Salvador Dalí

Cécile Eluard, Paris (acquired directly from the artist) 

Lionel Prejger, Paris 

Paul Kantor Gallery, Beverly Hills (acquired from the above in 1968) 

Sylvester Stallone, Beverly Hills (acquired from the above in 1985) 

Waddington Galleries, London 

Private Collection, United States (acquired from the above) 

Sotheby's, London, 29 June 1999, lot 184 (consigned by the above) 

Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)

Sotheby's, New York, 8 May 2002, lot 57 (consigned by the above)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art, Surrealism, 1983, no. 31, illustrated (titled Standing Figure and dated circa 1934)

New York, Arnold Herstand & Co., Surrealism: From Paris to New York, 1990, n.p., illustrated (titled Standing Figure and dated 1934)

Robert Descharnes and Gilles Néret, Salvador Dali, 1904-1989, The Paintings, vol. I, Cologne, 1994, no. 510, p. 227, illustrated in color (titled L’homme aux tiroirs and dated circa 1934)

Executed during the Spanish Civil War, Salvador Dalí’s Personnage aux tiroirs transforms the human figure into an instrument of revelation. The body becomes a site of inquiry, divided, and dissected, its interior life rendered visible through the opening of drawers. Across a field of paper, Dalí stages one of the most enduring metaphors of his career: the human form as architecture of the unconscious.

Created during one of the most intense and productive years of the artist’s career, the work reflects a moment in which Dalí’s imaginative power, symbolic vocabulary, and technical precision reached full synthesis. It came to life in the midst of his formative partnership with Edward James, the poet, patron and visionary collector who did more than anyone to sustain Dalí’s Surrealist production during the 1930s.

The motif of drawers in Dalí’s work finds its origin in a linguistic accident as much as in psychoanalytic thought. During his years in England, the artist was struck by the peculiarly English piece of furniture known as the “chest of drawers”, a phrase whose double meaning delighted his instinct for wordplay. The term “chest” suggested at once the anatomical torso and the domestic cabinet, offering Dalí a bridge between the human body and the object world. From this pun emerged one of his most fertile symbols: the body as a piece of furniture, a container for hidden compartments of memory and desire. The image resonated deeply with his engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis during the mid-1930s, when he sought to visualise the mechanisms of repression and revelation that Freud had identified as the architecture of the mind (see fig. 1). A drawer conceals, yet invites access. It organises, but also hides. When inserted into the body, it becomes an emblem of what Dalí termed “the secret drawers of the human mind.”

Personnage aux tiroirs belongs to the central phase of Dalí’s Surrealist production, describing a figure whose contours are both anatomical and architectural. Each drawer seems perfectly measured, as if the artist sought to balance precision with absurdity. The face, the torso, and the limbs all become sites of hidden memory. Dalí’s draftsmanship is characteristically lucid, maintaining the tension between control and delirium in exquisite equilibrium.

Dalí worked on the drawing at a time of deep personal and political fracture. In 1936, civil war erupted in his native Catalonia, forcing the artist into a form of internal exile that marked his return to Cadaqués with a new perception of the landscape, not as a familiar sanctuary, but as a site of decay, death and metaphysical estrangement. This atmosphere of dislocation seeps into Personnage aux tiroirs where the drawers suggest introspection, retreat, and an archaeology of the self.

o situate the present work within the broader development of Dalí’s imagery, one must recall Study for Spain, from 1936, and Giraffe en Feu, from 1937, two equally charged works executed at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (see figs. 2 and 4). In that composition, the female body becomes a fractured topography, its cavities echoing the dismemberment of the nation. The drawers in Giraffe en Feu punctuate the body of Dalí’s beloved country showing visible signs of a psychic and political trauma. In Personnage aux tiroirs, the violence is internalised and introspective: the drawers suggest not a body riven by history, but one consumed by memory. Works from this period articulate Dalí’s conviction that identity is a constructed space, composed of recesses, compartments, and hidden architectures. Yet where Study for Spain translates this idea onto a collective body, with Spain being torn open by conflict, the present work distills it into a single form. The human subject becomes a symbol for the unstable and endlessly interpretable wider world.

This image of the “drawer-body” reaches its fullest realisation in Dalí’s celebrated sculpture Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs, conceived in 1936. There, the artist reconfigures one of antiquity’s most recognisable icons. The idealised goddess, once the paragon of immutable beauty, is reimagined as a vessel for psychological complexity. Drawers emerge from her smooth marble torso, each adorned with a pompon handle—a witty, almost coquettish subversion of classical purity. Dalí transforms the serene perfection of the Greek original into a meditation on interiority. “The only difference between immortal Greek sculpture and surrealist sculpture,” he remarked, “is that the latter opens up its drawers.”

Seen alongside the Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs, Personnage aux tiroirs can be understood as an essential precursor. The sculpture’s conceptual foundations are laid in this drawing: the same impulse to reveal, to violate the closed surface, to make visible the invisible. Dalí’s fascination with the Venus de Milo carries a wider historical resonance. In appropriating the most canonical image of Western beauty, he positions Surrealism as both heir to and disruptor of classical tradition. The drawers enact a literal deconstruction of ideal form: they expose what academic art had long sought to conceal: the corporeal as psychological terrain. In this sense, Personnage aux tiroirs functions as both homage and critique. It recognizes the continuity of art history while asserting the necessity of its transformation.

There is also a political timbre to Dalí’s treatment of the body in these years. Written in the mid-1930s, his essays reveal a growing preoccupation with the instability of Europe, the eruption of war, and the breakdown of rational order. The human form, fragmented and furnished with drawers, becomes a cipher for a civilization collapsing inward. In the present work, as with other Surrealist objects like Leonor Fini's, Armoire anthropomorphe (see fig. 3), the act of opening a drawer or door may be read as an act of excavation or a search for coherence in an age of disintegration.

In the broader trajectory of Dalí’s career, Personnage aux tiroirs stands as a concise statement of his psychological, linguistic and formal concerns. It embodies the Surrealist belief that art should externalize the interior, but it does so with the intellectual rigor that distinguishes Dalí from his contemporaries. The motif of the drawer would recur throughout his oeuvre, becoming one of his most recognizable symbols (see fig. 4). Personnage aux tiroirs holds its secrets in plain sight, a body that offers itself to scrutiny while guarding its mysteries. In its quiet authority, its poetic wit and conceptual precision, it encapsulates the quality Dalí most admired in art: the power to reveal what had always been hidden.