Dali's ashtray in Mumbai
Hindustan TimesUttara Parikh was a young advertising executive in the Bombay office of Air India, when one day in 1967, the phone rang. The elephant was needed to pay Salvador Dali, the Spanish surrealist painter, for an artefact he was designing, commissioned by a team of Air India executives, who met the painter in New York. Uttara Parikh in her Air India office in 1999 Dali designed the most unique ashtray in the world for Air India, a surreal combination that fused elephants, swans and a serpent around an aeroplane fuselage-like sea shell space. Critics trace some of this influence to the Elephant and Obelisk statue designed by the famous seventeenth-century Italian architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini The Elephants by Dali Dali’s 1949 painting titled The Elephants features two such mammoth animals, surreally supported by stilts, each bearing an obelisk suspended slightly above the animal. The elephants and swans in Dali’s Air India ashtray, first appeared in his 1937 painting titled Swans Reflecting Elephants.
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Air India’s prodigious art collection will soon be showcased at NGMA. The question now is, can they be made more accessible to the public?
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