I was on YouTube last night and I found this documentary made a few years ago by the BBC about Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross. The programme is called Artworks Scotland. It was a series about…well…artworks in Scotland! Aye, I know, who would’ve guessed?! This is a fascinating documentary piece about how the painting came to Glasgow, and about the man responsible for bringing it – Tom Honeyman.
It talks to artists who studied at Glasgow School of Art, and their memories of first seeing the painting in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and what it meant to them. It’s a pretty similar experience to my own. What you find is people hypnotised by this piece of art, regardless of whether they liked Dali or not. For most of them, like myself, it was their first experience of art.
What is hilarious is the bit where they talk to this guy who petitioned against the painting in the 1950s because of the cost. He refers to the painting as junk! Haha! I understand he feels the need to defend his original stance, but really he doesn’t have to. He could have just admitted that he got it wrong in the first place. It just makes him seem really petty and reeks of sour grapes. You may not like a painting, but you can’t refer to it as junk, unless it is actually junk. Dali worked on this painting for months and he put his heart and soul into, and you do any artist a great disservice by triviliasing it down to a single disparaging word.
This video is quite a few years old so bits of it are out of date, but it’s a really great documentary. I thinked I’ve expounded enough about this painting, but I hope you’ll enjoy it!
