Objet Surréaliste à fonctionnement symbolique - Le soulier de Gala

Details

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Objet Surréaliste à fonctionnement symbolique - Le soulier de Gala
assemblage with a shoe, white marble, photographs, a glass containing wax, a gibbet, a matchbox, hair, and a wooden scraper
19 x 11 x 5½in. (48 x 28 x 14cm.)
Conceived in 1931 and executed in 1973, in an edition of eight plus four artist proofs, each slightly different, by Max Clarac Sérou under the supervision of Salvador Dalí.

Provenance

Galerie du Dragon, (Max Clarac-Sérou), Paris.

Literature

W.S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, New York, s.d., p.269 (the original sculpture illustrated p. 253).
Exh. Cat., Le surréalisme au service de la révolution, Paris 1931, p. 17 (another example illustrated).
Ed. Editions surréalistes, La conquète de l'irrationel par Salvador Dali, Paris 1935.
Exh. cat., Dictonnaire abrégé du Surréalime. Exposition internationale su Surréalisme, Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1938, p. 45 (the original sculpture illustrated).
A. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Paris, 1965.
J. Corti, Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme, 1969, p. 45 (another example illustrated).
Louisiana Revy, Salvador Dali, Humbleback, 14, no. 1, October 1973, p. 16 (another example illustrated).
Exh. cat., Dada and Surrealism reviewed, Hayward Gallery, London, 1978, p. 267, no. 115 (another example illustrated).
Exh. cat., L'object Surréaliste, Galerie du Dragon, Paris, 1979. Exh. cat., Salvador Dalí rétrospective, 1920-1980, Centre George Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, 1979-1980, p. 219 (another example illustrated).
Exh. cat., Rétrospective Dalí, Iseta Museum of art, Tokyo, Dalmaru Museum, Osaka, Prefectural Museum, Hiroshima, 1982, p. 71 (another example illustrated).
R. Descharnes, Dalí, the Work, the Man, New York 1984, p. 151 (another example illustrated).
Louisiana Revy, Salvador Dali, Humbleback, 30, no. 2, December 1989, cat. 85 (another example illustrated).
R. Descharnes and G. Neret, Salvador Dalí The Paintings, Vol. I, New York 1994, p. 180 (another example illustrated).
Ed. A. Sheldon, Fetishism. Visualising Power and Desire, London 1995, p. 74 (another example illustrated).
H. Finkelstein, Salvador Dalí's Art and Writing, 1927-1942. The Metamorphoses of Narcissus, Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 165 (another example illustrated).
R. Radford, Dalí, London 1997, p. 144 (another example illustrated).
W. Jeffett, Masterpieces of Surrealism, Florida 2000, p. 29 (another example illustrated).

Special notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

Lot Essay

Sold with a photo-certificate from Robert P. Descharnes dated Paris, vendredi 8 décembre 2000.

"The Surrealist object is one that is absolutely useless from a practical and rational point of view, and is created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with the maximun of tangible reality, ideas and fantasies that have a delirious character".(Salvador Dalí, Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution.

Objet Surréaliste à Fonctionnement Symbolique, was first conceived in 1931 and its primary function was to shock, as indeed was the work's alternative title The Pubic Hair of the Virgin. It was however also intended to awaken hidden erotic desires within the viewer. Dalí has described this work as consisting of: "A woman's shoe, inside of which has been placed a glass of warm milk, at the centre of putty in ductile shape, colour of excrement. The mechanism consists of the immersion of a sugar cube on to which has been painted the image of a shoe, in order to observe the disintegration of the sugar and as a consequence of the image of the shoe in the milk".

In preparation for the 1973 edition of this remarkably complex Surrealist object, Dalí listed the neccessary components of the work in instructions to the maker Max Clarac-Sérou, as follows:

Shoe: Leather made by a Catalan shoemaker
Pieces of sugar, made of white marble
Photographs of an ankle-boot are glued to the sugar-lumps
Gibbet: tinted wood
Acorn-shaped element: gilded metal, suspended to a gold-coloured cord
Horn-shaped element: red granite porphyry
A glass containing wax
In a matchbox attached to the sole of the shoe is placed a marble sugar-lump to which pubic hairs of a virgin are attached
On the basis, made of black marble is fixed a wooden scraper.

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