Permanent Collection

The Dalí Museum is home to an unparalleled collection of over 2,400 Salvador Dalí works. See below for select works. The Museum’s nonprofit mission, to care for and share its collection locally and internationally, is grounded by a commitment to education and sustained by a culture of philanthropy. For image requests, please fill out our image request form here.

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Objects

Title: Aphrodisiac Telephone
Other Title: Lobster Telephone | Téléphone aphrodisaque
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: c.1936-38
Materials: Plastic (Bakelite) and painted plaster lobster
Dimensions: Overall 7 in x 12 in x 4 1/2 in
Accession ID Number: 1996.1
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
1996.1
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023.

Description: “The Lobster Telephone” is one of Dalí‘s most surreal and striking creations. By combining an actual working telephone which is made of Bakelite with a plaster of paris lobster as the handset the quintessential technological device becomes dysfunctional and primordial. The Lobster Telephone produced in 1938 is one of nine others previously owned by Edward James, an eccentric and wealthy Englishman, for whose London house it was likely designed. James, a foremost collector of surrealist works was considered to be one of Dalí’s most important patrons and a personal friend. James support during the late 1930’s allowed the artist considerable freedom to produce some of his finest paintings and made possible Dalí’s first trip to Italy.


Title: Venus de Milo with Drawers (and PomPoms)
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: c.1964; Original plaster 1936
Materials: Painted bronze with ermine pompoms
Dimensions: Object 99 cm x 29.5 cm x 31.5 cm
Accession ID Number: 2002.2
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
2002.2
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023.

Description: The most elegant of Dalí’s Surrealist objects is the Venus de Milo with Drawers, inspired by the most famous antiquity at the Paris Louvre, the marble statue of Aphrodite from the 2nd-century BCE, known as the Venus de Milo. As a child, Dalí had made a terracotta copy of the Venus de Milo and recalled: “My first experience as a sculptor gave me an unknown and delicious erotic joy.” In 1936, Dalí created a mold of the Venus de Milo in which he cut six drawers. By perforating the famous Venus, Dalí engages in two of his favorite practices–the defacement of a classic symbol and the contrasting of the animate and inanimate. Dalí was inspired by Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams. The drawers may represent areas of our unconscious which only psychoanalysis is able to open. Referring to the meaning behind the open drawers Dalí stated, “They illustrate a certain complacency in smelling the narcissistic orders emanating from each of our drawers.”


Title: Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically-Gala’s Shoe
Other Title: Objet surréaliste à fonctionnement symbolique- le soulier de Gala
Series Description: Edition 8/8
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: Edition 1973; Original 1931 (lost)
Materials: Assemblage with shoe, white marble, photographs, a glass containing wax, a gibbit, a
matchbox, hair and a wooden scraper.
Dimensions: Overall 19 in x 11 in x 3 11/16 in
Accession ID Number: 2001.4
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
2001.4
Location: Not on view
Copyright: In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023.

Description: In Dalí’s objects, he undermines the familiar nature of such mundane objects as a phone, a shoe, a drawer, or a jacket, by combining them with such provocative items as a lobster, a sugar cube with pubic hair, the Venus de Milo, or a series of shot glasses filled with crème de menthe and dead flies. In each case, Dalí produces an object that is not about artistic beauty, but rather about sexual obsessions and psychological complexes.


Title: Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket (Veston Aphrodisiaque)
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: Replica 1978; Original 1936 (lost)
Materials: 6 fabric parts: Tie with metal collar stud, shirt, jacket, bra, scarf, 1 wood and metal
hanger, 55 liquer glasses with resin inserts.
Dimensions: Overall 13 3/8 in x 9 3/4 in
Accession ID Number: 2007.185
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2007.185
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (ARS), 2023.

Description: In Dalí’s objects, he undermines the familiar nature of such mundane objects as a phone, a shoe, a drawer, or a jacket, by combining them with such provocative items as a lobster, a sugar cube with pubic hair, the Venus de Milo, or a series of shot glasses filled with crème de menthe and dead flies. In each case, Dalí produces an object that is not about artistic beauty, but rather about sexual obsessions and psychological complexes.


Title: Persistence of Memory
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1949
Materials: Pin, sculptured gold with tree set with diamonds. No loss of jewels. 15 stones total.
Dimensions: Overall 7 cm x 6 cm x 1.5 cm
Accession ID Number: 2007.151
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2007.151
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (ARS), 2023.

Description: Created by Eric Ertman and Carlos Alemany in the 40’s from designs by Dalí. Marked
“Copr. Alemany & Eertman Inc./599/14k” on back.





Prints

Title: Lost on the Mountain
Maker: Albrecht Schenck
Date Made: c.1873
Materials: Chromolithograph
Accession ID Number: 2007.100a
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2007.100a
Location: ON VIEW


Series Description: Commercial print by Schenck which appeared in Harpar’s Bazaar in 1942.


Title: Abricot Chevalier (Apricot Knight)
Series: Flordali (Flora Dalinae)
Series Description: 12 photolithographs of original gouaches painted on printed illustrations + original engraving (Matthieu, lithographs)(Rigal, engraving)[embossed] Jean Schneider, Basel. 35 albums on Japon numbered I/XXXV – XXXV/XXXV (with a suite on Auvergne or Rives numbered 1-35) I/CL-CL/CL on Auvergne
#1/200-200/200 on Rives a-e for collaborators on Auvergne or Rives. Several EA on: Arches, Rives, Auvergne or Japon. Signed in Paris.
Pierced plates are owned by Schneider.
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1969
Materials: Photolithograph of original gouache painted on printed illustration and original engraving
Dimensions: Framed 34 1/4 in x 26 1/4 in x 1 1/4 in
Accession ID Number: 2007.1046.2
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2007.1046.2
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (ARS), 2023; Photo © David Deranian, 2023.

Description: 44/200 tirage. The chevalier, or knight, in this botanical transformation is actually part of the engraving that Dalí has added to the original source image. One of the more disturbing images in this suite, here we see the awkward female form of the apricot in the moments immediately prior to an attack by a creature Dalí has fashioned from the blossom and cross-section illustration. It is possible that the smaller creature is looking to the larger one for sustenance, but the inclusion of the lance-bearing knight would seem to indicate that we are seeing a knight coming to the rescue of a damsel in distress. Dalí often creates work with a palpable tension, causing the viewer to take a second look in an attempt to determine what exactly they are seeing.


Title: Drawers of Memory
Series Description: Published by Sidney Lucas, New York. 150 on BFK Rives. I-X on Japon. 2 for copyright. Signed in New York. The Dalí Museum owns 22/150.
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1965
Materials: Original lithograph in black on zinc
Dimensions: Image 25 in x 37 3/4 in
Accession ID Number: 2007.1109
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2007.1109
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (ARS), 2023.

Description: Drawers of Memory is an original lithograph on BFK Rives paper in an edition of 150 printed in 1965. Drawers of Memory is based on the painting “The Anthropomorphic Cabinet,” 1936 in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Dalí’s haunting nude, her body made up of rifled and empty drawers, reclines in the limitless landscape of Dalí’s homeland. The figure’s downcast head portrays the feeling of despair and nothingness for time passed or inner emptiness. The figure, in this print, gestures to a distant angel with a crutch/specter that is absent in the earlier painting. Dalí combines his familiar crutch symbol in this work to represent solemnity in regards to the angelic figure in the distance. Possibly the artists return to this subject in his later years may offer some consolation in obtaining fulfillment to the suffering of the past.


Title: Cancer
Series: Signs of Zodiac
Series Description: Published by Leon Amiel, New York. 250 on Arches (script). I-L on Japon. A/O-O/O. Frontispiece of 12 spatter designs in a circle. XLVII/L.
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1967
Materials: 13 lithographs from original gouaches
Dimensions: Image 25 in x 11 1/2 in
Accession ID Number: 1996.5.4
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of Peter Genovese
1996.5.4
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (ARS), 2023.


Title: Angel of Dada Surrealism
Series: Memories of Surrealism
Series Description: Published by Transworld Art Corp/ A. & E. Rich. Published in porfolio of the same name. The lithographs were executed after collages and overprinted with an etched copperplate reworked in drypoint by Dalí. With text in English. A I/XL – AXL/XL on Japon, AP A I/XXV- A XXV/XXV on Arches, A A – AJ on Japon dedicated by Dali, A-1/175 – A175 -175/175 on Arches. There are portfolio’s in French. Original impressions are stamped “Salvador Dalí 1971.”
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1971
Materials: Etching on color lithograph on paper
Dimensions: Image 20 3/4 in x 16 3/8 in
Accession ID Number: 1992.3.4
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Bequest of the Albert Field
Estate 1992.3.4.
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (ARS), 2023; Photo © David Deranian, 2023.

Description: The Memories of Surrealism suite represents Dalí’s meditation on the historically bound movement and as a timeless source of inspiration. Dalí summarized his feelings regarding his role in the movement by stating, “What is Surrealism?…Surrealism is myself.” It was Allan Rich of Transworld Art who approached Dalí with the idea for the Memories of Surrealism suite. Dalí was intrigued by the theme of memory, which held such a powerful grip of his own career. The suite consists of twelve original etchings on photolithography after the original gouache and collage paintings produced in 1971, fifty years after he had painted the famous “Persistence of Memory,” his most celebrated canvas.


Photographs

Title: Dalí posed with his cane in his museum
Maker: Meliton Casals
Materials: Black and white photograph
Dimensions: Image 14 in x 11 in
Accession ID Number: 1986.84
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
1986.84.
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Meli Casals; Image Rights of Salvador Dalí reserved. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2023.


Title: Dalí’s Portrait, 1961
Maker: Lies Wiegman
Date Made: 1961
Materials: Black and white photograph
Dimensions: Image 16 in x 12 in
Accession ID Number: 2003.4.5
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
2003.4.5
Location: Not on view
Copyright: Photo © Lies Wiegman; Image Rights of Salvador Dalí reserved. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2023.


Title: Dalí’s Moustache (Portrait)
Series Description: 250
Maker: Philippe Halsman
Date Made: 1954
Materials: Photograph
Accession ID Number: 1983.16
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
1983.16
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Halsman Archive; Image Rights of Salvador Dalí reserved. Fundació Gala-Salvador
Dalí, Figueres, 2023.


Title: Portrait of Dalí
Maker: Man Ray
Date Made: 1930
Materials: Black and white photograph
Accession ID Number: 2003.1.3
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
2003.1.3
Location: Not on view
Copyright: Image Rights of Salvador Dalí reserved. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2023.


Title: Salvador Dalí
Series: Horst Vintage Photographs
Maker: Horst
Date Made: 1943
Place Made: America
Materials: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: Image 9 15/16 in x 8 in
Accession ID Number: 2016.4.1
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of the Horst Estate
2016.4.1
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Condé Nast / Horst Estate; Image Rights of Salvador Dalí reserved. Fundació
Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2023.


Works on Paper

Title: Baseball and Ballerina
Other Title: Untitled
Series: Destino
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1947
Materials: Ink and watercolor on paper
Dimensions: Image 15 1/8 in x 19 in
Accession ID Number: 1998.2
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
1998.2
Location: Not on view
Copyright: In the USA © Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023.


Title: Study for “Soft Watch Exploding”
Other Title: Study for Soft Watch Exploding
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1954
Place Made: Spain
Materials: Ink and pencil on paper
Dimensions: Image 5 in x 6 3/4 in
Accession ID Number: 2007.63
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2007.63
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023; Photo ©
David Deranian, 2023.

Description: Following World War II, Dalí returned to Spain. Over the next decade, he redefined his artistic identity, placing distance between himself and the surrealists. He proclaimed that he had become a classicist. In Dalí’s 1951 text, the Mystical Manifesto, he declares himself a “Nuclear Mystical painter” and states that the synthesis of modern science and
religion is the new focus of his work.

Dalí had been influenced by the explosion of the atom bomb at Hiroshima at the end of the war: “The atomic explosion of August 6, 1945, shook me seismically. Thenceforth, the atom was my favorite food for thought. Many of the landscapes painted in this period express the great fear inspired in me by the announcement of that explosion.” His understanding of the effects of the atomic bomb shattered the disquieting yet
timeless landscape of his most popular surrealist work, The Persistence of Memory. In order to demonstrate the difference between the pre- and post-atomic Dalí, the watch becomes the perfect vehicle. Whereas Dalí’s 1931 watches oozed and dripped, signaling the timelessness of the dream state, his new 1954 watches were solid yet brittle substances that could be shattered. In this ink study for the oil painting Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion, the watch no longer melts; it disintegrates into spiraling subatomic particles and rhino horns.


Title: Illustration for “Tres Picos”
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1955
Materials: Watercolor and ink on print
Dimensions: Image 9 3/8 in x 6 1/2 in
Accession ID Number: 2007.116
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2007.116
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
© Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023; Photo ©
David Deranian, 2023.

Description: Dalí was often commissioned by publishers to create illustrations for books. This work may have been a preliminary watercolor but not included as part of the suite of twenty wood engravings produced for The Three-Cornered Hat (Le Tricorne) written by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. The portfolio with images and text was issued in 1959 by the Nouveau Cercle Parisien du Livre in a limited edition. The well-known novella is about a magistrate who becomes infatuated with a miller’s faithful wife and his attempts to seduce her. The story was originally published in 1874 under the title of El sombrero de tres picos. This watercolor was purchased in 1962 from Andre Weil in Paris taped on a board marked “Tres Picos.”

Dalí wrote in 1942 the Total Camouflage of Total War, in which he states ,“The discovery of ‘invisible images’ was certainly my destiny’.” His skill of employing a variety of techniques to create unusual effects in his art is based on his ability in “seeing things differently.” Dalí’s ability to ‘read’ other configurations in illustrations by other artists prompted this interpretation of Tres Picos. Dalí uses a nineteenth century illustration by Du Casse of the Apatura iris (Purple Emperor) butterflies to create a colorful Renaissance man in an elaborate costume. The source engraving titled Nymph de Iris came from the illustrated publication Dictionnaire Pittoresque d’Histoire Naturelle edited by Félix Édouard Guérin-Menneville (1799-1874). Dalí employs his paranoiac-critical method to transform this typical entomological illustration into an entirely new image.

Dalí’s use of the butterfly highlights his appreciation for the insect’s natural beauty and his attraction to it as a symbol of metamorphosis. Analogous to the butterfly the image of the costumed man becomes a configuration of butterflies, larva and plants. The figure holds in his hands the male and female of the species resembling two large fans or masks for a formal masquerade. A caterpillar curls into a leaf to pupate forming the man’s tricorne hat, with another alighting on top to create a plume. A partially revealed man’s face appears under the hat with a curled beard and mustache characteristic of the period. The placements of the flower on which a butterfly perches may represent a phallus symbolizing erotic inferences alluded to in the novella.


Title: Les Fourmis
Other Title: Ants
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: c.1936
Place Made: Spain
Materials: Gouache on tinted paper
Dimensions: Image 25 3/4 in x 19 1/2 in
Accession ID Number: 1980.15
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 1980.15
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023; Photo ©
David Deranian, 2023.

Description: “Ants horrify me. In my work I paint what horrifies me, the demonical, and what exalts me, the angelic.” This gouache presents two clusters of highly stylized ants swarming over two shafts of wheat. Originally designed for a scarf for famous fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, it serves as an example of Salvador Dalí’s emerging popularity and flexibility between high art and commercial design. First exhibited in the 1965 retrospective exposition, Salvador Dalí 1910-1965 at the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art in New York, Les Fourmis is distinctive because it was the only commercial design from the Morse collection chosen to be included with their oil collection at this prestigious exhibit. Schiaparelli created some of the most radical designs in fashion throughout the 1930-40s. Her appreciation of Surrealism led to a productive friendship with Dalí, and marked the beginning of a successful collaborative relationship, beginning in 1936 and continuing through the premiere of Schiaprelli’s perfume Shocking Radiance, in 1943. By the early 1940s, Dalí was already notorious for his work with medium outside of traditional high art, including his designs in fashion and furniture.

With this scarf design, Dalí has refined one of his most unpleasant and darker icons, the ant, a vivid symbol of putrefaction and decay. According to Dalí, his irrational fear of ants began in his early childhood, around the age of six, while visiting family in Cambrils, Spain. In the Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the artist recalls an early morning on his way to the family wash-house where he discovered a bat, still half-alive, bristling with frenzied ants with its tortured little face exposing tiny teeth. This haunting memory and its associations with death and putrefaction informs many of Dalí’s early 1930s paintings, including The Great Masturbator, 1929, The Font, 1930, and The Persistence of Memory, 1931. The ant is also associated with sexual anxiety and impotence. Dalí places these swarming insects in the most uncomfortable of places, transforming them into pubic hair in Combinations, 1931, and they cluster on the mouth of the Medusa figure in The Font, suggesting female genitalia.

Les Fourmis clearly demonstrates Dalí’s success at utilizing even his most outrageous and horrifying images into designs that would appeal to his commercial audience.


Title: Study for “Disappearing Images”
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1939
Place Made: Spain
Materials: Charcoal on paper
Dimensions: Image 19 in x 24 3/4 in
Accession ID Number: 1997.1
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
1997.1
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023; Photo ©
David Deranian, 2023.

Description: This is an important preliminary sketch for “Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages),” one of the key double image paintings in the collection. The Study for ‘Disappearing Imagse’, a 1939 charcoal on paper drawing has particular significance to this collection as it provides insight into Dalí’s creative process, indicating how he would refine ideas before creating a finished oil painting.

As in The Three Ages oil painting, the drawing presents three obscure faces that are formed by distinct features in a village landscape. Using a slanted pencil pattern, Dalí places seated and standing figures within three archways, with a series of smaller arches visible across a street or courtyard. By squinting, these specific details dissolve and merge to form the three faces. For example, the seated women in the central arch facing away from the viewer forms the nose, mustache and mouth of the figure, and the two arches across the way form the face’s eyes. Such a transformation is an excellent example of the “paranoiac-critical method,” where Dalí developed complex, irrational double images with the goal to undermine the viewer’s sense of reality by making the irrational world of the image more believable than the viewer’s real world.

While the structure and technique used to achieve the three disappearing faces is the same as the oil painting, the specific faces are quite different. In the oil painting, an allegorical progression of the three stages of man moves from right-to-left, from infancy to old age. In this earlier study, the specific faces are much less precise, and the order is reversed. An indeterminate face appears on the left, possibly a young man, and here the adolescent in the center appears a bit older and bears a mustache. The face on the right is a skull, which Dalí abandoned in the finished canvas.

Exhibition History: 2023, St. Petersburg, The Dalí Museum, Where Ideas Come from: Dalí’s Drawings


Paintings

Title: Cadaqués
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1923
Place Made: Spain
Materials: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Image 38 in x 50 in
Accession ID Number: 1983.2
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 1983.2
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA © Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023.

Description: Figueres is located inland from the Costa Brava in an area called the Empordà at the foot of the Pyrenees near the French border. The landscape in this region was to be a major influence and inspiration to Dalí throughout his artistic career. The seemingly endless plain that surrounds Figueres, the distant horizon, the white beaches of Rosas, and the rugged cliffs of the Albares Mountains recur in every period of Dalí’s work.

In the summers of Dalí’s youth, the family often retreated to their residence in the nearby coastal town. This is an expansive view of Cadaqués from the rock terraces above the Dalí family home. The dynamic composition of this work about his homeland uses a traditional form to establish the subject’s tranquility. The balloon rising above the landscape and the tiny white sailboat on the expansive bay below create a feeling of lightness and space.

If these seven young women appear similar to one another, it is because Dalí used his sister, Anna Maria (1908–1990), as the model for all of them. She was Dalí’s only sibling and was his primary model in the years before he met his future wife, Gala, in 1929.


Title: Daddy Longlegs of the Evening-Hope!
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1940
Place Made: Bowling Green, Virginia, United States
Materials: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Image 16 in x 20 in
Accession ID Number: 2000.6
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2000.6
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023.

Description: “Daddy Longlegs of the Evening – Hope!” (“Araignée du soir, espoir”) – 1940. (Including: soft aeroplane, vomited by a cannon, ants, victory born of a broken wing, violoncello in white mastic, and an angel who weeps).

Dalí and his wife, Gala, stayed in the United States from 1940 to 1948 due to the war in Europe which drove him and his fellow Surrealists into exile. This was the first painting Dalí completed after coming to America. The victory referred to in the title is the classical sculpture of the winged Nike of Samothrace who emerges shrouded while rising from the limp airplane. The cannon from the deflated plane is reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Philosopher Conquest of 1914.”

An anguished head occupies the center, but here it has become a soft structure infused with sunset colors. The head is metamorphosed into an elastic female figure whose breasts are mimicked by two inkwells (erotic symbols in Dalí’s iconography) which suggest the signing of treaties (and Dalí’s father’s role as a notary). Ants eat away at the figure’s mouth as they do in countless other paintings, indicating the insidious destruction swallowing Europe. The viscous cello and bow suggest that all of Europe’s highest precepts were helpless to prevent the destruction of culture at the hands of a fascist regime. The painting’s title refers to an old French peasant legend: a spider seen in the evening is a symbol of good luck.


Title: Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln-Homage to Rothko (Second Version)
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1976
Materials: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Image 99 1/4 in x 75 1/2 in
Accession ID Number: 2004.1
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
2004.1
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA © Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023; Photo ©
Joseph Siciliano USA, 2016.

Description: “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea…” demonstrates a fascination with perception and the mystery of identity. Dalí layers multiple optical scales to create two paintings in one. This painting is based on a photograph that Dalí first saw in the November, 1973 issue of Scientific American. Vol. 229. No.5.. The article, “The Recognition of Faces” by Leon D. Harmon, featured a reproduced low resolution (252 pixels) monochromatic photograph of the face of Abraham Lincoln from an American $5 bill. Harmon’s computer generated “coarse–scale” portrait demonstrated the low quantity of information needed to represent a recognizable individual face. The concept awaked Dalί’s old fascination with paranoia–specifically, how much of the reading of an image is from the viewer as distinct from the thing viewed. By squinting slightly and so flattening the depth of field, the portrait of Lincoln snaps into view displacing the figure of Gala. Once seen, the image appears at each return.

Gala’s figure is framed by the cruciform windows through which the viewer is lead to a crucifixion painted in a heavy impasto. The figure of Jesus on the cross, reminiscent of Dalí’s 1951 painting titled “Christ of St. John of the Cross,” (Glasgow, Scotland), appears in the clouds. The earlier painting by Dalí is inspired by a 16th century drawing by the Carmelite Friar St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) where Christ is viewed from above. The top of Christ’s head glows representing the rising morning sun, a new element Dalί created as he developed this work on canvas. Yet, in spite of the masterful and expressive use of paint, Dalί plays with the ambiguity of medium. The ironic use of paint to recreate the effects of photography on one level is made more resonant by the collage of small printed reproduction of the Harmon photo onto the canvas.

Dalí titles the work Homage to Mark Rothko (1903-1970) – a leading abstract expressionist painter who had committed suicide in 1970. Early in his career, Rothko experimented with automatic drawing and surrealist techniques. He studied the writings of Freud as did Dalí. By the 1940s, Rothko abandoned all references to the figurative and painted using simplified shapes, color gradations and value relationships. Dalí’s multiple blocks of colors in varying progression of hues ending in a dark perimeter is evocative of the meditative “color field” paintings of Rothko.

Dalí spent many years living between Spain and the United States and considered America his second home. Dalí painted this work in his room at the St. Régis Hotel in New York. As well as homage to an American painter, the painting is homage to America itself, created in the nation that gave him refuge during the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War and World War II in Europe.


Title: The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1952-54
Materials: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Image 10 in x 13 in
Accession ID Number: 2007.10
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2007.10
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023.

Description: The reappearance of the inspirational rock formation at the Bay of Cullero and the forlorn olive tree links this composition back to the original painting. In contrast to his 1931 “Persistence of Memory,” the 1952-54 “Disintegration” shows the world altered by the nuclear age. The rectangular blocks represent the “atomic power source,” and the form of the head of the Great Masturbator is depicted in a fluid manner. The addition to the original painting of the missile-like objects flying in the background connects the work more clearly to the atomic bomb, yet the form is actually a rhino horn. Dalí found the rhino horn to be a symbol of absolute perfection, and referred to this phase of his career in the early 1950s as his “rhinocerotic” period.

In The Secret Life, Dalí wrote about the original Persistence of Memory: “I was about to turn out the light when instantaneously I saw the solution. I saw two soft watches, one of them hanging lamentably on the branch of the olive tree.” After seeing the work that Dalí completed in an afternoon, Gala commented, “No one can forget the image once he as seen it.”


Title: The Hallucinogenic Toreador
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1969-70
Materials: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Image 157 in x 118 in
Accession ID Number: 2000.22
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2000.22
Location: ON VIEW
Copyright: In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights
©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023; Photo © Doug Sperling and David Deranian, 2021.


Illustrations

Title: Alice Frontispiece
Series: Alice in Wonderland
Series Description: The Alice in Wonderland portfolio contains a frontispiece which includes one etching printed at the Atelier Rigal and twelve illustrations printed by M. Nourisson with the remarques printed also at Atelier Rigal. The 2,500 portfolios, numbered 1 – 2,500, are printed on Mandeure paper. Each portfolio is signed in the frontispiece by Dali. A deluxe edition of 200 portfolios, numbered I to CC, were printed on Rives paper. This version features a second suite, printed on Japon Nacre, of the twelve illustrations. A few portfolios of each edition are the property of the artist. Cancelled plates owned by Schneider, remarques are destroyed. The text is from the works of Lewis Carroll. 1927/2500.
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1969
Materials: Etching + color on paper
Dimensions: Image 15 1/4 in x 10 in
Accession ID Number: 1989.2.1
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Bequest of the Albert Field
Estate 1989.2.1
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (ARS), 2023

Description: The combination of Dali’s illustrations, with their vibrant colors and exotic imagery, and Lewis Carroll’s magical story has made Alice in Wonderland one of Dali’s most popular and well-known book illustrations. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) was the English mathematician and photographer who is best known as the author of two highly celebrated stories of fantasy; Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. One of Carroll’s favorite pastimes was to devise games and puzzles for children, and Alice was written in 1865 for the entertainment of a young girl names Alice Liddell. In this story, Carroll excelled at using inverted logic, satire, parody and suggestive symbolism to create the fabric of his fantasy.

It has often been pointed out that such a superb book of nonsense could only have been written by a person with great skill as a mathematician and logician. Carroll’s story concerns the adventures of a young girl named Alice who spies a rabbit consulting a timepiece and follows him down a rabbit hole into a world of endless magic and strangeness. She embarks upon a series of adventures in this most curious new world where liquid from a bottle marked “drink me” can make one small, while a bite of cake marked “eat me” can make one grow like an unfolding telescope. It is the topsy-turvy world of ordered nonsense that Dali captures in his vibrant illustrations to the book. Some of the key figures in these tales, such as the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Queen of Hearts have all become popular figures of fantasy. Many of them are portrayed in Dali’s illustrations. One of the main characters in the suite is Alice herself. Throughout the suite Dali uses the image of “the girl skipping rope” as the symbol for Alice. This girl appears as Alice on the frontispiece and is repeated in details on the remaining twelve illustrations. The girl skipping rope has been a haunting figure throughout Dali’s career, appearing first in the 1930s. Dali probably derived this girl from Giorgio De Chirico’s 1914 painting Mystery and Melancholy of a Street where a girl playing with a hoop is heading into an ominous deserted street towards an empty box car.

Dali’s girl skipping rope presents a further enigma which can be seen in his 1936 painting Suburbs of a Paranoiac Critical Town. Here her shape is the same as the bell tower in the building behind her. She plays innocently in the landscape, oblivious to the threat suggested by the hallucinatory similarity between her shape and the shape of the inanimate bell tower. Her innocence is made all the more apparent by the strangeness of the world around her. Several works in the Dali Museum collection repeat this figure, including the paintings Morphological Echo from 1936 and Anthropomorphic Echo from 1937, and the drawing The Nostalgic Echo from 1935. What better symbol for Alice than the girl skipping rope. She represents the same concept that Alice does—innocence running obviously through a strange world.


Title: And the bound body of Jesus in linen cloths with the spices
Series: Biblia Sacra (Sacred Bible)
Series Description: Salvador Dalí first met Doctors Giuseppe and Mara Albaretto – and their daughter Cristiana – at his home in Port Lligat in 1956. Educated by the Catholic Salesian Order and maintaining involvement with their educational publishing enterprises, Giuseppe was a passionate Catholic and had a great faith and devotion to the Church that he desired to share with others. After establishing a friendship
with the artist over the course of several years, Albaretto commissioned Dalí to create one-hundred paintings based upon specific passages selected from the Latin Vulgate Bible.

The results of the Albaretto commission grew to one-hundred and five pieces that were completed
between 1963 and 1964. The original illustrations were completed with a combination of gouache,
watercolor, ink and pastel.

Publisher: Rizzoli, Rome; TIRAGE: I-CXCIX “Magni Luxus”. 1-1499 on “Luxus”. The molds of Dalí’s hand listed in the colophon were not made. The books and prints are not signed. The text is Vulgate on laid paper with Dalí signature in watermark. The Dali Museum’s deluxe edition is 225/1499.
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1969
Materials: Lithograph
Dimensions: Paper 19 in x 13 3/4 in
Accession ID Number: 2007.1437.1.50
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2007.1437.1.50
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (ARS), 2023

Description: Volume III. Albaretto Collection information Latin / English verse = all from New International Version, except Tobit and Judith (Revised Standard Edition) and Bible verses from: The Jerusalem Bible, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York. 1970.

Et ligaverunt corpus Iesu linteis cum aromatibus / And they bound the body of Jesus in linen cloths with the spices

John 19: 39-42
He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.


Title: Yin and Yang
Series: Alchemy of the Philosophers
Series Description: Published by Art et Valeur, Paris. Signed in Paris. 1/225 – 225/225 on parchment, text in English and French.
1 1T/50-50 1T/50 on parchment, text in Italian and French. H.C. 1-30 on parchment.
EA I – EA XXX on paper The text, boxed in 2 sections, consists of replicas of ancient documents with translations plus 6 serigraphs of Dalí drawings. The book is comprised of 10 original prints created on parchment by Dalí along with a collection of writings by alchemists who lived between the second and 17th century. The Dalí Museum owns H.C. 17/30.
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1976
Materials: Drypoint etchings with lithography and silkscreen parchment
Dimensions: Image 76 cm x 56 cm
Accession ID Number: 1990.16.5
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Dalí Museum purchase
1990.16.5
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (ARS), 2023; Photo © David Deranian, 2020.

Description: This artist book is comprised of ten original prints created on parchment by Dalí along with a collection of writings by alchemists who lived between the second and seventeenth centuries. The Alchemy of the Philosophers required four years of production to complete. A moveable wheel containing mercury (absent from our copy) adorns the leather and parchment casing. Dalí originally conceived this ornamentation after the theme of Roues Combinatoires (Combinative Wheels), by the great Catalan philosopher Ramon Llull. Llull’s system was comprised of a set of tables and moveable discs that combined various Christian doctrines with logical principles in order to teach the truths of Christian faith to other cultures

Alchemy, the forerunner of modern chemistry, is an ancient art with unknown beginnings that sought to transform base metals into silver and gold. Over the centuries, alchemy became more of a symbolic process as it combined with mysticism to materialize spiritual truths. The six realms of alchemy are represented in a selection of texts ranging from early Chinese to the most important texts of Indian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and medieval alchemy. The ten prints Dalí created are on special hand-finished lambskin. The various plates combine the three distinct printing processes of lithography, serigraphy, and dry point engraving. These prints are colored and decorated with precious and semi-precious stones.


Title: The Queen’s Croquet Ground
Series: Alice in Wonderland
Series Description: The Alice in Wonderland portfolio contains a frontispiece which includes one etching printed at the Atelier Rigal and twelve illustrations printed by M. Nourisson with the remarques printed also at Atelier Rigal. The 2,500 portfolios, numbered 1 – 2,500, are printed on Mandeure paper. Each portfolio is signed in the frontispiece by Dali. A deluxe edition of 200 portfolios, numbered I to CC, were printed on Rives paper. This version features a second suite, printed on Japon Nacre, of the twelve illustrations. A few portfolios of each edition are the property of the artist. Cancelled plates owned by Schneider, remarques are destroyed. The text is from the works of Lewis Carroll. The Dali Museum owns edition number CXXIX of the deluxe edition.
Maker: Salvador Dalí
Date Made: 1969
Materials: Heliogravure with remarque
Dimensions: Image 15 5/8 in x 10 1/2 in
Accession ID Number: 1989.2.9
Credit Line: Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Bequest of the Albert Field
Estate 1989.2.9
Location: Not on view
Copyright: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (ARS), 2023.