Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more PROPERTY FROM A EUROPEAN PRIVATE COLLECTION 
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

Chevauchée céleste

Details
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Chevauchée céleste
signed 'S DALI' (lower left)
oil on canvas
74 x 33 in. (188 x 83.9 cm.)
Painted in 1957
Provenance
Billy Rose, New York.
Georges Farkas, New York.
Alex Maguy, Paris, by whom acquired from the above circa 1973, and thence by descent; sale, Christie's, London, 4 February 2002, lot 74.
Private collection, Switzerland; sale, Christie's, London, 23 June 2010, lot 55.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
Literature
R. Descharnes & G. Néret, Salvador Dalí, 1904-1989, The Paintings, 1946-1989, vol. II, Cologne, 1994, no. 1107, p. 767 (illustrated p. 493).
Exhibited
Paris, Galerie de l'Elysée, Sept tableaux de Dalí, May - June 1973.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. These lots have been imported from outside the EU for sale using a Temporary Import regime. Import VAT is payable (at 5%) on the Hammer price. VAT is also payable (at 20%) on the buyer’s Premium on a VAT inclusive basis. When a buyer of such a lot has registered an EU address but wishes to export the lot or complete the import into another EU country, he must advise Christie's immediately after the auction.

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Anna Povejsilova
Anna Povejsilova

Lot Essay

Employing a wealth of Dalí's own strange personal symbolism Chevauchée céleste (Celestial Ride) is a portrait of a bizarre triumphal celestial march. With its unforgettable image of a tame rhinoceros travelling through the clouds on vast and fragile elongated legs, while carrying a young naked virgin holding aloft a symbolic crutch, the painting is a powerful icon of the central erotic theme of Dalí's art - his belief in the creative power of impotence.

For Dalí the rhinoceros was a ‘cosmic’ animal that belonged in the heavens - even more than the elephants of his famous painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony. The rhino's hide, Dalí asserted, had ‘plenty of divine granulations‘, and its horns, he had been delighted to discover, were ‘the only ones in the animal kingdom constructed in accordance with a perfect logarithmic spiral’.

Dalí had first been given a rhino horn by the poet Emmanuel Looten around 1950 and throughout the decade the rhinoceros horn became an obsessive icon in his work. In much Eastern mythology the rhino horn is widely believed to be a source of sexual potency. For Dalí too, the rhinoceros was an image of strength and virility that ultimately manifested itself in the phallic projection of its horn. Its complimentary symbol was the virgin, whom Dalí regarded as being the target and receptacle of the rhino's virility.

The crutch which the virgin brandishes like a sceptre is one of Dalí's most repeated images and was for the artist a perennial symbol of impotency that had comforted and inspired him since his childhood. By the 1950s Dalí openly celebrated his own sexual difficulty in this respect, claiming that ‘all the great people who realise sensational achievements are impotent, Napoleon, everybody. The people who are not impotent make children, embryos, and nothing more. But immediately that sex works only with extreme difficulty, you create fantastic music, architecture, visions, imperial invasions’ (quoted in I. Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, London, 1997, p. 546).

The rhinoceros and the virgin are therefore symbolic opposites that in this work have been harmoniously united in a celestial union or hieros gamos. This strange marriage that has resulted in the virile beast being tamed by the virgin, is echoed in the background of the painting where two sexually complimentary but wholly amorphic shapes deriving from Dalí's childhood obsession with Millet's Angelus surround a phallic skyscraper that also rises above the clouds. In addition to this, the TV-like window in the side of the rhinoceros depicting a game of baseball also asserts the same sense of a dynamic sexual union of opposites. For, according to the animator John Hench, with whom Dalí worked on the film project Destino in the late 1940s, Dalí interpreted the great American game along largely sexual lines as a dance between a female dancer who was also the ball and the male batter who was also the bat (see exh. cat. Salvador Dalí, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1980).

Dominated by the seeming visual impossibility of the rhino's delicate elongated legs to bear the weight of such a robust and heavy creature, Chevauchée céleste is a parade of opposites. Opposites that are all harmoniously united in the celestial domain of the soft-clock, that timeless and magical dream-world of Dalí's evidently fertile imagination.

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