Salvador Dalí loved to shock — and he loved the old masters. A new exhibition in Florida keeps both truths in the same room. “Dalí: Disruption + Devotion” opens at The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg on 7 November 2026 and runs until 18 April 2027. It is co-organised with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Five centuries, side by side
The show brings together paintings, drawings and prints from both collections, spanning nearly five hundred years. Works by El Greco, Orazio Gentileschi and Diego Velázquez hang alongside Dalí’s own. The exhibition’s key image says it all: Dalí’s 1958 canvas Velázquez Painting the Infanta Margarita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory from the St. Petersburg collection, paired with Velázquez’s Infanta Maria Theresa (1653) from Boston.
The iconoclast as student
Dalí is remembered for melting clocks and public provocations, but he was also a devoted student of art history and religion. The curators — Jennifer Cohen, director of curatorial affairs at The Dalí Museum, and Frederick Ilchman, chair of Art of Europe at the MFA Boston — arrange the works in pairings and thematic groups that show an artist honouring tradition while pulling it apart. The title captures that double motion: disruption and devotion, never one without the other.
Visitors write along
A digital layer adds a contemporary twist. Students from the Ringling College of Art and Design built an interactive piece: by scanning QR codes in the galleries, visitors answer prompts about faith and provocation and watch their words join an ever-changing projection beside other people’s responses.
The exhibition launched with an opening celebration on 6 November as part of the museum’s Museum Week, and it is included in regular gallery admission. For anyone who thinks of Dalí only as a showman, the pairings offer a quieter, more surprising portrait: the rebel who kept returning to the painters he set out to unsettle.