ST. PETERSBURG (AP) – For a few hours Tuesday, this Florida city was transformed into a Surrealist canvas in honor of Salvador Dali, the genre’s master.

A man wearing a large snail hat led a parade of drummers, who were followed by a phalanx of pirates past shimmering water and vibrant palm trees. Wild green parakeets fluttered in the air. Spanish royalty was on hand, as were several mayors, dozens of reporters and hundreds of art lovers.

A number of people had attached pencil-thin Dali mustaches to their upper lips.

Everyone gathered beneath a glass-and-concrete building — the new, $36-million museum that features a priceless collection of Dali’s works.

It replaces the old Dali Museum, more than doubling the exhibition space and improving hurricane protection. It is considered the world’s most comprehensive collection of Dali’s work.

Princess Cristina of Spain, who is the duchess of Palma de Mallorca and the youngest daughter of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia, called the museum a “superb setting, a state of the art building” that evokes the waves, magic and light of Dali’s native Mediterranean Sea.

The museum’s signature architectural detail is a wave of glass paneling that undulates around the building — a striking feature that was designed by architect Yann Weymouth, who had a hand in creating the glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris.

“The city of St. Petersburg gains a landmark and outstanding beacon of cultural beauty,” the princess said.

Floridians believe the museum will be the centerpiece of an arts renaissance in the Tampa Bay area, which recently saw the renovation of a new museum of art in nearby Tampa and the opening of a gallery devoted to popular glassmaker Dale Chihuly in St. Petersburg. Officials said the Dali museum took 14 years from conception to ribbon-cutting. Because much of the fund raising and building happened in tough economic times, local officials say the community is clearly committed to the arts and the tourism it brings to the area.

“We overcame the difficulty of the economic times,” said former St. Petersburg Mayor Bob Ullrich. “What you see before you today is the symbol of a resolute will of this community to create world class art museum for a world class art collection.”

Dali, who was born and raised in Figueres, Spain, is best known for his surrealist paintings of melting clocks. Yet he was a classically trained painter whose art ranged from Old Master-style still lifes to religious iconography. A full range of his work can be seen at the St. Petersburg museum, including seven of his 18 masterwork paintings.

Jorge Dezcallar, the Spanish ambassador to the U.S., said the new museum will inspire a legacy of research and collaboration between the two countries.

“This is very befitting, in a land so closely linked to Spain,” he said. “Dali’s legend and legacy continue to live on. He would feel also at home in this building.”

Much of the Dali Museum’s art was collected by an Ohio couple — A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse — who bought their first Dali painting in 1942 and then amassed nearly 100 of his works. The couple became so enamored with his creations that they eventually befriended Dali and his wife, Gala, who moved to the United States in the 1940s.

Decades later, the Morse collection took an improbable path to St. Petersburg.

In 1980, a young St. Petersburg lawyer named Jim Martin read an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “U.S. Art World Dillydallies Over Dali;” about how Mr. Morse wanted to find a home for his collection — and how he was willing to donate it for free as long as the venue would keep the artworks together.

Martin called Morse and urged him to consider St. Petersburg. The Morse family did, and the first museum was eventually built in 1980.

“Sun and sand and Dali sounded pretty good,” Martin told a crowd of several hundred on Tuesday.

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewriteen, or redistributed.

 

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FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) – Somewhere between the Office Depot and the Ross Dress for Less store off West Seventh Street, a Frenchman named Roland G. Garros lifted off in his Bleriot monoplane a century ago.

Every other pilot at the Great Aviation Meet, a traveling troupe brought to Fort Worth by several of its leading businessmen, refused to fly. The winds were up, and the aircraft were only eight years removed from Orville and Wilbur Wright going airborne for the first time.

But Garros, determined to please the 15,000 people who had paid 50 cents to watch a plane fly, pulled back on his stick and went airborne into 25 mph gusts, a dangerous decision because his plane couldn’t fly a whole lot faster than that.

At 1,500 feet, he leveled off and took a “seven-mile, cross-country jaunt” and landed perfectly a few minutes later, according to news accounts.

Few, if any, people that day, Jan. 12, 1911, had ever seen it done before.

A machine flew.

From an area that gave the world the F-16, Ormer Locklear, Horace Carswell, Jeana Yeager and the Huey helicopter, it would seem that the actual birthday of aviation in Tarrant County, Texas, has been largely forgotten.

“Ninety percent of the people who come to our museum have no idea what went on here,” said Tom Kemp, a retired Air Force colonel who volunteers at the Veterans Memorial Air Park near Meacham Airport.

But three groups of aviation enthusiasts, the Fort Worth Air & Space Museum Foundation, the OV-10 Bronco Association and the B-36 Peacemaker Museum, decided to mark the centennial of flight in Tarrant County with a yearlong campaign designed to remind people that there’s more to local history than cattle and railroads.

Their first event is scheduled for Saturday near the site of Garros’ first flight.

“I think that aviation is so much a part of the fabric here that people don’t think about it,” said Jim Hodgson, president of the Veterans Memorial Air Park and a founder of the OV-10 Bronco Association. “It’s always been here. They don’t think about that initial spark that got everything going. But aviation really did change the complexion of this area.”

Thousands of people saw that initial spark on Jan. 12 and Jan. 13, 1911, during the Great Aviation Meet held at the Fort Worth Driving Park, a race track on the site of what is now Montgomery Plaza off West Seventh Street.

The International Aviators had just performed before 20,000 people in Dallas, and several prominent leaders of Fort Worth hastily arranged a stop in Fort Worth before the aviators headed to Oklahoma City.

The aviation exhibit was part of a yearlong tour across America organized by wealthy brothers A.J. and John Moisant and featuring well-known pilots of the day. The pilots earned a princely sum of $500 to $2,000 a week, according to a story in The New York Times in 1910.

“It cannot be predicted from what obscure village the inventor shall arise to solve the problem still confronting those who are wrestling with the gigantic task of making aerial navigation as practical and safe as other means of transportation,” the Times quoted A.J. Moisant as saying.

Just a few weeks later, his brother, John, died in an airplane crash in New Orleans. The airport there carried his name for many years.

In addition to flying for the crowds, one pilot would race a man driving a powerful Fiat race car around the track. But the gusty winds and concern about the large crowds getting too close to the track on Jan. 12 led to a shortened aviation meet with only Garros going airborne the first day.

The Dallas Morning News called him “reckless” for doing it, though Garros was quoted in newspapers of the day saying he did it to appease the largest assembly of people ever in Fort Worth.

Similarly, the yearlong tribute to aerospace milestones in North Texas is being put together on the fly.

“It should have been done a year ago,” Hodgson acknowledged.

But because no one else appeared to be organizing anything, Hodgson and friends started throwing together a plan less than two months ago. Each month, the group intends to have a program to commemorate either a historic event, unit, aircraft or person with North Texas ties.

In February, they will mark the 62nd anniversary of the first nonstop flight around the world, which originated and ended at Carswell Air Force Base.

Later in the year, they plan to push programs on aircraft such as the B-36 Peacemaker built in Fort Worth, the British and Canadian pilots who trained in Tarrant County in World War I and the arrival in Ryan Place of “Daredevil Cal” Rodgers on the first transcontinental flight.

The air show at Naval Air Station Fort Worth in April comes coincidentally on the centennial of naval aviation, bringing in many of the Navy’s heavy hitters such as the Blue Angels.

In May, the Fort Worth Air & Space Museum Foundation will unveil a major exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, which officials hope will whet the public’s appetite for a major aviation-only museum.

“It will be a preview of our ultimate air and space museum we will build at Alliance Airport in 2016,” said Bill Morris, a researcher for the foundation. “It will help us focus the structure of the big museum.”

The groups have also enlisted the help of Tarrant County College, which has an aviation program, to reach out to middle-school students to get more young people interested in the field.

They hope that more groups, schools and cities will get into the act by having their own programs.

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Information from: Fort Worth Star-Telegram,

http://www.star-telegram.com

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WS-01-11-11 0846EST

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