Salvador Dali's Dream of Venus Pavilion Site

Long before installation art had a name, Salvador Dalí arguably invented the genre at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens.

The fair itself was an extraordinary event. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Albert Einstein both spoke. Vermeer’s The Milkmaid and the Magna Carta were on display. Westinghouse buried a time capsule — containing writings by Einstein and Thomas Mann, a pack of Camel cigarettes, microfilm of key texts, seeds, and a Mickey Mouse watch — to be opened in the year 6939 AD. Color photography, nylon, air conditioning, and the View-Master all made their public debuts. GM and Frigidaire unveiled vision-of-the-future zones showcasing technologies that would reshape postwar life.

Dalí’s contribution was the Dream of Venus pavilion — a surrealist world unto itself. Visitors entered through a pair of giant women’s legs and bought tickets from a fish-head booth. Inside, topless sirens and mermaids swam in two pools. Women costumed as pianos and lobsters moved among props and paintings in front of a massive four-panel Dalí canvas. The entire tableau was a waking dream designed to destabilize the orderly corporate vision of the future surrounding it.

Creative compromise arrived, as it always does. Fair organizers made major modifications to Dalí’s original vision, provoking him to write a pamphlet he titled “Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to His Own Madness.” The pavilion survived the edits, and whatever was lost in translation, the exhibition still brought Surrealism out of gallery walls and directly to the public at a scale it had never reached before.

Location: Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, New York 11367