Salvador Dalí
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A study for Hymen from Shakespeare's "As you like it"
Signed and dated -48. Watercolour, gouache and indian ink on Fabriano paper 49 x 34 cm.
Provenance
Acquired from Wallin Eriksson Konsthandel (Wallin Eriksson Art), Götaplatsen, Gothenburg, Sweden, in the early 1970's.
Hence by descent to present owner.
More information
M. Nicolas Descharnes and Olivier Descharnes has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work. Archive no. d5296_1948.
Few people have such a unique universe as Salvador Dali were a imaginative mix of madness and technical perfection and accuracy rules. As an artist Dali was a true polymath, he was an artist, a film maker, an author and worked with theater and fashion.
In this piece we meet several of the elements that has been characteristics of Dali, the stilts who bears the body, the cut off perspective with an estrad that goes against the horizon, a distorted body and the threads that holds the entire female figure. The current catalog number is a preliminary study of a costume for a theater set of William Shakespeare's "As you like it" created after Luchino Visconti's request. The figure is Hymen, the matrimonial God. The catalog number touches on important themes that are recurring throughout Dalí's production: the subconscious, the human body and the dream world, which Dalí interprets for us viewers. The year before the work was made, Dali compiled all his "beliefs" in the book "50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship" (1948) where he mixes serious artistic advice, lively anecdotes and insights into the artistic craft. The watercolor reflects several of these.
Artist
Salvador Dalí, was born in 1904 in Spain and died in 1989. He is one of the most popular artists of the 20th century and one of our most noted surrealists. Dalí's early paintings show the influence of Cubism, Pittura Metafisica and novelty. He was also largely inspired by classical masters. In 1927 Dalí came to Paris, and in 1929 he was included in the surrealist group with André Bréton as the leader. Dalí was very much influenced by Freud's paranoid-critical method, which means that everything is interpreted symbolically.
Few people have such a peculiar universe as Salvador Dali, where an imaginative mix of madness performed with technical perfection and accuracy reigns. As an artist, Dalí was a true renaissance-man who worked in art, film, literature, theatre and fashion. All these different strings and his popularity still today show that his art expressed something that no one else could transfer from thought to work.
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