Salvador Dalí

Klaus Hegewisch, Hamburg
Vivian Horan Fine Art, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

London, Tate Gallery, Salvador Dalí, 1980, no. 47
Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie & Zurich, Kunsthaus, Salvador Dalí 1904-1989, 1989, no. 92, illustrated in the catalogue

Robert Descharnes, Dalí, L'œuvre et l'homme, Lausanne, 1984, illustrated p. 154
Steingrim Laursen (ed.), Louisiana Revy,  vol. 30, December 1989, no. 97, illustrated p. 36
Karin von Maur, Salvador Dalí 1904-1989, Stuttgart, 1989, no. 92, illustrated p. 121
Salvador Dalí y Federico García Lorca. La persistancia de la memoria (exhibition catalogue), Museu d'Història de Catalunya, 2004-05, fig. 9, illustrated p. 128

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, attached to the mount on the reverse of all four corners, floating in the mount. Apart from a slight scuff towards the centre right edge and some slight handling marks mainly to the extreme right edge, this work is in very good original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the paper tone is slightly brighter in the original.
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Bureaucrate et machine à coudre is an exquisite exploration of the most important sources of inspiration in Surrealist art. The present work was used as the frontispiece to Salvador Dalí's illustrated edition of Les Chants de Maladoror by the Comte de Lautréamont (the nom-de-plume of the poet Isidore Ducasse) commissioned by Albert Skira. In discussing the present work Karin von Maur quotes the fantastical verse Ducasse composed: 'the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!' (K. von Maur, op. cit., p. 121). Von Maur states that this line became the dictum of the Surrealist group, suggesting that Andre Breton encouraged his fellow artist's to look upon Ducasse's example as the way of subverting the reality whilst connecting with the subconscious. Bureaucrate et machine à coudre is a sumptuous visualisation of Ducasses' words, one in which Dalí utilises an extraordinary variety of imagery, each element of which is presented in a excitingly subverted manner.  The reconfiguration of words and images essential meanings and associations became the preminant aesthetic device for the Surrealist artists.

In the present work Dalí has employed an intricate and highly precise style of drawing to incorporates three distinct subjects within the heterogeneous whole of the composition. The 'russian general or philosopher' (K. von Maur, op. cit., p. 121) is a key element of his work in the early 1930s. The alien appearance of the lobster is used to pitch the image above reality, a device he used in a painting from 1933, Gala et l'Angélus de Millet précédant l'arrivée imminente de l'anamorphose coniques. The Sewing machine in the foreground is a direct reference to Ducasse and commonly used by Dalí as a sexual innuendo. The horse later featured in the atmospheric masterpiece Le Devenir géologique (fig. 2). The works that Dalí produced when inspired by Les Chants des Maladoror garnered great praise and attention, Ian Gibson quotes the critic Magí A. Cassanyes who described them as 'seismographic documents' of such implacable honesty and power that only a man of the greatest moral and artistic integrity could be capable of executing them. And that man was Salvador Dalí' (I. Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali, London, 1997, p. 327)

Fig. 1, Salvador Dalí, Téléphone - Homard, 1936, plastic, painted plaster and mixed media, Tate gallery, London

Fig. 2, Salvador Dalí, Gala et l'Angélus de Millet précédant l'arrivée imminente de l'anamorphose coniques, 1933, oil on panel, National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa

Fig. 3, Salvador Dalí, Le Devenir géologique, 1933, oil on panel, Private Collection