Eleanor Morse, an art collector who made a museum out of a storage warehouse in 1982, died last week in St. Petersburg, Florida. She was 97 years old. Like many collectors whose collections have outgrown their own homes and living spaces, Morse, along with her late husband, A. Reynolds Morse, made their art collection, which included hundreds of modern paintings and drawings by Salvador Dalí, into a museum. They founded the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg. At first they stored the collection in a wing of A. Reynolds Morse’s business, but it outgrew the space. So they moved the entire Salvador Dalí Museum to a space in St. Petersburg that had previously been used as a marine storage warehouse. The museum is still located on St. Petersburg’s waterfront, but has moved to a new location and is now operated by the state of Florida.
Morse and her husband first became interested in Salvador Dalí after seeing a traveling exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art. They bought their first painting as a wedding gift to each other, for $1,250. It was titled Daddy Longlegs of the Evening -- Hope! Eventually, the Morses met Dalí, and became good friends with the artist and his wife, Gala. They collected hundreds of his works from all periods. Some of Dalí’s most notable paintings collected by the Morses included “The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus” (1959), “The Ecumenical Council” (1960), and “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” (1970).
Remembering the Dalís, Morse once commented (in a quotation appearing in last week’s St. Petersburg Times), “They were wonderful fun...But we knew also that Dalí wanted us to buy his paintings. He would become irritated if we bought older ones from a gallery instead of a new one from him.”
The Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg now contains more than 2,000 works by Dalí. It has nearly 100 Dalí paintings and more than 1,000 drawings, watercolors, prints, and other objects. It also contains some clothing designs, furniture, ballet sets, and films.
The Morses’ friends and family were horrified by their Dalí obsession and by some of the works in the collection. “My father said we’d taken leave of our senses,” Morse once said (the quotation appears in today’s New York Times). But the couple were unswayed by the opinions of others. Last week’s St. Petersburg Times quotes the Dalí Museum’s director emeritus, Marshall Rousseau, who once noted, “Ren and Eleanor have two passions: each other and Dalí’s art.”
Morse was closely involved in helping to run the Dalí Museum until her health began to deteriorate when she was about 94. She also translated Dalí’s writings, which were in French and Spanish. For her translations from the French, France twice gave her awards for spreading French culture to other countries. In 1989, Spain’s King Juan Carlos gave her the Cross of the Officer of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, for her scholarship. The honor is the highest award the Spanish government can confer on a noncitizen of Spain.
The Dalí Museum’s board president, Tom James, and current director, Hank Hine III, remembered her with admiration in last week’s St. Petersburg Times. “She had an independent streak,” noted James, “and her own views.” Hine recalled, “She was both correct -- in that she was always beautifully dressed and had lovely manners -- and also really quite wild, quite flexible, in her thinking. She had to have had that to come from her background and embrace all that Dalí was. She had a broad, generous, encompassing spirit.”
Sources used:
Bennett, Lennie. “Eleanor Morse, co-founder of Salvador Dalí Museum, dies at 97.” The St. Petersburg Times. July 3, 2010.
Grimes, William. “Eleanor R. Morse, Dalí collector, dies at 97.” The New York Times. July 6, 2010.
“Museum founders: A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse.” The Dalí Museum.