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Lot Essay
Sold with a photo-certificate from Robert P. Descharnes dated Paris, 14 mai 1985.
"The progress of sciences has been colossal, even Auguste Comte could not foresee it. But from the spiritual of view, we live in the lowest period of civilization divorce has come about between physics and metaphysics. We are living through an almost monstrous progress of specialisation, without any synthesis" (Salvador Dalí, Le Sauvage, 1976).
Executed in 1977, Cara Blanca con huevo y angel ("Soft face with egg and angel") is an important late example of Dalí's philosophy of the "super-soft" and the last exploration of the strange landscape of his iconic masterpiece of 1931, The Persistence of Memory.
The unforgettable image of the soft watches was first re-worked by Dalí between 1952-54 in the painting, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory where the soft clocks and portrait heads were metaphorically broken up into atomic particles. In this last version of this theme, Dalí attempts to generate a synthesis between physics and metaphysics by exploring the "soft" qualities of this earlier version. By exploring how the different elements are affected by gravity and in exploiting their symbolic value within his own "religious" iconography, Dalí attempts in this work to unite earlier elements from his paintings of the 1930s with his post-war concerns over scientific progress.
Here, heads, eggs, crutches, and two angels are suspended in a state of levitation. For Dalí, the soft melting faces represent the solidification of unconscious desires that have fused with the anthropomorphic shapes of rocks from his native Cadaques. A classic Dalínian soft image, fried eggs were an important symbol for the artist from a pre-birth experience that he famously recalled in his autobiography as a vision of a pair of fried eggs, without the pan which "would approach (towards me), recede, move toward the left, toward the right, upwards, downward", (S.Dalí, The Sectret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York 1947, p.26).
The soft watch to the right of the composition is a plastic visualisation of Einstein's theory of relativity, which for Dalí made time and space "soft", ridding them of their absolute rigidity, stretching, compressing and moulding them into what he called a "Camembert of time and space".
One of Dalí's finest late paintings, Cara Blanca con huevo y angel is an exceptional illustration of Dalí's own bizare philosophy of the "super-soft". A double portrait, which may portray the artist and his wife Gala, the painting is a powerful image, full of soft components and an echo of the way the artist viewed himself late in his life. Dalí claimed in old age that he would assume the appearance of a fortress created by Gala's devotion on the outside, and within himself "...…continue to grow; old in the soft, and the supersoft."
"The progress of sciences has been colossal, even Auguste Comte could not foresee it. But from the spiritual of view, we live in the lowest period of civilization divorce has come about between physics and metaphysics. We are living through an almost monstrous progress of specialisation, without any synthesis" (Salvador Dalí, Le Sauvage, 1976).
Executed in 1977, Cara Blanca con huevo y angel ("Soft face with egg and angel") is an important late example of Dalí's philosophy of the "super-soft" and the last exploration of the strange landscape of his iconic masterpiece of 1931, The Persistence of Memory.
The unforgettable image of the soft watches was first re-worked by Dalí between 1952-54 in the painting, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory where the soft clocks and portrait heads were metaphorically broken up into atomic particles. In this last version of this theme, Dalí attempts to generate a synthesis between physics and metaphysics by exploring the "soft" qualities of this earlier version. By exploring how the different elements are affected by gravity and in exploiting their symbolic value within his own "religious" iconography, Dalí attempts in this work to unite earlier elements from his paintings of the 1930s with his post-war concerns over scientific progress.
Here, heads, eggs, crutches, and two angels are suspended in a state of levitation. For Dalí, the soft melting faces represent the solidification of unconscious desires that have fused with the anthropomorphic shapes of rocks from his native Cadaques. A classic Dalínian soft image, fried eggs were an important symbol for the artist from a pre-birth experience that he famously recalled in his autobiography as a vision of a pair of fried eggs, without the pan which "would approach (towards me), recede, move toward the left, toward the right, upwards, downward", (S.Dalí, The Sectret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York 1947, p.26).
The soft watch to the right of the composition is a plastic visualisation of Einstein's theory of relativity, which for Dalí made time and space "soft", ridding them of their absolute rigidity, stretching, compressing and moulding them into what he called a "Camembert of time and space".
One of Dalí's finest late paintings, Cara Blanca con huevo y angel is an exceptional illustration of Dalí's own bizare philosophy of the "super-soft". A double portrait, which may portray the artist and his wife Gala, the painting is a powerful image, full of soft components and an echo of the way the artist viewed himself late in his life. Dalí claimed in old age that he would assume the appearance of a fortress created by Gala's devotion on the outside, and within himself "...…continue to grow; old in the soft, and the supersoft."