Dali gifts to Buffalo doctor going public
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.”
