[Plate 5] from Les chants de Maldoror

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[Plate 5] from Les chants de Maldoror

Artist Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1989)

Author Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) (French, 1847-1870)

Publisher Albert Skira (Paris, 1934)

Printer etchings: Roger Lacourière, Paris; text: Philippe Gonin, Paris

Date1934

DimensionsSheet (untrimmed): 13 × 9 13/16 in. (330 × 250mm)
Image: 11 3/4 × 7 1/4 in. (298 × 184mm)

MediumEtching Paper: Arches cream wove, watermarked

ClassificationPrints

Credit LineGift of Molly and Walter Bareiss

Object number

1984.367F

Not on View

Exhibition HistoryToledo Museum of Art, The Bareiss Collection of Modern Illustrated Books from Toulouse-Lautrec to Kiefer, 1985, no. 16

Splendid Pages: The Molly and Walter Bareiss Collection of Modern Illustrated Books, Feb. 14--May 11, 2003, p. 45-46, fig. 32, p. 46

Between the Wars; Sept. 5 2008 through Dec.31 2008.

Comparative ReferencesSee also Castleman, Riva. A Century of Artists Books, New York, 1994, p. 94, repr.

cf. Garvey, Eleanor M., The Artist & the Book, 1860-1960, Boston, 1961, no. 67

cf. Hogben, Carol, Rowan Watson, editors. From Manet to Hockney: Modern Artists’ Illustrated Books, London, 1985, no. 99 reprs.

cf. Hallmark Gallery. Albert Skira: The Man and His Work, New York, 1966

cf. Wheeler, Monroe. Modern Painters and Sculptors as Illustrators, New York, 1946, p. 99

cf. Strachan, W. J. The Artist and the Book in France; The 20th Century livre d'artiste, New York, 1969, p. 329

cf. Johnson, Robert Flynn. Artists' Books in the Modern Era 1870--2000: The Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books, San Francisco, 2001, no. 106.

Label TextA prototype of Surrealist literature, LES CHANTS DE MALODOR, a macabre and hallucinatory narrative prose poem, was first published in 1868-69. This was Dali's first major work of original book illustration. Les Chants de Maldoror by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont, a macabre and hallucinatory prose-poem of violence, cruelty, and perversion first published in 1869, was a text much revered by the Surrealists. Salvador Dalí, for his commissioned etchings, recycled motifs from his paintings and drawings – soft watches, decaying flesh, eroticized bodies, knives, bones, crutches, pedestals – and exploited his deep knowledge of Freudian symbols to create vivid visions of putrefaction, cannibalism, death, castration, and fetishized sex.