Salvador Dalí

Danenberg-Beilin, Inc., New York

Acquired from the above on 8 December 1975 by the present owner

London, Hayward Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, 1978, no. 12.31, p. 300, illustrated

Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Salvador Dalí: rétrospective, 1920-1980, 1979-80, no. 270, p. 326, illustrated in color

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, vol. II, no. 394, p. 466, illustrated in color

New York, The National Academy Museum and Phoenix Art Museum, Surrealism USA, 2005, pl. 35, p. 100, illustrated in color; p. 186 (New York only)

Salvador Dalí, "The American City Night-and-Day," The American Weekly, 31 March 1935, p. 5, illustrated

Salvador Dalí, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, New York, 1976, p. 294

Conroy Maddox, Dali, New York, 1979, p. 80

Exh. Cat., Schloss Heidelberg, Salvador Dali: Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Objekte, Skulpturen, 1981, p. 67

Salvador Dalí, 400 obres de 1914 a 1983, vol. II, Madrid, 1983, pp. 105 and 268 

Eduard Fornés, Dali and his books, Barcelona, 1987, p. 40 

Robert Descharnes, Salvador Dalí: The Work, the Man, New York, 1989, p. 155, illustrated (in The American Weekly)

Meredith Etherington-Smith, The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dalí, New York, 1995, pp. 207 and 256

Juan Antonio Ramírez, Dalí: Lo crudo y lo podrido, Madrid, 2002, fig. 32, p. 59, illustrated 

Michel Nuridsany, Dalí, Paris, 2004, p. 320 

Nina Schleif, Schaufenster Kunst: Berlin und New York, Cologne, 2004, p. 177

Exh. Cat., Venice, Palazzo Grassi and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dalí: The Centenary Retrospective, 2004-05, pp. 240, 489 and 572

Exh. Cat., Barcelona, Departamento de Cultura, Dalí: afinidades electivas, 2004, p. 439

Exh. Cat., Barcelona, CaixaForum; Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; St. Petersburg, Salvador Dalí Museum (and traveling), Dalí. Cultura de Masses, p. 194 and 282; p. 199, illustrated in color (in The American Weekly)

Elliott King, Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema, Harpenden, 2007, p. 56

Darío Villanueva, Imágenes de la ciudad: Poesía y cine, de Whitman a Lorca, Valladolid, 2008 

Miguel Cabañas Bravo, Amelia López-Yarto Elizalde and Wifredo Rincón Garcia, eds., El arte y el viaje, Madrid, 2011, p. 117; p. 118, illustrated (in The American Weekly)

In November 1934, Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala arrived in New York for the first time, traveling there on the occasion of the artist’s second exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery. The show was a resounding success, both critically and commercially, just as his debut exhibition at the gallery had been the previous year.

Shortly after his arrival in New York, Dalí was commissioned by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to create illustrations for one of his publications, The American Weekly. Dalí published seven illustrated articles between December 1934 and July 1935, and would continue to provide illustrations through 1938, a record of his impressions of daily life in the United States. La Ville is the original drawing for an illustration published in the 31 March 1935 edition of the paper, accompanying an article by Dalí titled “The American City Night-and-Day.” His satirical captions describe New Yorkers as “phantoms that haunt Wall Street on Sunday afternoon, embodying the anguish of the locality,” and “belated loiterers of the city and their suppressed desires retiring into a dream hand.” The characters who feature within these vignettes appear to be conceived as the manifestation of stereotypes—the denizens of the city as Dalí both perceives and imagines them to be, enacting a critique of underlying social structures which is at once satirical and exactingly sharp.

In this drawing, La Ville is unmistakably New York City at once alien and eerily remote, yet strangely familiar and somehow universal. The city is rendered as a kind of a utopian metropolis, an imagined space that both reflects and transcends the real. When considered in the context of the economic and political conditions in America in 1935—six years after the stock market crashed on “Black Thursday,” and just two years after reaching the highest recorded unemployment rate of the decade-long Great Depression—one can imagine why audiences to The American Weekly were enthralled by the escapism of Dalí’s vision. The spiral tower on the right resembles the tower which Vladimir Tatlin conceived in 1920 for his unrealized Monument to the Third International—a project which posited architecture as a symbolic corollary to the emerging conditions of modern life. Dalí, however, reimagines Tatlin’s Constructivist form through his own biomorphic lens. The result is a world governed by a kind of centripetal force where the speed and urgency of urban life begin to warp the architecture itself. Cars race up a spiral roadway that leads ambiguously into the structure at left, a violin and disembodied hand stretch upward, as if pulled by some unseen force, two figures appear truncated by the world they inhabit. Together, these elements give visual form to the psychological pressures Dalí encountered upon arriving in New York.

Beyond the psychological escape from the reality of daily life which Dalí’s illustrations offered to their American readers, they likewise offered an antipode to the way in which modern life was represented by American painters. In the years directly preceding the Great Depression, the prevailing aesthetic and stylistic concern among American modernists was the architecture of industry and machines which had come to characterize the landscape of the United States. In photography as in painting, radical strides were taken in abstracting the architecture of the metropolitan world, a means for both extolling and seeing anew the construction of the city itself. There was admiration for the infrastructure of the city, but one which was faithful to the rectilinear architecture of its construction. Walker Evans distorted the landscape of New York through unconventional sight lines and exaggerated perspective, both prompting and enabling his viewer to see the world around them from a point of view they might not think to adopt. The contemporaneous work of Charles Sheeler and the broader cohort of Precisionists took a positivist outlook on the experience of life within the modern condition. As the 1930s progressed, the focus shifted away from the architecture of the industrialized world to the people who inhabited it. Social Realism and its concern for the harsh, albeit stylized, reality of daily life came to replace the almost sublime approach to the American landscape which had characterized the preceding decade. It was against this worldview that Dalí offered his own vision, making the pivotal transgression of the dialectic between figure and their surroundings to reimagine them as a composite.

The personification of the landscape, or perhaps conversely the edification of its protagonists, placed La Ville, though a world apart, firmly within the language of Dalí’s concurrent investigations in paint. The year prior, in 1934, the artist articulated his seminal notion of paranoiac-critical activity, what he defined as the “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena” (quoted in Robert Descharnes, Salvador Dalí, New York 1976, p. 32). But whereas in his idiosyncratic Surrealist dreamscapes, the world which was depicted as a result of this paranoiac-critical activity appeared to be tangential to yet decisively apart from lived reality, here Dalí works with an explicit and legible reference to a specific place, New York, made strange.

This anthropomorphizing impulse was an instrumental tactic within the Surrealist repertoire at large. Dalí’s precise, controlled draftsmanship sets his work apart within the Surrealist tradition of blending human and architectural forms. Unlike Max Ernst or Kay Sage—whose processes distance the artist’s hand from the final image—Dalí’s drawing feels like a direct, intentional translation of his inner vision. This clarity and control make his anthropomorphized forms especially haunting and psychologically intense.

At the center of La Ville are the two figures borrowed from Jean-François Millet’s L'Angélus: a man and a woman, heads bent in benediction, who have put down their tools of work to pray. The painting became something of a gospel for Dalí, who, particularly during the years between 1930 and 1934, returned to its imagery. Within La Ville, the two figures are reimagined as skyscrapers. Dalí uses the figures’ prayerful pose to communicate an erotic frisson he perceived between the architecture of the city and its inhabitants. By physically merging the human form with the built environment, Dalí reimagines the paradigm of devotion to a different altar—one rooted in urban desire rather than Millet’s spiritual reverence.