The Average Bureaucrat

While living in the Tampa/St Petersburg area in the late 90’s, I became a big fan of the surrealist painter Salvador Dali and the magnificent Dali museum that is located in St. Petersburg. During that time I performed every Friday and Saturday at the Vinoy Resort hotel which is an icon of downtown St. Pete, and I would frequently point the guest to the museum. Hopefully some of them took me up on the suggestion and got to see the brilliant works for themselves.

The funny thing about art is that it is hardly ever about the painting itself but rather about the artists relation to painting. At first glance most of Dali’s works would not make sense to the average person. Images of dripping clocks and burning giraffes or a cross suspended in mid air would leave onlookers either intrigued or disinterested thinking that the artist must have had quite a good drug trip while wielding his brush across the canvas. While I won’t rule out the latter, his works are definitely more than meets the eye and his images are loaded with meaning, both philosophically and politically.

some of Dali's more popular works 


The Persistance of Memory -1931

The Hallucinogenic Toreador - 1968-70

Hundreds, possibly thousands of works are on display at the museum, You could take a week to take all of them in and really appreciate all of the subtle meanings and nuances in his works.

One of my favorite paintings in the museum is called “The Average Bureaucrat” It is not one of the masterworks which are about 9 feet by 13 feet, The Average Bureaucrat is only 36 x 40 inches in size, which is significantly smaller. Even though it isn’t prominently displayed, it stood out to me.

The Average Bureaucrat - 1930 

The painting is a representation Dali’s father who was a prominent government employee in his town. Dali had a very tumultuous relationship with his father. He would cycle in out of favor with him throughout his lifetime. The image shows a bald man with concave indentation on his head. The indentation is filled with seashells. The image of the seashells represents the lack of knowledge or understanding that he believed his father to exhibit. In the background of the image are 2 small figures that represent the close relationship he had with his father when he was a boy.

This glimpse into the personal life of Dali was most fascinating to me. I appreciate all that this image says of the pain that he felt in no longer relating to his father anymore. They were real close when he was young and he always desired that kinship again as an adult.

This painting screams these personal questions: What happened to you the moment you stopped looking at your parents as mom and dad and started seeing them as just another person? What happened when you started reconciling the past and holding them accountable with your understanding of “how things should have been” as an adult?  What happened to how you remember them being when you were a child?

The image will likely will have its own unique impact on you and the questions it invokes might even be different, yet is serves as a brilliant example of how art can mean as much to the observer as it does the creator.