Disruption + Devotion at The Dalí Museum

Reveals the Art Historian Hiding Inside the Showman

Opening November 7th

Featuring rarely lent masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition explores Salvador Dalí’s lifelong devotion to the Old Masters, complemented by newly displayed works from the Museum’s permanent collection.

Dalí: Disruption + Devotion is a special exhibition exploring how Salvador Dalí made the European tradition the raw material of his own art, restaging its great predecessors to claim a place among them.

Co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition features rarely lent paintings and works on paper spanning five centuries, placing Dalí’s work alongside renowned predecessors including El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Luis Meléndez and Francisco Goya. The exhibition will be on view November 7, 2026, through April 18, 2027.

“What unfolds through this exhibition is not merely a conversation between one artist and his predecessors, but something more consequential — a struggle, conducted in paint, over the very meaning of tradition,” said Hank Hine, Executive Director of The Dalí Museum.

Far from rejecting tradition, Dalí continuously returned to it, reworking classical compositions, religious imagery, portraiture and still-life painting into psychologically charged and technically daring new forms.

Organized by six thematic sections — Fantasy and Nightmare; The Last Old Master; Velázquez and the Portrait; Not So Still Life; Higher Callings; and Inexorable Time — the exhibition reveals Dalí as a painter who mined the whole history of art to fashion himself into its latest heir. Visitors can also add their voices to Dalí’s dialogue with the past by responding to exhibition-inspired questions on their phones, with their reflections projected onto the gallery wall.

The exhibition’s exploration of Dalí’s influences extends into the Museum’s permanent collection, where a newly rotated selection brings rarely seen works back into public view, some for the first time in nearly two decades. Among them is Biblia Sacra (1967-69), Dalí’s largest print suite, which reimagines biblical passages through his distinctly modern visual language; Changes in Great Masterpieces (1974), six lithographs in which Dalí playfully reworks paintings by Raphael, Vermeer, Rembrandt and Velázquez; and selections from Les Caprices de Goya de Salvador Dalí (1977), which illuminate his fascination with Goya and the dialogue between the two Spanish artists.

Accompanying the exhibition is its inaugural scholarly catalog for Dalí: Disruption + Devotion. Edited by the curators of the exhibition Dr. Frederick Ilchman and Dr. Jennifer Cohen, Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Dalí Museum, the catalog includes contributions by Dr. Julia Vázquez, Dr. Claire Howard, Emma Kohlmayer and Dr. William Jeffett.

The publication expands on the exhibition’s themes through in-depth essays and features a new interview with contemporary artist Jeff Koons, who reflects on Dalí’s enduring influence and the lasting dialogue between historical and contemporary art — a rare pairing of art’s great provocateurs, past and present.

Dalí: Disruption + Devotion is on view through April 18, 2027. For more information about the exhibition and to purchase tickets, visit TheDali.org/Disruption