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Salvador Dalí
Description
- Salvador Dalí
- Nature morte. Invitació a la son (Invitation à dormir), Portrait de Federico García Lorca
- Signed Salvador Dalí and dated 1926 (lower right)
- Oil on canvas
- 39 by 39 in.
- 99.1 by 99.1 cm
Provenance
Private Collection, Japan (acquired by circa 1969)
Thence by descent
Exhibited
Barcelona, Galerie Dalmau, Exposició S. Dalí, 1926-27, no. 17
Okayama, Tenma-ya Gallery, Centenarian of Western Modern Art, 1969
Literature
Rafael Santos Torroella, La miel es más dulce que la sangre: las épocas lorquiana y freudiana de Salvador Dalí, Barcelona, 1984, p. 112
Karin von Maur, Salvador Dalí, 1904-1989, Stuttgart, 1989, no. 43, illustrated p. 51
Daniel Giralt-Miracle, Avantguardes a Catalunya, Barcelona, 1992, p. 306
Fèlix Fanés & Aguer Montserrat, Dalí. Arquitectura, Barcelona, 1996, p. 195
Fèlix Fanés, Salvador Dalí: La construcción de la imagen, 1925-1930, Madrid, 1999, p. 59
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Huellas dalinianas, Madrid, 2004, p. 38
Fèlix Fanés, La Pintura y sus sombras: cuatro estudios sobre Salvador Dalí, Teruel, 2004, p. 20
Condition
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.
Catalogue Note
Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca arrived at the Residencia de Estudiantes, the seat of avant-gardism in Madrid from 1910 to 1936, in the early 1920s. Dalí's education was dotted with expulsions and censure from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, and he often steered clear of the literary cadre over which García Lorca reigned. Still, the two found in each other (and in their compatriot Luis Buñuel) sharp intellectual companionship and rivalry.
Unsurprisingly, the combination of Dalí's precocity and high self-regard produced a seemingly limitless bravado. He had few expectations of his peers, and saw his classmates (and professors) as willing recipients of his genius with little to give in return. It is remarkable, then, that Dalí was dumbstruck, perhaps even intimidated, by García Lorca's intellectual acrobatics at the after-hours literary tables of Madrid. Of these late evenings when García Lorca held court, Dalí recalled: "This was the culminating moment of [Lorca's] irresistible personal influence—and the only moment in my life when I thought I glimpsed the torture that jealousy can be" (Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York, 1942, p. 203).
The present work's title and slumbering subject may refer to an unsettlingly prophetic presentation that García Lorca rehearsed while at home in the Residencia. According to Dalí, García Lorca staged elaborately descriptive performances of his own death. They featured a rigorously ghoulish enactment of bodily decomposition (five days long, by his estimation), a sobering appraisal of his casket's décor, and an extensive recital of the trappings of his funerary procession through Granada. The drama unfolded with García Lorca in bed and his compatriots gathered at his side. At its conclusion, García Lorca unceremoniously shattered the illusion by leaping up, laughing, and brusquely ushering his friends out the door. After this, he slept.
Invitació a la son combines the Surrealist preoccupation with oneiric, symbol-riddled personal psychologies with a spatial sensibility developed by Giorgio de Chirico. Beyond its clear formal and art historical merits, the present work is an important document of an ephemeral friendship—Dalí and García Lorca were closest between 1925 and 1928, and Lorca was assassinated at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936—that provides rare candid access to the tenderness and vulnerability behind the sometimes impenetrably bizarre façade of the Surrealist avant-garde. In his 1942 autobiography, Dalí wrote, "...The personality of García Lorca produced an immense impression on me. The poetic phenomenon in its entirety and 'in the raw' presented itself before me suddenly in flesh and bone, confused, blood-red, viscous and sublime, quivering with a thousand fires of darkness and of subterranean biology like all matter endowed with originality in its own form" (ibid., p. 176).
Fig. 1 A reclining García Lorca. Photograph taken by Dalí's sister Ana Maria in 1925.
Fig. 2 Dalí, García Lorca and Pepin Bello at the Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid in 1923.