Salvador DALI (1904-1989) - Lot 31

Salvador DALI (1904-1989) Moses and Akhenaton, 1974 Gouache, watercolor, ink and Indian ink, etching on heavy paper, watermarked upper left, visible in part "Arches". Signed lower center in felt-tip pen "S. Dalí" in felt-tip pen. 65 x 50.3 cm (irregular) Provenance: -Ariane Lancell Collection, art publisher -Acquired by Madame H. on January 15, 1976 from Ariane Lancell (under the title "Bicéphale" for FF 90,000, copy of invoice enclosed). -In the descendants of Madame H. Bibliography : -Graphic Works, Albert Field, Ed. The Salvador Dali Archives, New York, 1996; p.100. -Moses and Monotheism, 1974 by Sigmund Freud illustrated by S. Dali, Art et Valeur, Paris, Illustrated under no. 75. This is one of the 10 preparatory originals for Sigmund Freud's "Moses and Monotheism". This work contains 10 lithographs after the artist's original gouaches, etchings and drawings. The work is listed under d7813_1974 in the Salvatore Dali Archives. Authentication has been confirmed by Messrs Nicolas and Olivier Descharnes. A certificate may be issued after the sale at the buyer's expense. Moses and Monotheism illustrated by Dali, 1974 Reissued in 1974 by Art et Valeurs in an edition of 250 copies, the book is divided into two parts, one for Freud's text, the other for Dali's plates. It includes 14 woodcut illustrations and 10 color plates on lambskin, each with an intaglio engraving in the center, partly covered by a colored lithograph. The cover is a repoussé metal plate featuring Michelangelo's Moses reinterpreted by Dali. Moses and Akhenaton is one of the preparatory gouaches for Dali's illustration of Freud's book. Freud's thesis in Moses and Monotheism, 1939 Moses and Monotheism is the last of three essays on Jewish identity in which the founder of psychoanalysis examines the origins of monotheism in Egypt. The discovery of the Amarna tablets in 1887 revealed the establishment of monotheism in Egypt, under the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaton. Egyptologists such as the American Breastead (1894) and Weigall (1910) closely associated Akhenaten, who had abolished the entire Egyptian pantheon in favor of a single god, the Sun God Aton, to the biblical story. This thesis, now partially contested, asserts that for the first time in human history, a ruler denounced the opposition between false gods and true God, and attributed Creation to a single God. Dali, Freud and psychoanalysis By the 1920s, Dali had already read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Dali's artistic orientation developed from his deep interest in, and knowledge of, Freudian psychoanalysis. Indeed, it was on the basis of his exploration of the unconscious, and of his own unconscious expressed in pictorial terms, that he founded his contribution to Surrealism. Freud and Dali: Meeting in 1938 "A few years after my last attempt to meet Freud, I dined with some friends in a restaurant in Sens. I was eating my favorite dish - snails - when I spied, over a neighbor's shoulder, a picture of the master on the front page of a newspaper. I immediately picked up a copy announcing Freud's arrival in Paris, in exile, and screamed. I had just discovered Freud's morphological secret. His skull was a snail. All you had to do was remove the brain with a pin. This discovery had a profound influence on the portrait I painted of him a year before his death." Moses and Akhenaton, the preparatory work for the book, 1974 A cross of life surmounts the figures. This is an Egyptian symbol, derived from the hieroglyphic representing the word "ˁnḫ," which means "life". This hieroglyphic character was used by the Egyptians to symbolize life. Like all religious civilizations, they believed that a stay on earth was just a fraction of eternal life. Dali places this symbol (treated in a soft texture) above a bi-morphic figure probably representing Adam and Eve. Their Siamese attachment would symbolize the fact that woman was born from man, Eve from Adam's rib. The Egyptian cross (Life) overlooks the first two creatures of the of the Old Testament. Dali's imagination circumscribes the scene with elements of Creation: a starburst representing the cosmic universe, a fantastic, monstrous animal in the lower left, a vulture symbolizing death. Other symbols from Dali's often nightmarish mythology, taken from his childhood and repeated throughout his work, are also used.