Home > LECTURES & LITERATURE > Art-at-Lunch: Salvador Dali’s The Ecumenical Council: A Paranoiac Reading

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Art-at-Lunch: Salvador Dali’s The Ecumenical Council: A Paranoiac Reading

Presented by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)

September 29, 2010

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Join PAFA staff and students for this series of talks on American art and culture every Wednesday at noon. Enjoy discussions and lectures with scholars and artists covering a variety of topics related to PAFA's exhibitions, collections and areas of interest. Visitors are encouraged to bring a bagged lunch, though limited options will be available for sale outside the Auditorium doors. The Ecumenical Council (1960), one of Salvador Dalí’s most dramatic and tendentious religious paintings from his post-surrealist period, is generally interpreted as a pre-celebration of the Second Vatican Council. However, Jonathan Wallis of Moore College of Art Design argues that an additional interpretation of the painting emerges when the process Dalí employed to produce the painting–the “paranoiac-critical method”--is recognized as a necessary component to the process of unraveling it. Wallis argues that The Ecumenical Council can be read as a personal declaration by Dalí of his “divinely justified” candidacy as the next official Vatican artist, poised to revise the Catholic Church’s modern artistic identity and religious program as it moved into the second half of the twentieth century.