Salvador Dalí

Luc Laniel, Paris (artistic director at Christofle)
Acquired from the family of the above by the present owner

Dalí, Paris, 1957, no. 18, illustrated p. 5
Robert Descharnes & Gilles Néret, Salvador Dalí. The Paintings 1904-1946, Cologne, 1993, vol. I, no. 469, illustrated p. 210 (as dating from 1933 and with incorrect medium)

Le Temple de l'amour is an important study for the design of Dalí’s Dream of Venus pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The gallery owner and early supporter of the Surrealists, Julien Levy, had originally intended to organise the display at the World’s Fair as the successor to Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme held in Paris the previous year. However, since he had difficulty in recruiting artists in Europe, he decided to concentrate on Dalí, whose eccentric antics had already made him the subject of significant media attention in America. Lewis Kachur has described the Dream of Venus as:

‘a giant Surrealist folly containing a grotto with erotic all-female tableaux vivants, some of them staged underwater… an astonishing realization of what Dali had termed the “terrifying and edible beauty” of Surrealist architecture, then unprecedented on American shores. Entered through a spread-leg archway, it contained such features as a ceiling of inverted umbrellas and a new version of the artist's famous Rainy Taxi. Its bulbous, writhing facade, riven with holes and cracks, opposed the polished, streamlined Art Deco architecture of the national and corporate pavilions of the fair's optimistic “World of Tomorrow.”… Limblike forms protruded from a front wall festooned with stylized womanly torsos in plaster and giant two-dimensional figures reproduced from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist (with the face from his Mona Lisa). This anti-machinism referred ultimately to nature, and to biomorphic forerunners like Gaudi’s Casa Mila or the “palace” of Facteur Cheval. Seen at night, the structure became quite spooky’ (Lewis Kachur, “Dalí’s folly”, Art in America, October 2003).

Dalí’s calling card of the melting clock is prominently placed the present work, and it became a central motif of the paintings presented inside the pavilion itself. Of particular note is the artist’s rare use of collage: beyond cut-outs of ferocious fish and shells, these include a Surreal anatomical figure appropriated from a drawing by Picasso, Une anatomie: trois femmes (now in the Musée Picasso, Paris), which Dalí must have removed from the journal Minotaure, where it had been published in 1933 in the first issue, devoted to Picasso (p. 38). Perhaps to transform this figure into a respectable American visitor to the fair, Dalí adds the finishing touch of a bow-tie. Certain elements were in retained for the final façade (fig. 1), such as the woman’s legs in stockings as the entrance, while others, like the fish and flagpoles, were transformed, and still others, removed completely. Most importantly, this work allows the viewer a glimpse into the workings of Dalí’s creative laboratory.

Fig. 1, Eric Schaal, Photograph of the façade of Dalí’s Dream of Venus pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1939