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Lot Essay
Sold with a photo-certificate from Robert Descharnes, dated Paris, mai 2001.
Familiarity with Dalí's work reveals that amid his enormous diversity of his imagination there are few images that appear again and again. In La soie est une femme we see Dalí returning to his Surrealist roots, re-discovering images that were very important during the 1920s and 1930s such as his fascination with the disembodied head, one of his favourite images of his trademark Surrealist icons. La soie est une femme is therefore very important from an iconographical point of view. For Dalí the head tethered from the body represented a very lifeless image, and in La soie est une femme Dalí has placed this fearful symbol in the middle of a bland and deserted landscape - in the 1950s, this powerful image is even more mundane than his earlier representations of the same subject.
This watercolour was featured on the cover of the winter 1957 issue of the American Fabrics magazine. Breton saw Dalí's incursion into fashion as a trivialisation of the Surrealist movement, but Dalí himself seemed to regard his work with fashion as a legitimate extension of his Surrealist activities. For Dalí, his involvement with the world of fashion was just another means whereby he could experiment and communicate the strange landscape of his universe.
Familiarity with Dalí's work reveals that amid his enormous diversity of his imagination there are few images that appear again and again. In La soie est une femme we see Dalí returning to his Surrealist roots, re-discovering images that were very important during the 1920s and 1930s such as his fascination with the disembodied head, one of his favourite images of his trademark Surrealist icons. La soie est une femme is therefore very important from an iconographical point of view. For Dalí the head tethered from the body represented a very lifeless image, and in La soie est une femme Dalí has placed this fearful symbol in the middle of a bland and deserted landscape - in the 1950s, this powerful image is even more mundane than his earlier representations of the same subject.
This watercolour was featured on the cover of the winter 1957 issue of the American Fabrics magazine. Breton saw Dalí's incursion into fashion as a trivialisation of the Surrealist movement, but Dalí himself seemed to regard his work with fashion as a legitimate extension of his Surrealist activities. For Dalí, his involvement with the world of fashion was just another means whereby he could experiment and communicate the strange landscape of his universe.