Los Dos Amigos

When Salvador Dalí, barely 22, and his family took a trip to Paris in 1926, their first stop was the studio of Dalí’s idol Pablo Picasso. “We came here even before visiting the Louvre!” Dalí told Picasso, then 45, who, according to Dalí’s letters, replied, “You were quite right in doing so.” So began a lifelong friendship between the two Spaniards. “Picasso/Dalí, Dalí/Picasso,” a show of 120 works by both artists, opens on November 8 (through February 16, 2015) at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and will travel to the Museo Picasso in Barcelona next. Dalí was inspired by Picasso’s pioneering Cubist works, and Picasso by Dalí’s 1929 solo exhibition in Paris. Both were affected by the Spanish Civil War, the subject of Picasso’s 1937 Guernica, and Dalí’s Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), an image of a man coming apart. Picasso at times dismissed Dalí, and they disagreed about the importance of the Surrealists, but, reportedly, Picasso twice paid for Dalí’s travel to America. If that’s not a friend, indeed.