Etude pour La pêche au thons

This work is a study for the oil La pêche au thons, 1966-1967 a monumental canvas widely regarded as one of the artist’s great late masterpieces (Descharnes no. 1272; Fondation Paul Ricard). Dalí dedicated it to Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, a nineteenth century French Academic painter, who specialized in monumental battle scenes. The work’s subject derives from Dalí’s fascination with the myth of the Dioscuri, and draws on a rich repertoire of references ranging from ancient and classical art, such as Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa, 1818-1819 (Musée de Louvre) through to stories about the bloody tuna fishing in the Mediterranean Dalí heard as a child. “It is the most ambitious picture I have ever painted. It is a revival of representational art, which synthesizes virtually every artistic style into one formidable canvas: realism, abstraction, pop-art, op-art, cubism, surrealism. […] All those fish and all the people busy killing them are personifications of the finite universe – that is to say, all the components of the picture achieve a maximum of hyper-aesthetic energy in it” (ibid. p. 567 - 577). The painting’s epic subject, hyper-realist aesthetic and alarming energy represented for the artist a quintessential view of the universe, defined by coexistence of mysticism and modern science, physics and metaphysics.