There was a time when Salvador Dalí—yes, that Dalí—was set to design a new statue on Monument Avenue. Obviously, that didn’t work out.
The fittingly bizarre monument would have depicted Confederate nurse Sally Luisa Tompkins battling a dragon. The whole scene would be balanced on a 20-foot tall pedestal resembling the Spanish artist’s pinky finger.
Dalí’s outlandish concept was communicated to the public in spring 1966 by way of the artist’s agent and “military advisor,” Captain J. Peter Moore. The dragon, Moore clarified, would actually “be an enlarged microbe of some kind.”
No one alive today knows how Dalí got involved with Richmond’s plan to expand Monument Avenue, or why he picked Tompkins as his subject. Nevertheless, the city reacted strongly to the proposal. Letters poured in to local newspapers, with people decrying Dalí as a farce.
Maurice Bonds, then the chair of art history at the RPI School of Art, wrote to the Richmond News Leader with a tongue-in-cheek take on the surreal idea.
“How about Captain Sally drooling over a branch with one eye supported by a crutch and all in shiny aluminum with a red neon heart that really beats? Let’s tie a bow on Traveller’s tail and hold a happening in Capitol Square.”
Bonds’ letter to the editor of the Richmond News Leader, March 22, 1966.
The sculpture’s poor reception added a sour note to the city’s plans. Dalí’s statue of Tompkins soon faced a suite of competing local sculptors, and the project was definitively shelved when the chairman of the monument committee died in a plane accident.
But Dalí’s flamboyant entrance into a heated local debate was one in a long line of artists and designers prompting public discussions about the fate of Richmond’s Confederate statues. It’s a conversation that continues today, including, most recently, the opening of Monument Avenue: General Demotion/General Devotion. Organized by VCUarts’ mObstudiO and Storefront for Community Design, the exhibition features work from an international design competition that invited architects, planners, designers and artists to imagine possibilities for the historic street.
Learn more about Dalí’s planned statue in Style Weekly.
2018 marks 90 years of creative daring at VCU School of the Arts. To mark this occasion, VCUarts is spending this school year reflecting on our shared history and envisioning how we can continue to pave the way for creative practice in the 21st century and beyond. Visit the VCUarts 90th Anniversary website to learn more about the many stories that have shaped our school, and to share memories of your own.
Featured image: “Portrait of Salvador Dalí” by Carl Van Vechten, via Library of Congress.
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