements -such as symbolism, futurism, and surrealism- into Spanish literature. He was executed by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. His body has never been found.
García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town 17 km west of Granada, southern Spain. His father, Federico García Rodríguez, was a prosperous landowner with a farm in the fertile vega -valley- surrounding Granada and a comfortable villa in the heart of the city. García Rodríguez saw his fortunes rise with a boom in the sugar industry.
At the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, García Lorca befriended Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí and many other creative artists who were, or would become, influential across Spain. He was taken under the wing of the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, becoming close to playwright Eduardo Marquina and Gregorio Martínez Sierra, the Director of Madrid's Teatro Eslava.
From 1925 to 1928, he was passionately involved with Dalí.Although Dalí's friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, Dalí rejected the erotic advances of the poet. With the success of Gypsy Ballads, came an estrangement from Dalí and the breakdown of a love affair with sculptor Emilio Aladrén Perojo.
Federico García Lorca & Salvador Dalí in Cadaqués
These brought on an increasing depression, a situation exacerbated by his anguish over his homosexuality. He felt he was trapped between the persona of the successful author, which he was forced to maintain in public, and the tortured, authentic self, which he could acknowledge only in private. He also had the sense that he was being pigeon-holed as a gypsy poet. He wrote: The gypsies are a theme. And nothing more. I could just as well be a poet of sewing needles or hydraulic landscapes. Besides, this gypsyism gives me the appearance of an uncultured, ignorant and primitive poet that you know very well I'm not. I don't want to be typecast.
Growing estrangement between García Lorca and his closest friends reached its climax when surrealists Dalí and Luis Buñuel collaborated on their 1929 film Un Chien Andalou. García Lorca interpreted it, perhaps erroneously, as a vicious attack upon himself. At this time Dalí also met his future wife Gala.Aware of these problems -though not perhaps of their causes-, García Lorca's family arranged for him to make a lengthy visit to the United States in 1929–30.
Cadaqués is a town in the Alt Empordà comarca, in the province of Girona, Catalonia. It is on a bay in the middle of the Cap de Creus peninsula, near Cap de Creus cape, on the Costa Brava of the Mediterranean. It is two-and-a-quarter-hour drive from Barcelona, and thus it is accessible not only to tourists but also to people who want a second home for weekends and summers. In 2002, Cadaqués had an official population of 2,612, but up to ten times as many people can live in the town during the peak of the summer tourism season.
Cadaqués has a special place in art history. Commanding charcoals, by local artist Eliseu Meifrèn, of the 19th century Cadaqués beleaguered by a winter tramontane, can be seen at the Cadaqués museum. Fren was the first modern artist to live in Cadaqués and gave the town many of his works and a marble top table on which he sketched many of its turn-of-the-century fishermen.
Salvador Dalí often visited Cadaqués in his childhood, and later kept a home in Port Lligat, a small village on a bay next to the town. A summer holiday here in 1916, spent with the family of Ramon Pichot is seen as especially important to Dalí's artistic career. Other notable artists, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Hamilton, Albert Ràfols-Casamada, Antoni Pitxot, Henri-François Rey, Melina Mercouri and Maurice Boitel also spent time here. Cadaqués is mentioned in the story Tramontana by Gabriel García Márquez.
The interesting submarine life of this sleepy fishing village was studied for several years by phycologist Françoise Ardré, long before Cadaqués was discovered and transformed into a tourism destination.
Today, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma have visited some old friends in CanAlcover, Palma, the headquarters of the ObraCultural Balear, OCB, that works for the Balear culture in the islands and promote it as a part of the Catalan culture.
Mallorcan language is a variant of Catalan that you can listen to only in a little part of Catalonia, Cadaqués, the town where Salvador Dalí died on a day like today in 1989. There are not strong links between Salvador Dalí and Mallorca except the common language and the Mediterranean culture but The Grandma has wanted to read more about this author and his controversial life while she was contemplating the endless horizon from the Port of Palma.
Before visiting Can Alcover, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 5).
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (11 May 1904-23 January 1989), known professionally as Salvador Dalí was a prominent surrealist artist born in Figueres, Catalonia.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, at times in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.
Dalí attributed his love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes to an Arab lineage, claiming that his ancestors were descendants of the Moors.
Salvador Dalí
Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. To the dismay of those who held his work in high regard, and to the irritation of his critics, his eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork.
Salvador Dalí was born on 11 May 1904 on the first floor of Carrer Monturiol, 20 in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà county, in Catalonia.
In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid and studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. A lean 1.72 metres tall, Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric and dandy. He had long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and knee-breeches in the style of English aesthetes of the late 19th century.
At the Residencia, he became close friends with Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, and Federico García Lorca. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí rejected the poet's sexual advances.
In August 1929, Dalí met his lifelong and primary muse and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant ten years his senior, who at that time was married to surrealist poet Paul Éluard.
In the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. His work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years. The Surrealists hailed what Dalí called his paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.
The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí
In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, ThePersistence of Memory,which introduced a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches.
The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic. This idea is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape, and other limp watches shown being devoured by ants.
Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were civilly married on 30 January 1934 in Paris. They later remarried in a Church ceremony on 8 August 1958 at Sant Martí Vell. In addition to inspiring many artworks throughout her life, Gala would act as Dalí's business manager, supporting their extravagant lifestyle while adeptly steering clear of insolvency. Gala seemed to tolerate Dalí's dalliances with younger muses, secure in her own position as his primary relationship.
While the majority of the Surrealist artists had become increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art.
In 1940, as World War II tore through Europe, Dalí and Gala retreated to the United States, where they lived for eight years splitting their time between New York and Monterey, California. They were able to escape because on June 20, 1940, they were issued visas by Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, France.
Salvador and Gala Dalí crossed into Portugal and subsequently sailed on the Excambion from Lisbon to New York in August 1940. Dalí’s
arrival in New York was one of the catalysts in the development of that
city as a world art center in the post-war years. After the move, Dalí returned to the practice of Catholicism.
Salvador Dalí and Gala
In 1948 Dalí and Gala moved back into their house in Port Lligat, on the coast near Cadaqués. For the next three decades, he would spend most of his time there painting, taking time off and spending winters with his wife in Paris and New York. In 1968, Dalí had bought a castle in Púbol for Gala; and starting in 1971 she would retreat there alone for weeks at a time. By Dalí's own admission, he had agreed not to go there without written permission from his wife. His fears of abandonment and estrangement from his longtime artistic muse contributed to depression and failing health.
Gala died on 10 June 1982, at the age of 87. After Gala's death, Dalí lost much of his will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself, possibly as a suicide attempt; there are also claims that he had tried to put himself into a state of suspended animation as he had read that some microorganisms could do. He moved from Figueres to the castle in Púbol, which was the site of her death and her grave.
Dalí's politics played a significant role in his emergence as an artist. In his youth, he embraced both anarchism and communism, though his writings tell anecdotes of making radical political statements more to shock listeners than from any deep conviction. This was in keeping with Dalí's allegiance to the Dada movement.
As he grew older his political allegiances changed, especially as the Surrealistmovement went through transformations under the leadership of the Trotskyist writer André Breton, who is said to have called Dalí in for questioning on his politics.
Today, The Grandma wants to remember one of the most important French poets of the last century, PaulÉluard,who was born on a day like today in 1895. She likes his poetry and she wants to read about his exciting life in those convulse time.
Éluard was a witness of important events like the WWI and WWII, the Spanish Civil War, The Russian Revolution and the Moroccan Revolution and his poems are great reflexions of his livings.
Before talking about Éluard, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 42 & Checkpoint 7).
Paul Éluard (14 December 1895-18 November 1952), was a French poet and one of the founders of the surrealist movement.
Éluard was born in Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis, France, the son of Eugène Clément Grindel and wife Jeanne-Marie Cousin. His father was an accountant when Paul was born but soon opened a real estate agency. His mother was a seamstress. Around 1908, the family moved to Paris, rue Louis Blanc. Éluard attended the local school in Aulnay-sous-Bois before obtaining a scholarship to attend the Ecole Superieure de Colbert. At the age of 16, he contracted tuberculosis, interrupted his studies, and remained hospitalized until April 1914 in the Clavadel sanatorium near Davos.
There he met a young Russian girl of his age, Helena Diakonova, whom he nicknamed Gala. He confided in her of his dream of becoming a poet, of his admiration for poets dead of hunger, sizzling dreams and of his parents’ disapproval. She wrote to him that you will become a great poet. They became inseparable. She believed in him and gave him the confidence and encouragement and provided him with the sense of security he needed to write. She listened and was involved in the creation of his verses. She became his muse and the critic, always honest, and told him which images she preferred, which verses she disliked. He was then particularly inspired by Walt Whitman. In Clavadel, Éluard also met the Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira. They became friends during their hospitalization in the sanatorium, and kept in touch by mail after returning to their respective countries.
In April 1914, Paul Éluard and Gala were both declared healthy again and sent home, to Paris and Moscow respectively. The separation was brutal. Europe was on the brink of war. Paul was mobilised. He passed his physical and was assigned to the auxiliary services because of his poor health. He suffered from migraine, bronchitis, cerebral anaemia and chronic appendicitis and spent most of 1915 under treatment in a military hospital not far from home. Paul’s mother came to visit him and he talked for hours about his beloved, opening his heart to her and slowly rallying her to his cause. Her initial hostility towards Gala slowly faded away, and she started calling her the little Russian. However, Paul’s father, who had also been mobilised, remained adamant that she could not come to Paris.
Gala & Paul Éluard
In Moscow, Gala listened to no one. Her love for Paul gave her an unshakable faith that they would be reunited again. She wrote to Paul’s mother to befriend her and finally convinced her stepfather to let her go to Paris to study French at the Sorbonne. She took a boat to Helsinki, then reached Stockholm before embarking for England. Once in London, she took a train to Southampton before taking a boat to rally Dieppe, and finally took a train to Paris.
In June 1917, Paul was sent to Hargnicourt to work in one of the military evacuation hospital, 10 kilometres from the front line. The poet was given a chair, a desk and a pen to painfully write to the families of the dead and the wounded. He wrote more than 150 letters a day. At night he dug graves to bury the dead. For the first time since Clavadel, shaken by the horrors of the war, Paul started writing verses again. Gala wrote to him I promise you our life will be glorious and magnificent.
On 14 December 1917, Paul Éluard turned 21 and wrote to his mother I can assure you, that your approval will be infinitely precious to me. However, for all our sakes, nothing will change my mind. He married Gala on 20 February 1918. However, he announced to his parents and newlywed wife that when he went back to the front line he would voluntarily join the real soldiers in the trenches. Gala protested and threatened to go back to Russia to become a nurse on the Russian front. But nothing would do, and for the first time Paul resisted her. Let me live a tougher life, he wrote her, less like a servant, less like a domestic. Two days after getting married, Paul left for the front line.
There, living conditions were severe. Éluard wrote to his parents Even the strongest are falling. We advanced 50 kilometres, three days without bread or wine. His health suffered. On 20 March 1917 he was sent to a military hospital with incipient pleurisy.
On 10 May 1918 Gala gave birth to a baby girl who was eventually named Cécile, died 10 August 2016.
Paul Éluard, Salvador Dalí, André Breton and others
In 1919, Éluard wrote to Gala: War is coming to an end. We will now fight for happiness after having fought for Life. Waiting to be sent home, he published Duty and Anxiety and Little Poems for Peace. Following the advice of his publisher, he sent the poems to various personalities of the literary world who took a stand against the war. Gala helped him to prepare and send the letters.
In 1919, Jean Paulhan, an eminent academic and writer, responded to his letter expressing his admiration. He referred him to three young writers who had started a new journal called Literature. He encouraged Paul to go and meet them.
The three young poets Jean Paulhan recommended to Paul were André Breton, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon.
The meeting with Paul took place in March 1919. Paul was intimidated. He was shy and blushing. He was still a soldier and wearing his war uniform. It was the best omen for the three poets, who all showed great courage during the war. Paul brought with him his poems and read them to the jury. They were seduced by the young man and liked his work. They decided to publish one of his texts in the next edition of Literature.
Wounded and scarred by the war the four poets found solace in their friendship and poetry. Against a society that wanted to channel them into being good and useful citizens, they chose a life of bohemia. They refused the bourgeois middle-class aspirations of money, respectability and comfort and rejected its moral codes. They hated politicians and the military or anyone with ambitions of power. They rejected all constraints. Their ideal was freedom and they felt they had already paid the price for it. Revolted and passionate, they were looking for a new ideal, something as far detached as possible from the current political and philosophical programmes. They found solace in the Dadaist movement, which originated in Switzerland.
Paul Éluard & Pablo Picasso
In November 1921, Paul Éluard and his wife visited Max Ernst at his home in Cologne. Paul had an immediate and an absolute sympathy for Max. Underneath the charm, Max, like Paul, was a man deeply revolted, in total rupture with society. Unlike Paul, however, he remained indifferent to propagating this revolt which he considered to be an intimate elegance.
Paul and Gala moved to a house just outside Paris and were joined by Max Ernst, who entered France illegally, using Éluard's passport. Jean Paulhan once more helped Paul by providing Max Ernst with fake identity papers. Paul, Max and Gala entered into a ménage à trois in 1922. Paul was torn between his love for Gala and his friendship for Max. He refused to challenge Gala, and spent his nights in clubs: the Zelli, the Cyrano, the Parrot, and Mitchell. Gala's well-being was still what mattered to him above all and he tried to forget his anxiety by drinking.
Éluard, depressed, wrote Dying of not Dying. On 24 March 1924, Éluard disappeared. No one knew where he was. The night before he had had a worrisome meeting with Louis Aragon during which he confessed that he wanted to put an end to a present that tortured him. For his friends, Paul was gone forever. But Paul wrote to Gala and four months later she bought a ticket to go and find him and bring him back, locating him in Saigon.
Éluard supported the Moroccan Revolution, as early as 1925, and in January 1927 he joined the French Communist Party together with Louis Aragon, Breton, Benjamin Péret and Pierre Unik. All explained their decision in a collective document entitled Au grand jour. It was during these years that Éluard published two of his main works: Capitale de la Douleur (1926) and L'Amour la Poesie (1929).
In 1928 he had another bout of tuberculosis and went back to the Clavadel sanatorium with Gala. It was their last winter together. Gala met Salvador Dalí soon after and remained with him for the rest of her life.
In 1934, Éluard married Nusch (Maria Benz), a music-hall artist, whom he had met through his friends Man Ray and Pablo Picasso.
The period from 1931 to 1935 were among his happiest years. He was excluded from the French Communist Party. He traveled through Europe as an ambassador of the Surrealist movement.
Portrait of Paul Éluard by Salvador Dalí
In 1936, in Spain, he learned of the Franquist counter-revolution, against which he protested violently. The following year, the bombing of Gernika inspired him to write the poem Victory of Gernika. During these two terrible years for Spain, Éluard and Pablo Picasso were inseparable. The poet told the painter you hold the flame between your fingers and paint like a fire. Mobilized in September 1939, he moved to Paris with Nusch after the Armistice of 22 June 1940. In January 1942, he sent her to the home of some of his friends, Christian and Yvonne Zervos, near Vézelay, near the maquis. Éluard asked to rejoin the French Communist Party, which was illegal in occupied France. Thousands of copies of the twenty-one stanzas of his poem Liberté, first published in the Choix revue, were parachuted from English aircraft over occupied France. During the war he also wrote Les sept poèmes d'amour en guerre (1944) and Avril 1944: Paris respirait encore!.
In 1943, together with Pierre Seghers, François Lachenal and Jean Lescure, he assembled the texts of several poets of the Resistance in a controversial book called The Honor of Poets. Faced with oppression, the poets eulogised in it hope and freedom.
In November 1943, Éluard found refuge in the mental asylum of Saint-Alban, headed by doctor Lucien Bonnafé, in which many resistants and Jews were hiding. At Libération, Éluard and Aragon were hailed as the great poets of the Resistance.
On 28 November 1946, during a stay in Switzerland, he learned of Nusch's sudden passing. Distraught, he became extremely depressed. Two friends, Alain and Jacqueline Trutat, for whom he wrote Corps Memorable, gave him back the will to live.
Paul Éluard & Maria Benz 'Nusch'
His grief at the premature death of his wife Nusch in 1946 inspired the work Le temps déborde in 1947 as well as De l'horizon à l'horizon de tous,which traced the path that led Éluard from suffering to hope.
The principles of peace, self-government, and liberty became his new passion. He was a member of the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wrocław in April 1948, which persuaded Pablo Picasso to also join. The following year, in April, he was a delegate to the Council for World Peace, at the conference held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.
In June, he spent a few days with Greek partisans entrenched on the Gramos hills to fight against Greek government soldiers. He then went to Budapest to attend the commemorative celebrations of the centenary of the death of the poet Sándor Petőfi. There he met Pablo Neruda.
In September he was in Mexico for a new peace conference. There he met Dominique Lemort, with whom he returned to France. They married in 1951. The same year Éluard published The Phoenix, a collection of poems dedicated to his reborn happiness.
He later eulogised Joseph Stalin in his political writings. Milan Kundera recalled that he was shocked to hear of Éluard's public approval of the hanging of Éluard's friend, the Prague writer Záviš Kalandra in 1950.
Paul Éluard died from a heart attack on 18 November 1952 at his home, 52 avenue de Gravelle in Charenton-le-Pont. His funeral was held in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and organized by the French Communist Party, the French government having refused to organise a national funeral for political reasons. A crowd of thousands spontaneously gathered in the streets of Paris to accompany Éluard's casket to the cemetery. That day Robert Sabatier wrote: the whole world was mourning.
The Beans are living their last days in San Francisco before travelling to San Diego where they're going to participate in a new edition of the ComicCon as special guest stars. This morning, they have been revising some English grammar like Past Simple vs. Past Continuous and constructions with Let's.
They have also talked about objective and subjective points of view, something very important if you like enjoying modern art.
The family has participated in a new programme of ABC7-KGO TV. Manuel and Cristina Bean have been chosen by their family to representate it in a TV Contest named Password. Both of them have done a fantastic participation and they have won the total amount valorated in free entrances to visit the SFMOMA in San Francisco.
The family has decided to talk about art with one of the genius of the last century, Salvador Dalí, and they have been preparing their visit to the SFMOMA, a wonderful and interesting museum where you can enjoy the last modern works without any kind of censorship, because, as everybody must know, art is a free expression and we are in the city where was born the Free Speech movement and where was signed The Charter of the United Nations in 1945.
Then, this afternoon, the family has visited the SFMOMA. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art.
The museum’s current collection includes over 33,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts. They are displayed in 16,000 metres square of exhibition space, making the museum one of the largest in the United States overall, and one of the largest in the world for modern and contemporary art.
The Beans, the SFMOMA and Salvador Dalí
SFMOMA reopened on May 14, 2016, following a major three-year-long expansion project.The expansion more than doubles the museum’s gallery spaces and provides almost six times as much public space as the previous building, allowing SFMOMA to showcase an expanded collection along with the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection of contemporary art.
SFMOMA was founded in 1935 under director Grace L. McCann Morley as the San Francisco Museum of Art. For its first sixty years, the museum occupied the fourth floor of the War Memorial Veterans Building on Van Ness Avenue in the Civic Center.
A gift of 36 artworks from Albert M. Bender, including The Flower Carrier (1935) by Diego Rivera, established the basis of the permanent collection. Bender donated more than 1,100 objects to SFMOMA during his lifetime and endowed the museum's first purchase fund. The museum began its second year with an exhibition of works by Henri Matisse. In this same year the museum established its photography collection, becoming one of the first museums to recognize photography as a fine art.
SFMOMA was obliged to move to a temporary facility on Post Street in March 1945 to make way for the United Nations Conference on International Organization.
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art,
if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
Today, The Beans have been working some new aspects of the English grammar like Used to and Object Pronouns.
The family is a little tired because of the rythm of the trips. They are doing exceptional efforts but they are hard workers and exceptional students and they are doing a great job.
The family has decided to stay in the hotel and talk about the history of the city that they are going to visit deeply during the next days. San Francisco is a city with a huge history, a great referent in all kind of social movements and the city where the Hippie movement born in the 60's like a peaceful movement against war policies.
The Beans have been talking about the importance of this movement not only for the history of the USA but for the universal history because it was a mirror for other countries and communities.
If you talk about the Hippie movement, you must remember incredible voices and composers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimmi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Scott McKenzie, Jefferson Airplane and others. An exceptional generation of great artists who expanded the global message of peace and love around the planet.
Salvador Dalí, a genius of painting
The Grandma has also talked about the influence of the drugs in this movement, particularly, and how drugs have been used by the power to stop social movements and to control them. It has been a very hard moment because this is a theme that affects everybody in some senses and everyone of us has a closer experience to tell, to remember and sometimes, to forget.
Finally, the family has been talking about some important artists and writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Mercè Rodoreda, Agatha Christie, Federico Garcia Lorca, Antonio Machado and Miguel Hernández.
A hippie is a member of a counterculture, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The term hippie first found popularity in San Francisco by Herb Caen, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Jimmi Hendrix & Janis Joplin
The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and many used drugs such as marijuana, LSD, peyote and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.
In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, popularized hippie culture, leading to the Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast.
Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa.
In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people. In later years, mobile peace convoys of New Age travelers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere.
In Australia, hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass.
Piedra Roja Festival, a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970. Hippie and psychedelic culture influenced 1960s and early 1970s young culture in Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe.
Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, mainstream society has assimilated many aspects of hippie culture. The religious and cultural diversity the hippies espoused has gained widespread acceptance, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a larger audience.
The hippie movement politicized my generation.
When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history,
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