If you haven’t visited the Art Gallery of Ontario recently, this is as good and bland a time as ever to take the eyes on an aesthetic vacation. Indeed, judging from the happy hubbub and voluminous traffic on a recent midweek afternoon, many have descended on the AGO for aesthetic healing as it were, whether to view the gleaming King Tut exhibition, to walk under and through Giuseppe Penone’s expansive sculpture installation The Hidden Life Within, to stand by Rodin’s surprisingly small and darkly green The Thinker or to satisfy a more personal yearning, as I did.

I wanted to immerse myself on this day in the gallery’s “Buried Treasure” grouping, which examines the unconscious in European thought -- specifically, early-20th-century work which with its mix of surreality and expressionism is still as vital and provocative as ever. I wanted to get up and close and personal with some of my favourite artists, including Chagall, Picasso, Miró -- but especially Giorgio de Chirico, whose disquieting Piazza d’Italia (1913, pictured, above) has always been a favourite of mine.

Pre-eminently, Picasso always tickles one live, always delivers the “art.” You almost forget how ingenious he was. His Seated Woman (1927) forces you to square up to it and lose yourself in its perfectly balanced and calming pale blues and grey composition. Apparently he was working out some family entanglements in this piece, and the image actually consists of three figures distorted and compressed together in a tranquil but tense trinity.

And Chagall’s Over Vitebsk (1914), with his trademark folksy, dreamy lyricism, never grows stale. Yves Tanguy’s The Satin Pillow (1929) conversed quietly with the other works, particularly the untitled Miró with its hissing soft red globs. But then I caught myself eyeballing Otto Dix’s very anxious Portrait of Heinrich Stadelemann (1922, pictured, left) longer than I would have wished, for it very vividly represents a tortured soul or a twisted mind, or someone suffering from the winter blahs.

When I at last came upon the de Chirico, its small size surprised me. I had always imagined it to be much bigger, but up close it seemed like a distillation of my preconceived idea of it. This didn’t diminish its beauty and power.

So I felt very good about this assemblage, though none of it moved the earth for me. What I realized was that these images, which I have long loved and which represent for me my first true encounter with art, have been usurped by the marketplace and commerce and have become somewhat stale. Or is it that I have become stale? Nevertheless, I was not moved. Fault not the artists.

And I was about to move on to another section of the gallery and view Henry Moore’s magnificent bronze Warrior With Shield, among other war trophies, when I paused and glanced at a glass case in the middle of the room which housed a chess set of all things. I love chess and have always had a soft spot for beautiful chess sets. To my astonishment, this set was made by none other than Salvador Dali. I like Dali, but many of his images (the ubiquitous melting clocks) and ideas seem to have lost their potency. One might say that surrealism on the whole no longer surprises or delights. Perhaps this isn’t completely true, for this chess set was an absolute revelation, and worth a trip to the gallery for me.

The chess-obsessed Marcel Duchamp once asked the Dali to design a set for the American Chess Federation. Dali, who loved chess as much as Duchamp, readily agreed. His Chess Set (Homage to Marcel Duchamp) (pictured, left) is in a word, fantastic. I found myself with a few other gallery goers quite mesmerized by it. One older gentleman beside me said with a smile that it was Dali’s most inspired work.

And it is inspired. Except for the queens and rooks, Dali modelled the pieces after his own fingers. The queens were cast from the thumb of his wife Gala, and for the rooks he used a salt shaker from the St. Regis Hotel in New York. Both bronze and sterling editions were produced for the American Chess Foundation. F. J. Cooper of Philadelphia minted just 45 sets and Dali signed every piece. Staring at the set one is both startled and amused. The kings and queens are crowned with a cast of a tooth, possibly a dental pun, but the salt shakers are topped with a cast of Dali’s nipple. The mix of ghoulish and random make for a strangely resonant sculptural entity.

As for Dali’s explanations: “I had a precise and yet symbolic concept,” he said. “In chess, as in other forms of human alchemy, there is always the creator, above all, the artist as creator. It is this that I wanted represented: the hand of the artist, the eternal creator. How better to express this vision than by sculpting my own hand, my own fingers?”

When asked by F. J. Cooper “Why the teeth?” Dali replied “Why not?”

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