Celestial Elephant- Salvador Dali, 1979

Celestial Elephant

Lithograph

1979

Salvador Dali featured animals with great frequency in his works. Surrealism explored the human subconscious, the world of dreams, and it was fertile ground for portraying recurring images in one’s nocturnal cinema of the mind – which frequently includes animals. Who among us, after all, hasn’t had at least one dream about a man-eating octopus or a bloodthirsty shark, or some giant, menacing swarm of insects!

Of the many animals that make an appearance in Dali’s oeuvre, large and small, the elephant was an oft-seen favorite, such as in the present lithograph, Celestial Elephant of 1979. It’s a little known fact that Salvador Dali actually owned an elephant, which he named Susurus, and which was housed at the Barcelona zoo.

Except for Dali’s 1970 Hannibal Crossing the Alps watercolor, it’s rare if not impossible to find a “normal” elephant in Dali’s works; i.e., one where the large beast doesn’t stand impossibly heavy and tall on stilt-like spider or giraffe legs!

What is the idea behind this unusual and amusing treatment of the mighty pachyderm, anyway? In three words: ambiguity, paradox, contradiction. All, in effect, underpinnings of Dali’s approach to his art and, to a large extent, the way he lived his life. By doing the exact opposite of what people expected, Dali provoked us in exciting, amusing, sometimes unsettling, but always memorable ways.

In Celestial Elephant, the paradox is boldly and colorfully evident: a multi-ton animal supported by skyscraper-tall chicken limbs! It is an undeniably funny sight, and Dali clearly intended to elicit a smile or two in creating this whimsical work. Trumpeting cherubs herald the strong presence of the elephant, which, together with its riders, is already high enough to be in the heavens (celestial, as it were), as it moves along an Egyptian desert featuring a brick-walled pyramid in the middle distance, on top of which a crutch-carrying, victorious-looking figure stands. Colorful dragonflies, butterflies, and the jeweled garment on the elephant itself add to the pageantry and mystique of the scene.

Important images in Dali’s work, such as the elephant, often find an echo in other works of his, sometimes in a variety of mediums. In the case of Dali’s elephants, there is a long line of sensational works in which the animal is found.

An early and dramatic appearance of elephants – used to extraordinary double-image effect – was Swans Reflecting Elephants of 1937. This masterful oil painting shows four swans on a small lake, which, at the same time, reveal reflections that are in the shape of elephants (the painting sold at auction for upwards of $3 million in the 1990s).

Another dramatic canvas by Dali, and one of his most celebrated, is The Temptation of Saint Athony (1946), where various temptations (sex, riches, etc.) are carried upon the backs of three elephants, whose sky-high spider-like legs are perhaps the most dramatic of any of Dali’s paradoxical elephant portrayals.

Dali introduced his interest in the elephant into other mediums, too. In the late 1960s, Air India commissioned him to design a promotional ash tray for the company; Dali came up with a design that was both a swan and an elephant, depending on whether it was right side up or upside down. The skinny-legged pachyderm also showed up – with an obelisk on its back, similar to the one in Temptation of St. Anthony – in Space Elephant, a dramatic jeweled object designed by Dali.

Dali even counted among the unusual, surrealistic props strewn about his unconventional property at Port Lligat, Spain, an actual elephant’s skull!

Among other serious paintings in which his utterly unique brand of elephants appears are Triumph of Dionysus and Melancholy, Atomic, Uranic, Idyll. The year Celestial Elephant was created, 1979, was a time when Dali was playing visual “games” in another way, as well. He was involved in optical explorations that began a few years earlier with his interest in holography and stereoscopy. His 1979 Searching for the Fourth Dimension canvas was another step on the road to discovering new visual phenomena in the medium of oil painting.

Taken in context, then, Celestial Elephant finds plenty of company within Dali’s prolific career. The graphic has a cheery, optimistic, jubilant quality about it and is a splendid example of how Salvador Dali could take a comparatively normal subject and give it that special paranoiac-critical twist that made it uniquely Dalinian!

We might be bold enough to say here that, just as Gala told Dali that once someone sees the soft watches in The Persistence of Memory they will never forget it, so too can it be said of a work like Celestial Elephant. After all, are you ever going to forget so contradictory yet compelling an image?

“Alsace” from The French Railways- Salvador Dalí

By Paul Chimera

Dali Historian

(Mr. Chimera worked directly with Dali Museum founder Reynolds Morse, as the publicity director of the original Dali Museum when it was located in Beachwood, Ohio)

‘Alsace’

The French Railways

1969

Alsace from The French Railways by Salvador Dali 1969

There’s really no mistaking a Dali! The Surrealist master had a distinctive style and flair that made everything very much his own – very much “Dalinian!” This interesting print – “Alsace,” based on Dali’s original gouache and collage and produced to help promote train travel on behalf of the French National Railway – is no exception.

Alsace is one of the main stops for France’s rail system, along with five others for which Dali produced unique images: Auvergne, Normandie, Alpes, Roussillon, and Paris.

In “Alsace,” Dali has focused on the fantastic Romanesque and Gothic architecture of Strasbourg in this historic and beautiful region of France. In collage, we see part of the Strasbourg Cathedral or Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg. Dali’s surrealist twist here puts a kind of red cape around the image, giving it human-like characteristics, together with butterfly wings that fan out loosely on either side of the central figure. (In fact, this 6-piece print portfolio has alternately been called the “Butterfly” series.)

In some ways “Alsace” is a bit darker than the others in the series, in that Dali used heavy black for the suggestion of the butterfly wings, and the scene appears under an overcast if not storm-threatening sky. Perhaps all the more reason to be comfortable inside the modern French Railway system’s cars!

As is often the case with Dali, from the standpoint of technique, in “Alsace” he melds a fairly tight rendering of the background cathedral with a looser spontaneity of brushwork in the foreground. It adds up to that Dalinian earmark that makes a work by this 20^th century master exclusively his own, predictably fascinating, and eminently collectible!

© 2009 The Salvador Dalí Society®. All rights reserved
© Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation All Rights to Dalí’s Image, likeness, and works of art.
For more information and pricing contact: Joseph Nuzzolo, 888-888-DALI (3254)

______

Tristan Fou Costumes- Salvador Dali

Tristan Fou Costumes

Salvador Dalí

Lithograph, 1970

Mention Salvador Dali and his irrepressible melting clocks spring immediately to mind. Dali the painter, as well as Dali the showman, is doubtlessly what most people think of when the artist’s name is mentioned. The man whose flamboyance was as prominent as his iconic images of the 20^th century: burning giraffes and floating Madonna’s and impossibly limbed elephants and, of course, those soft-as-Camembert time pieces, oozing down the sides of ledges and tree branches and in many other settings – real or imagined.

But Dali had an extraordinary career as a set and costume designer of some remarkable ballets and other theatrical productions, too. And here, in this magnificent lithograph, Tristan Fou Costumes (Mad Tristan), we see an example of Dali’s inimitable surrealist vision as it informs a most unusual costume design.

Dali, in 1937, contracted with Leonide Massine of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo to produce Tristan Fou. Costumes were to be produced by Elsa Schiaparelli. The story was loosely based on the life of mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria – a blend of myth, fantasy, and reality.

The lithe and sinewy women feature four distinctly Daliesque touches that make them unmistakably the products of the Catalan painter’s vivid imagination. The heads of roses recall several paintings and sculptures by Dali that used this device to add a surrealist twist that exploits the symbolism of roses as representing the female sex. The nine fish tails strapped onto the body of the woman at left, supported by crutches, not only provide a visual incongruity, but nod to Dali’s interpretation of fish as a phallic symbol. This fact is dramatically illustrated in a drawing in the Dali Museum collection in St. Petersburg, Florida, where an exaggerated phallus is simultaneously and clearly also a fish. This fish motif was seen in various other works by Salvador Dali, most notably his 1941 oil painting, Costume for a Nude with a Codfish Tail.

The crutches – possibly the most ubiquitous of all of Dali’s personal images, even considering the famed soft watches – have been widely interpreted in two plausible ways: Dali’s comment on the weakness, frailty and degeneration of society in general – but also as a kind of sublimated allusion to his own alleged impotence. This latter explanation may be most significant, considering how Dali made unabashed declarations that eroticism was among the top driving forces in his remarkable life and work. Even if, in Dali’s case, it may have been more voyeuristic in its manifestation.

Finally, of course, we consider the outrageously peculiar appendages jutting from the middle figure and the woman at right in Tristan Fou Costumes. Once again, the phallic symbolism cannot be lost on even the most minimally discerning observer. It may also be a reference to at least one resident of Cadaques, Spain, when Dali was a young man, whose hydrocephalic deformity made an indelible impression on the young artist. The same sort of paradoxical elongation is seen, for example, in Dali’s 1932 canvas, The Average Fine and Invisible Harp, and, among others, in Meditation on the Harp, 1932-1934. What’s more, a similarly looking figure was depicted in the lower right of Dali’s 1945 painting, Napoleon’s Nose, Transformed into a Pregnant Woman, St rolling H is Shadows with Melancholia Among Original Ruins.

An examination of this lithograph would be incomplete if one didn’t also draw parallels between it and the costumes Dali created for his infamous Dream of Venus pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, in which the scantily clad women in that spectacle sported similar fish-themed regalia.

It may be an understatement to say that “Dali was different,” but indeed, a lithograph such as Tristan Fou Costumes immediately telegraphs to the viewer a distinctive difference that makes Salvador Dali’s work as eye-opening as it is memorable. A true kind of persistence of memory, because – as Gala famously said of Dali’s soft watches, when she first saw them in his career-defining 1931 masterpiece, “Once someone sees them, they will never forget them.” The same might apply to this dramatic lithograph, Tristan Fou Costumes – so different in content and execution, and so improbable for anyone to forget. That must surely be one of the great gifts of Surrealism – a movement whose powerful visual force has continued to have such lasting and memorable effects.

© 2009 The Salvador Dalí Society®. All rights reserved
© Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation All Rights to Dalí’s Image, likeness, and works of art.
For more information and pricing contact: Joseph Nuzzolo, 888-888-DALI (3254)

The Lady and the Unicorn

THE LADY AND THE UNICORN

by Peter Lucas of the Lucas Gallery

The unicorn is a legendary animal from folklore, predominantly European, that is much like a white horse except for its large, pointed, spiraling horn that projects from its forehead.  It sometimes has a goat’s beard and cloven hooves. The Greeks were the first to mention such a creature.  In the Middle Ages and Renaissance it became an important imaginary animal.  It was said to be very wild, to have lived in woodlands.  Considered a symbol of purity and grace, it could be captured only by virgin.  Its horn was believed to have had the power to render poisoned water drinkable and to heal sickness.

Dali himself was fascinated with horns especially that of the rhinoceros, which he believed held scientific and mystical secrets.  During the artist’s Atomic period, roughly (1945 to 1960), Dali believed that his paintings could be deconstructed into rhinoceros horns.  D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form was one of the texts that caused him to focus on the rhinoceros horn’s morphology with regard to the Golden section and the related logarithmic spiral.  He identified logarithmic spirals in rhinoceros horns, cauliflower heads, sunflowers and Vermeer’s painting The Lacemaker of 1669-1670. Whereas the unicorn was indeed associated with sexual innocence and purity, Dali associated the rhinoceros horn with chastity, too.  This was ironic to say the leastconsidering the phallic shape and fabled aphrodisiac qualities of the larger, real animal.

The unicorn even became a symbol of the Virgin Mary. From the 1950’s on Dali created paintings which included in them unicorn or rhinoceros.  Among these are ASUMPTA CORPUSCULARIA LAPISLAZULINA (1952),  and YOUNG VIRGIN AUTO-SODOMISED BY THE HORNS OF HER OWN CHASTITY (1954).  Although the latter piece has the words Virgin and Chastity in its title the work hardly seems to be chaste.  However this work brings out the telling point that the thoughts and feeling of a virgin may well be anything but virginal. This work might put some of  us in mind of the sentiments of one of Dali’s intellectual heroes and mentors,  Sigmund  Freud.  In his brilliant critique of modern Western civilization and the Western way of life titled CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS (1930).   Freud pointed out that we repress our basic drives to such an extent that we deny ourselves much chance of happiness in life.

© 2016 The Salvador Dalí Society®. All rights reserved
© Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation All Rights to Dalí’s Image, likeness, and works of art.
For more information and pricing contact: Joseph Nuzzolo, 888-888-DALI (3254)

New York Central Park Winter

New York Central Park Winter

New York Central Park Winter

(from the suite Currier & Ives as Interpreted by Salvador Dali)

by Sabeeha Mirza of The Salvador Dali Society

Dali was enthralled by all things American. From the bustling streets of an industrialized New York City to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood cinema,  he was drawn to the irresistible modernity of the states. He spent eight years living in the U.S. and frequently visited even after his return to Spain. By befriending members of the celebrity elite, Dali engulfed himself in a world of mass appeal. He immersed himself in social circles that included everyone from forward thinking philosophers, innovative artists, pop culture icons, actors, models in an attempt to maintain his position on the brink of artistic innovation.

During the mid-1960s, Dali also befriended Sydney Z. Lucas of the famed Phyllis Lucas Gallery who later became the official publisher of Dali’s graphic works in North America.  After Sydney passed, his wife Phyllis continued the business relationship with Dali. It was during one of their meetings that Phyllis Lucas showed Salvador Dali an original edition of the Currier & Ives Prints collection and Dali was instantly taken by it. There before his eyes was everything he loved about the states, presented to him in visual form.

This collection of prints provided us with an artistic record of the various stages of progress and society during the onset of the industrial revolution.  The results were an illustrated patrimony of historical and cultural value, showcasing both the good and bad sides of American life. Phyllis Lucas commissioned Dali to reinvent some of the prints with a Dalinean perspective. This suite of 6  color lithographs titled Currier & Ives as Interpreted by Salvador Dali was completed between the years of 1965 to 1971. On each lithograph a small plate with a miniature of the original images from Currier & Ives is included, while also including several cues to the original in his rendition.  In New York Central Park Winter, Dali is able to capture the lively spirit of the original, but in a moodier, dreamlike fashion.  Dali’s version extracts key components of the original, while making changes to showcase a more ethereal quality of New York. In this way, the Dali’s work serves as a reflection of the spirit of the times.

Dali’s New York Central Park Winter allows the viewer to step into a snowy scene of winter festivity. The bleeding of watercolor in vertical streams down from the center give the illusion of the reflective quality of the cold winter’s ice upon which several skating figures glide. Hues of greys and blues create an atmospheric breath of cold air and smog. The center of the background is highlighted by a smattering of white in a flurry of of snow atop a shadowy mountain shape. This pinnacle pushes up from dark swipes of black paint covering a bridge that leads to watercolor houses peeking out from behind layers of smeared, smog-like, black gouache. Complementary colors of Mediterranean blue and bold orange emanate from the sky, offering a pop of contrast to the piece, guiding the viewer’s gaze downward.  The whole piece seems to be washed in the dark grimy greys and blacks of post-industrial New York. In the foreground, collaged butterflies are superimposed onto the bodies of faceless female skaters . These fairy-like figures seem to glide and circle across the paper. Their zig-zag shadows seem to lift them up into the air and add an element of levity to the scene. A singular male figure dressed in a top hat and long coat accompanies one of the butterfly skaters and draws a direct reference to the original Currier and Ives print. His hat paired with her spotted fur coat are direct artistic quotations from the original print.

New York Central Park Winter as interpreted by Salvador Dali showcases American leisure and affluence in the midst of the city’s leap into modernity.  It serves as a beacon of Americanism. The co-author of Dali Prints: The Catalogue Raisonné and founder of The Salvador Dali Society Joe Nuzzolo stated “How poignant that Salvador Dali, who loved everything American, put his spin on the definitive Americana-work from the turn of the century: Currier and Ives.” This print is a must-have for any Dali collector of as it is an artistic glimpse into American history.

© 2016 The Salvador Dalí Society®. All rights reserved
© Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation All Rights to Dalí’s Image, likeness, and works of art.
For more information and pricing contact: Joseph Nuzzolo, 888-888-DALI (3254)

The Immaculate Conception and The Visible Woman

The Immaculate Conception and The Visible Woman

by Peter Lucas

In 1925 Dali returned left the Escuela de Belas Artes in Madrid for a year.  During this time in Figueres, his hometown, he again studied wit his childhood drawing instructor; Professor Joan Nunez of the Municipal School of Drawing. While back with this old teacher he developed a passion for engraving. His father even let him set up a printing press in the family home.

Dali later claimed that during this time back home he became familiar with all the print making techniques and even developed a few of his own. Between 1924 and 1926 he did ten or more paintings and drawings of his sister Ana Maria. In these he was influence by the great portraitists Ingres and Picasso. Sometime in this period he did an etching of a girl’s head in an objective style that was new for him. This may have been his first master etching. Regrettably it has disappeared but in all likelihood first Dali print ever was a portrait of his sister.

In 1930 Dali illustrated THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION with texts by the leaders of the Surrealist Movement Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, one of the greatest modern French poets. Dali print authorities disagree as to whether he reworked with his own hand the plate for a heliograph in this volume. But there is little doubt that this work both exciting and creative as well is Dalinean. Moreover now that it is 82 years old, it is quite rare and therefore very much a great prize for anyone with a passion for Dali graphics. For no one can deny that the image itself arises purely from the creative consciousness as well as subconscious of none other than genius Salvador Dali. Further adding to the work’s value is that only 111 books for which it is the frontispiece were printed.

The same can be said about THE VISIBLE WOMAN illustration of the same year. This work has a number of figures integrated into it. Dali’s being able to create harmony among these several writhing partially and fully human bodies give this work tremendous energy as well as great beauty. We can only marvel at this artist’s imagination when viewing such a work, for which he executed a pen-and-ink drawing. Only 205 copies of the book in which this heliograph appears were printed.

© 2009 The Salvador Dalí Society®. All rights reserved
© Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation All Rights to Dalí’s Image, likeness, and works of art.
For more information and pricing contact: Joseph Nuzzolo, 888-888-DALI (3254)

Surrender of Breda, 1974

Surrender of Breda

Lithograph

Changes in Great Masterpieces

1974

By Paul Chimera

Dali Historian

(Mr. Chimera worked directly with Dali Museum founder Reynolds Morse, as the publicity director of the original Dali Museum when it was located in Beachwood, Ohio)

No artist in history was revered by Salvador Dali more than the Spanish master who painted “Surrender of Breda,” the large masterpiece depicted here, and on which Dali deftly made some eye-fooling, surrealistic changes. That artist was Velasquez, who occupied the number one spot in Dali’s list of his favorite artists, along with such other iconic painters as Vermeer and Raphael – both of whom Dali pays homage to in other graphic works from this “Changes in Great Masterpieces” series.

Scholars often cite “Surrender of Breda” as being one of the most purely Spanish paintings ever created. Salvador Dali agreed. Not only was he profoundly inspired by the genius of his 17^th century precursor, but he was especially moved by his monumental canvas, which hangs in Madrid’s Prado Museum – a place Dali visited often to study the brushwork of the masters.

Remarkably, this single Velasquez picture figures in not one but two important Dali works. The first instance was in Dali’s huge and extraordinarily complex and beautifully painted canvas, “The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus” of 1959. Dali paid homage to the Velasquez painting by borrowing the flags and tall lances in the background of the earlier work and recreating them in the background of “Columbus.”

And, of course, the second instance of “Surrender of Breda’s” influence is in the present lithograph. Notice how Dali cleverly implied the illusion of a tear in the Breda work, down the middle. And then again, showing the same see-through background by virtue of the “hole” in the horse at right.

Below the main image is a small sepia reproduction of “Surrender of Breda,” accompanied by Dali’s sketch of the two main figures from the Velasquez work, one handing the key to the city off to the victor.

What a remarkable piece of Dalinian art, created the same year Dali’s Teatro-Museo Dali (Dali Theatre-Museum) opened in his birth town of Figueras, Spain. A tribute to his favorite artist. Adroit tromp l’ oil (eye-fooling) technique. Whimsical sketching. All coming together as part of what has long been considered one of Dali’s most interesting, inventive and important graphics suites.

© 2009 The Salvador Dalí Society®. All rights reserved
© Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation All Rights to Dalí’s Image, likeness, and works of art.
For more information and pricing contact: Joseph Nuzzolo, 888-888-DALI (3254

Jarre Du Péteur 1971

Jarre Du Péteur

         (From the suite Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel )

1971
70 x 50 cm
Felt pen and gouache on paper

Jarre Du Péteur

by Sabeeha Mirza of The Salvador Dali Society

Salvador Dali’s Le Jarre Du Péteur from the suite Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel is not for the faint of heart. Dali doesn’t just manage to cross the line, but instead leaps over it in this 1971 piece that’s title loosely translates into English as “Jar of Farts”. This felt pen illustration on a wash of gouache was his visual interpretation of the novel (translated to English as): The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua by François Rabelais. This book of tall tales, commonly known as Pantagruel, is chronologically the second volume of a series that follows the outlandish escapades of a family of giants. In 1532, it became the first book to be published by Rabelais under his pen name Alcofribas Nasier, and served as a sequel to the popular book entitled The Great Chronicles of the Great and Enormous Giant Gargantua, which was not credited by any specific author at the time.

In this particular volume, from which Dali’s work was inspired, Rabelais relates the antics of the giant named Pantragruel, the son of the aforementioned Gargantua. The tales of Pantragruel unfold via a series of nonsensical court cases and essays, cataloging the giant’s episodes. In one such episode, Pantragruel befriends a poorly mannered rascal and together they defeat a group of invading giants. The pair then proceed to urinate on the survivors, drowning them. Rabelais’s grotesque sense of humor and wild display of imagination resonated with Dali, because it was here that Dali found the inspiration for the fearlessness he displays in Le Jarre Du Peteur.

Dali’s unorthodox masterpiece Le Jarre Du Peteur brazenly depicts a large, human-like figure’s backside, expelling fumes from its rectum into an anthropomorphic, torch-bearing jar. With one leg bent in the air, the faceless giant’s other leg kneels down on one knee beside the dismembered flexed foot that bears Dali’s signature. The obscenity of the work is amplified by exposed bones protruding from the humongous, hairy legs from which several patches of weeds sprout from. Putrescence spews from the mouth of the disgruntled jar. While the figures are illustrated in black and white, the background is a robin’s egg blue, providing direct contrast to the yellow of the foreground. This sort of illustration on one-dimensional fields of color offers a sense of animation common to storytelling comics. Le Jarre Du Peteur proves that Dali was fearless and unapologetic. Even in the most vile, obscene subject matter—Dali manages to find the sophistication in its humor. When it comes to Dali, nothing is out of bounds.

Includes original Descharnes' letter of authenticity.

888-888-DALI (3254)

310-937-3999

joe@dali.com

© 2016 The Salvador Dalí Society®. All rights reserved
© Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation All Rights to Dalí’s Image, likeness, and works of art.
For more information and pricing contact: Joseph Nuzzolo, 888-888-DALI (3254)

St. George

By Sabeeha Mirza of The Salvador Dali Society

Salvador Dali

St. George

1971
Gouache and Watercolor on Paper (ARCHES)
56 x 40.5 cm

St. George

The late 60s and early 70s brought about a clear fascination with classic themes for Dali. He borrowed subject matter from everything from folkloric stories, Shakespeare, to Renaissance sculpture. More specifically, Dali was drawn to their reference to a singular common figure: the horse. The allure of this great animal in Dali’s eyes comes as no surprise. Historically horses proved to be the vehicle for travel conquest and exploration and thus became a symbol of power and determination. For Dali, horses not only exemplified grace, strength, and beauty but also anatomically were natural representations of perfect form and balance. Similarly, the artists Dali modeled himself after also such as Velazquez, Da Vinci, Delacroix, and Goya had produced painterly studies of horses as well. By painting horses, Dali cleverly included himself in a cultural lineage of great artistry through the common thread of motif. However as the title suggests, Dali takes this shared theme and presents it uniquely– in his own Dalinean fashion.

From 1970 through 1972 Dali created a suite of 25 horse-inspired paintings titled Dalinean Horses. Each of the works referred to a powerful story of heroism or to a prominent artist of influence as represented by a specific horse. One of the more alluring of works is Saint George. Dali had a fascination with the parable of Saint George and the Dragon—a tale adapted from similar narrative of Eastern origin and brought to the West by early Christian Crusaders. Dali had produced several works throughout his career modeled after the story, perhaps sparked by his interest in Gregorian folklore or the religious subtext of the story. Whatever the reason may be, the story of Saint George is a captivating one. As legend had it, a small kingdom had been plagued by a man-eating dragon which was fed a person periodically to satiate its appetite, preventing it from running havoc on the nearby towns. The unfortunate-soul that was offered to the beast was selected by lottery by decree of the king. That was until the lottery fell upon the princess–the king’s only daughter. By happenstance, Saint George was passing by the lake of which the dragon inhabited and spotted the damsel in distress. Saint George fearlessly charged at the beast, bearing merely a holy cross and a single spear, and wounded it. After rescuing the princess from harm’s way, Saint George harnessed the dragon using the princess’s girdle as a leash and led it back to the king. Upon arrival, George swore to kill the dragon and end its reign of terror with one condition: the king and his people must agree to accept the Christian faith, and thus join the legion of “the saved”. The king accepted the terms and thus Saint George secured himself a position as a hero and protector of the faith. It was this demonstrated valor, fortitude, and wit that made Saint George a reoccurring subject throughout Dali’s long career.

Saint George from Salvador Dali’s suite Dalinean Horses is hard to miss. While the story of Saint George was the inspiration of several of Dali’s works, Dali had never shown the protagonist quite like this before. In this rendition of Saint George, the off-primary colors of fuchsia, cerulean blue, yellow jump off of the paper in thick, bold strokes making it one of his most captivating versions yet. Perhaps inspired by the brazen nature of the preceding decade’s Pop Art, or the innovations in Technicolor television, Saint George is sophisticated and bold. Dali had also become a fan of groundbreaking Modernist artists such as William de Kooning and befriended out-of-the box thinkers like Duchamp and Warhol whose influence is evident in this loud, yet precise reduction of form. Dali’s technical emphasis does not lie in the quickness of brushstroke but rather in the deliberate use of color and composition.

It is this change in technical priority that makes this painting of Saint George unlike those of the painting masters. Dali is not necessarily concerned with accuracy of representation but rather with the impression the work leaves on the viewer—a truly modern concept. Also in contrast to other renderings of Saint George is the curious absence of the dragon in this piece. This is an obvious nod to the gravity of the impact of the work’s visual components, which reflects the boldness of the protagonist Saint George himself. This sort of fearless approach is resonated by the powerful stance and form of the horse he sits upon.

One of Dali’s greatest gifts was his ability to latch on to something that inspired him and consistently re-invent these motifs without crossing the line into redundancy. It is no wonder that Saint George became a figure that Dali admired and repeatedly looked to for inspiration. However, it is in his Dalinean Horses version of Saint George that we see true innovation. Its subject matter may be traditional, but much like the artist who produced it, it is in no way conservative.

Agony of Love- Salvador Dali

Salvador Dalí

The Unicorn (The Agony of Love)

1978
Gouache, Watercolor and Pencil on Board

65.5cm by 49cm