Dali gifts to Buffalo doctor going public

A darkened bank vault is no place for Salvador Dali’s exuberant, surreal art. So art lovers were happy last August when 15 sketches by the celebrated Spanish artist were brought to light by the widow of Dr. Edmund Klein after they had been locked away in downtown safe deposit boxes for more than 30 years.

But they’ve remained out of the public eye.

Now, after framing at Benjaman’s Art Gallery on Elmwood Avenue, the drawings are being readied for their first showing, from June 27 to Aug. 27 in the University at Buffalo’s Anderson Gallery, along with four other Dali works owned by Martha Klein — two lithographs, a watercolor and a silver statuette.

All were given to Klein's late husband, a renowned Buffalo dermatologist, in return for his treatment of Dali’s skin cancer over nearly a decade, starting in 1972.

Klein, whose patients also included actors John Wayne and Zero Mostel, got along famously with the highly imaginative artist and hesitated to bill him for the visits to his winter residence in a New York City hotel or homes in France and Spain.

So Dali “gave him a drawing each time,” Martha Klein recalled in the Williamsville home of her daughter, Rene Rubino, as a team from UB Galleries boxed the collection for the trip to Anderson Gallery on Martha Jackson Place in University Heights.

The largest pieces — the lithographs and watercolor, also gifts from the artist — were hung in the Kleins’ home, but there was no room for the drawings, so they went into deposit boxes for safekeeping.

Avoiding exposure to sunlight in a temperature-controlled room for all those years wasn’t the worst fate for the delicate drawings — including several angels — executed in Dali books, sketch pads and a photography catalog and dedicated to “mon ami Klein” or “mon Angel le Doctor Klein,” said Paul Chimera, a Dali specialist from Amherst and the family’s consultant on the collection.

On balance, the vault is “probably a pretty good place for them,” Chimera said.

The Klein collection will be exhibited with two Dali paintings owned by UB and four from Niagara University’s Castellani Art Museum.

Martha Klein, whose husband died 10 years ago, a decade after Dali, hopes the exhibition will attract a buyer or buyers. Though the family’s collection has not been appraised, she is confident it would fetch at least enough to pay for the education of her nine grandchildren.

She would prefer to sell the set intact, she said, because breaking it up “would spoil the story.”

tbuckham@buffnews.com

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 The figurine, found in 2008 in a cave in Schelklingen, southern Germany is thought to be the world's oldest reproduction of a human.

Los Angeles Times

The 40,000-year-old carved figure of a voluptuous woman was excavated in Germany. It 'radically changes our views of the context and meaning of the earliest Paleolithic art,' its discoverer says.

By Thomas H. Maugh II 
May 14, 2009

A 40,000-year-old figurine of a voluptuous woman carved from mammoth ivory and excavated from a cave in southwestern Germany is the oldest known example of three-dimensional or figurative representation of humans and sheds new light on the origins of art, researchers reported Wednesday. 

The intricately carved headless figure is at least 5,000 years older than previous examples and dates from shortly after the arrival of modern humans in Europe. It exhibits many of the characteristics of fertility, or Venus, figurines carved millenniums later. 

The figurine "radically changes our views of the context and meaning of the earliest Paleolithic art," its discoverer, archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tubingen in Germany, wrote in the journal Nature. 

Experts are excited about the find because of what it tells us about early humans -- and about ourselves. 

"The origin and evolution of figurative art, portable art, appear on most lists of what constitutes modern human behavior," said archaeologist Daniel Adler of the University of Connecticut, who was not involved in the research. 

"Any time you can push the clock back on some of these behaviors, we get a better understanding of why these were important and were developed, where they were developed . . . and the roles they played in the social glue that holds groups together," he said. 

"For European archaeologists, it marks the appearance of behaviors they find familiar, modern human behavior," said archaeologist John J. Shea of Stony Brook University in New York, who was also not involved. "It suggests the same values and ways of seeing the world existed among the earliest humans that migrated to Europe" as among humans today. 

The figurine was excavated at Hohle Fels, a large cave in the Swabian Jura region about 14 miles southwest of the city of Ulm. The cave shows evidence of a long period of prehistoric occupation and is probably best known for three ivory carvings previously discovered by Conard: a horse's or bear's head; a water bird that may be in flight; and a half-human, half-lion figurine, all dating from about 30,000 to 31,000 years ago. 

The new figurine was found in September in six pieces about 9 feet below the cave floor. Nearby were flint-knapping debris, worked bone and ivory, and remains of horses, reindeer, cave bears, mammoths and ibexes. Radiocarbon data indicate that the layer originated 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. 

The figure, about 2.4 inches tall, was carved from a mammoth tusk. 

It has broad shoulders, prominent breasts and intricately detailed buttocks and genitalia, all grossly exaggerated. 

Those features "are clearly more exaggerated than on others that come later," Adler said, "but many of the basic features that are seen later are already there. . . . It's a prototype for what you see later" from the Gravettian culture, which existed in France 28,000 to 22,000 years ago. 

"The stylistic attributes are being carried on for many, many generations." 

The figurine has two short arms with carefully carved hands resting on the upper part of the stomach; part of the left arm and shoulder are missing. One hand has five fingers, the other four.

The legs are short, pointed and asymmetrical, with the left noticeably shorter, typical of later Venus figurines. Also typical, the figure has no head. Instead, it has a carefully carved ring above the left shoulder. The polished surface of the ring suggests that the figurine was worn as an ornament around the neck. 

The intricate detailing achieved with primitive stone tools indicates "the amount of energy these guys were willing to invest in these little objects -- tens if not hundreds of hours," Shea said. That suggests the objects were very important to them. 

Many researchers believe that they were fertility totems, but their ultimate meaning may remain a mystery.

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these are beautiful women...in all seriousness 

       

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