Salvador Dalí

The Marx Brothers
J.M. Tessone, New York, by 1989

Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie & Zurich, Kunsthaus, Salvador Dalí, 1904-1989, Retrospektive, 1989-90, no. 42, illustrated in the catalogue
Atlanta, Michael C. Carlos Museum, From Gaudi to Tàpies: Catalan Masters of the 20th Century, 1996, illustrated in the catalogue
Barcelona, Fundació Caixa Catalunya, Dalí Architecture, 1996, no. 17, illustrated in the catalogue
Rio de Janeiro, Museu Nacional de Belas Arte, Dalí Monumental, 1998
Huntington, New York, Heckscher Museum of Art, Aaron Copland's America, 2001, illustrated in the catalogue
Rio de Janeiro, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Surrealism, 2001
Barcelona, Fundació la Caixa - Caixaforum & Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Dalí. Mass Culture, 2004, no. 123, illustrated in the catalogue
London, Tate Modern; Los Angeles, Los Angleles County Museum of Art; St. Petersburg, FL, Salvador Dalí Museum & New York, Museum of Modern Art, Dalí and Film, 2007-08, illustrated in the catalogue

Pierre Théberge, Salvador Dalí (exhibition catalogue), Montreal, 1990, no. 42, illustrated p. 97
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, It's all Dalí (exhibition catalogue), Rotterdam, 2005, illustrated p. 140

The work is laid down to an old cardboard mount. The mount has buckled a bit. There are numerous horizontal and vertical rubs resulting in lines where the pigment has been reduced, a few of these lines are creases (probably a result of the piece being laid down to the board). There are no apparent tears or paper losses. Prepared by Paper Conservation Studio, Inc. 1841 Broadway, Room 604 New York, NY 10023 phone 212-315-2828 fax 212--315-2622 alan@paperconservationstudio.com
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In 1932, Dalí lauded the Marx Brothers, placing them, "at the summit of the evolution of comic cinema" (quoted in Michael R. Taylor, "Giraffes on Horseback Salad", Dalí and Film, New York, 2007, p. 140), and professed that their lunatic brand of comedy was directly akin to the Surrealist ethos. A lifelong cinema fanatic and frequent dabbler in film, Dalí yearned to work with Harpo Marx, his favorite of the troupe, who he described as, "the one with the curly hair, whose face is that of persuasive and triumphant madness" (quoted in M. Taylor, op. cit., p. 142). The two met in 1936 and became fast friends, with Dalí travelling to Los Angeles in 1937 to create a portrait of Harpo (Fig. 1) and bringing with him the beginnings of a script.

The present work was executed as a scenario sketch for this proposed film, set to be titled Giraffes on Horseback Salad. The basic plot revolved around, "a character called Jimmy, a thinly veiled self-portrait of the artist as a young Spanish aristocrat and businessman, who is forced to live in exile in the United States as a result of the catastrophic civil war then ravaging his homeland. Bored by his stuck-up fiancée Linda, who represents 'the world of convention', Jimmy falls in love with the mysterious and immensely wealthy Surrealist Woman, who personifies the 'world of fantasy, dreams and the imagination.' Her friends are the Marx Brothers, Harpo...Groucho, and occasionally Chico..." (M. Taylor, op. cit., p. 146).

In the carefully composed scenario of Le Piano Surréaliste, Jimmy passionately embraces the Surrealist Woman on the bank of a shimmering pond, fed by the spring of the surrealist piano. A single cypress tree erupts from its center, leading the viewer's eye upwards to a vast clearing that recedes toward a distant horizon, while a clock-faced female nude stands sentry. The Surrealist Woman's face is intentionally obscured by an arching Jimmy, as per Dalí's stage direction that the character be "photographed from behind or in circumstances where the face is hidden, in order to increase the enigmatic atmosphere of her personality" (quoted in M. Taylor, op. cit., p. 148).

In a 1937 letter to Harpo, Dalí enthusiastically declared that the film's "sensational scenario made expressly for your genius, with extraordinary decorations and a very lyrical music, like Cole Porter's, would be something hallucinatory which in addition to amusing us could make a successful revolution in the cinema" (quoted in M. Taylor, op. cit., p. 149). Sadly, like so many of Dalí's film projects, Giraffes on Horseback Salad was never completed. Indeed, all that remains of the brief collaboration between two of the most provocative and eccentric minds of the 20^th century is some 80 pages of manuscript and roughly a dozen drawings, of which Le Piano Surréaliste is perhaps the most strikingly composed, psychologically challenging example.

Fig. 1  Salvador Dalí sketching Harpo Marx