Presently on the savory menu of exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, there lurks art of variously subversive ways and means. Wild, abstract-leaning, and rough film-noir-ish impressions are made in the main exhibition arenas where Joan Tanner and Ed and Nancy Kienholz hold forth.
Meanwhile, tucked into the museum’s corner spaces is a deceptively also-ran show called from the museum collection, gamely named Iconography of Dread: Symbolism to Surrealism. In a sense, this small meal of surrealist and symbolist work is the tamer event of the three exhibitions cited here. But it serves the valuable functions of provoking thought, wending down psychological rabbit holes of art history and reminding us of the riches — even of the bizarre, genre-elusive sort — contained in SBMA’s vaults.
Exhibit A, validating all three counts, is the celebrity in the house — Salvador Dalí’s irrational riddle of a painting, “Honey Is Sweeter than Blood.” Long-standing museumgoers will have caught sight of the canvas on many occasions, but it feels especially at home in this surely themed grouping. Painted in 1941, it’s a startling view, with his looming nude female figure (with a crutch) and a Minotaur in retreat conspiring toward a slightly feverish, libido-tinged dream scene in the clouds. Literally.