SALVADOR DALÍ, (1904-1989)
Cinq personnages surréalistes: Femmes à tête de fleurs, femme à tiroirs (évocation du jugement de Pâris)
Cinq personnages surréalistes: Femmes à tête de fleurs, femme à tiroirs (évocation du jugement de Pâris)
signed and dated 'Gala Salvador Dalí 1937' (lower right)
gouache, brush, pen and ink on pink paper
49.5 x 63.8cm (19 1/2 x 25 1/8in).
Executed in 1937
The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by Monsieur Nicolas Descharnes.
Provenance
Elsa Schiaparelli Collection, Paris (a gift from the artist).
Private collection (by descent from the above).
Private collection, London.
Private collection, US (acquired in 2015).
Exhibited
Knokke le Zoute, Casino communal, IX festival Belge d'été – Salvador Dalí, 1 July - 10 September 1956, no. 73.
Oregon, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Masterworks on Loan, 2015.
New York, Leila Heller Gallery, Exilic Pleasures, Surrealism Refuged in America, 27 April - 17 June 2017.
'Here new morphological phenomena occurred; here the essence of things was to become; transubstantiated; here the tongues of fire of the Holy Ghost of Dalí were going to descend'
- Salvador Dalí describing Elsa Schiaparelli's opening of her fashion boutique on the Place Vendôme, Paris, in 1935 (Salvador Dalí quoted in H. M. Chevalier, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York, 1942, p. 394).
A triumph of Surrealist draughtsmanship, Salvador Dalí's Cinq personnages surréalistes: Femmes à tête de fleurs, femme à tiroirs (évocation du jugement de Pâris) stands as an ode to fashion, friendship and the creative spirit of collaboration. Executed in 1937 as a gift to Dalí's close friend and Surrealist comrade, the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, the present work exemplifies the creative frenzy of 1930s Paris, with this remarkable duo at its epicentre. Sharing lifelong preoccupations with metamorphosis and the transformation of the female figure, Dalí and Schiaparelli together launched the very experiments in art and fashion that would redefine the intertwined worlds of Surrealism and couture.
A daring and eccentric couturière who pioneered the fashion show as an artistic and theatrical event, Schiaparelli was a key figure within the Parisian avant-garde, working with such artists as Man Ray, Jean Cocteau and Meret Oppenheim. Known for her visual humour and flamboyance, Schiaparelli used shocking pink and magenta as her signature hues – and requested that Dalí use pink paper for this very work. Waxing lyrical about her eccentricities, Yves Saint Laurent wrote: 'She slapped Paris. She smacked it. She tortured it. She bewitched it. And it fell madly in love with her' (Yves Saint Laurent, 'Forward' in P. White, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion, New York, 1986, pp. 11–12).
Schiaparelli's collaborations with Dalí were her most synergistic, resulting in some of the most significant creations of the Surrealist movement. The two were responsible for the momentous Lobster Dress (1937) worn by Wallis Simpson before her wedding to the Duke of Windsor, as well as the sinister Skeleton Dress (1938), upon which cotton wadding and quilted black silk gave the appearance of willowy bones. In the present work, Dalí incorporates the imagery of Schiaparelli's macabre creations to subvert traditional depictions of women's bodies and attire. His nymphal beings are swathed in the sinuous, cascading drapery used by Old Masters such as Botticelli to reveal and accentuate the female form. By grouping these figures within dramatic tableaux, harmonised with tilted heads and dynamic gestures, Dalí alludes to masterpieces such as Botticelli's Primavera (c. 1482). However, Dalí's figures display more garish, supercilious poses, invoking the stereotypical affectations of fashion models.
Characteristic of Dalí's tendency toward grotesque distortion, the costumes of his figures merge with their hanging skin, taut sinews and elongated muscles. This fusion of morbidity and ostentation would appear again shortly after the creation of the present work, in Dalí and Schiaparelli's famous Tears Dress (1938). Part of Schiaparelli's riotous 'Circus Collection', the garment is printed with trompe l'oeil pink and magenta tears, giving the appearance of lacerated flesh peeling directly off the fabric. Incorporating Dalí's nécrophilique fantasy of a corpse emerging back to life with its skin torn off, the Tears Dress was also inspired by the central female figure in Dalí's Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra (1936).
The two flower-headed figures are also recurring characters within Dalí's oeuvre, appearing repeatedly in works such as Three Young Surrealist Women. The left-hand figure leans nonchalantly on what appears to be a stage door, turning toward the central group of players, inviting the audience to view their outlandish mise-en-scène. Just as this doorway leads onto a figurative stage, so too does it lead into the fantastical penetralia of Dalí's imagination. The orthogonal lines beneath the figures anchor their anguished poses, generating at once a wooden stage floor and the sublime, attenuated environment so characteristic of Dalí's Surrealist compositions.
This confluence of the dreamlike and the hyperreal is a hallmark of the 'paranoiac-critical' method Dalí was then championing, which involved obtaining artistic imagery from states of self-induced delirium. As Dawn Ades writes, Dalí's aim was 'to give form to the formless and invisible, to dreams, reveries, delusions, desires and fears... His desire to give substance to the phantoms destined always to remain virtual led to one of the most sustained investigations into the relationship between vision, perception and representation of the century' (D. Ades, Dalí's Optical Illusions, exh. cat., Washington, D.C. & Edinburgh, 2000, p. 10).
Dalí indeed brought a flower-headed figure to life in a performance piece staged for the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. In it, the artist Sheila Legge posed in Trafalgar Square, her face entirely hidden by a mask of roses. The costume may well have been inspired by Schiaparelli herself. In her 1954 memoir, Shocking Life, Schiaparelli recalls thinking herself unprepossessing as a young girl, and wanting to plant flower seeds in her mouth, nose and ears in order to hide her face. The present work appears as an iteration of the Trafalgar Square performance, with its backdrop of Neoclassical architecture resembling that of central London. These elegant domes and colonnades also imbue the scene with the quality of an arcadian vision. Indeed, Dalí often peopled his Surrealist compositions with characters and myths of the classical world. With their botanical and anthropomorphic hybridity, Dalí's flower-headed nymphs appear to be midway through a transformation – an effect crystallised by the yellow butterfly held gingerly in one of their fingers. The effect is strikingly similar to Botticelli's inclusion of the nymph Chloris in Primavera, mid-way through her metamorphosis into the goddess Flora at the touch of Zephyrus.
Drawn in a rapid style, the present work's resemblance to a fashion designer's off-the-cuff sketches seems wholly purposeful. Indeed, the exaggerated, squared shoulders and triangular torsos of Dalí's figures embody the starkly angular forms of Schiaparelli's silhouettes. Dalí's surreal personnages appear to have been carved from wood, as the central figure produces drawers from within folds of silken skin. Aside from an amusing pun on 'chest of drawers', this alludes to the various outlandish Dalí-Schiaparelli inventions that inhabited the Place Vendôme boutique. These included a pink stuffed teddy bear with drawers in his stomach, as well as suits with drawer-like pockets adorned with plastic handles. Included in contemporaneous works such as The Anthropomorphic Cabinet (1936) and Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936), the figure with a chest of drawers also alludes to the psychic realms of Dalí's inner world. As William Jeffet explains: 'the drawers suggest the obscure recesses of the human mind, in the sense of Freud's conception of the unconscious' (W. Jeffet, Dalí: The Centenary Restrospective, exh. cat., Venice, 2004, p. 258).
It is no surprise that Dalí and Schiaparelli would become such close collaborators, given the alignment of their paradoxical modus operandi – combining the macabre with the minimal, the garish with the glamorous, the playful with the precise. Schiaparelli considered herself a sculptor, who could transform a woman's persona by concealing one facet in order to reveal another: 'Dress designing, incidentally, is to me not a profession but an art... A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to, glorifies or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty. More often it becomes an indifferent object, or even a pitiful caricature of what you wanted it to be – a dream, an expression' (E. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life, London, 1954, p. 46).
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Cinq personnages surréalistes: Femmes à tête de fleurs, femme à tiroirs (évocation du jugement de Pâris)
Cinq personnages surréalistes: Femmes à tête de fleurs, femme à tiroirs (évocation du jugement de Pâris)
signed and dated 'Gala Salvador Dalí 1937' (lower right)
gouache, brush, pen and ink on pink paper
49.5 x 63.8cm (19 1/2 x 25 1/8in).
Executed in 1937
The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by Monsieur Nicolas Descharnes.
Provenance
Elsa Schiaparelli Collection, Paris (a gift from the artist).
Private collection (by descent from the above).
Private collection, London.
Private collection, US (acquired in 2015).
Exhibited
Knokke le Zoute, Casino communal, IX festival Belge d'été – Salvador Dalí, 1 July - 10 September 1956, no. 73.
Oregon, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Masterworks on Loan, 2015.
New York, Leila Heller Gallery, Exilic Pleasures, Surrealism Refuged in America, 27 April - 17 June 2017.
'Here new morphological phenomena occurred; here the essence of things was to become; transubstantiated; here the tongues of fire of the Holy Ghost of Dalí were going to descend'
- Salvador Dalí describing Elsa Schiaparelli's opening of her fashion boutique on the Place Vendôme, Paris, in 1935 (Salvador Dalí quoted in H. M. Chevalier, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York, 1942, p. 394).
A triumph of Surrealist draughtsmanship, Salvador Dalí's Cinq personnages surréalistes: Femmes à tête de fleurs, femme à tiroirs (évocation du jugement de Pâris) stands as an ode to fashion, friendship and the creative spirit of collaboration. Executed in 1937 as a gift to Dalí's close friend and Surrealist comrade, the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, the present work exemplifies the creative frenzy of 1930s Paris, with this remarkable duo at its epicentre. Sharing lifelong preoccupations with metamorphosis and the transformation of the female figure, Dalí and Schiaparelli together launched the very experiments in art and fashion that would redefine the intertwined worlds of Surrealism and couture.
A daring and eccentric couturière who pioneered the fashion show as an artistic and theatrical event, Schiaparelli was a key figure within the Parisian avant-garde, working with such artists as Man Ray, Jean Cocteau and Meret Oppenheim. Known for her visual humour and flamboyance, Schiaparelli used shocking pink and magenta as her signature hues – and requested that Dalí use pink paper for this very work. Waxing lyrical about her eccentricities, Yves Saint Laurent wrote: 'She slapped Paris. She smacked it. She tortured it. She bewitched it. And it fell madly in love with her' (Yves Saint Laurent, 'Forward' in P. White, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion, New York, 1986, pp. 11–12).
Schiaparelli's collaborations with Dalí were her most synergistic, resulting in some of the most significant creations of the Surrealist movement. The two were responsible for the momentous Lobster Dress (1937) worn by Wallis Simpson before her wedding to the Duke of Windsor, as well as the sinister Skeleton Dress (1938), upon which cotton wadding and quilted black silk gave the appearance of willowy bones. In the present work, Dalí incorporates the imagery of Schiaparelli's macabre creations to subvert traditional depictions of women's bodies and attire. His nymphal beings are swathed in the sinuous, cascading drapery used by Old Masters such as Botticelli to reveal and accentuate the female form. By grouping these figures within dramatic tableaux, harmonised with tilted heads and dynamic gestures, Dalí alludes to masterpieces such as Botticelli's Primavera (c. 1482). However, Dalí's figures display more garish, supercilious poses, invoking the stereotypical affectations of fashion models.
Characteristic of Dalí's tendency toward grotesque distortion, the costumes of his figures merge with their hanging skin, taut sinews and elongated muscles. This fusion of morbidity and ostentation would appear again shortly after the creation of the present work, in Dalí and Schiaparelli's famous Tears Dress (1938). Part of Schiaparelli's riotous 'Circus Collection', the garment is printed with trompe l'oeil pink and magenta tears, giving the appearance of lacerated flesh peeling directly off the fabric. Incorporating Dalí's nécrophilique fantasy of a corpse emerging back to life with its skin torn off, the Tears Dress was also inspired by the central female figure in Dalí's Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra (1936).
The two flower-headed figures are also recurring characters within Dalí's oeuvre, appearing repeatedly in works such as Three Young Surrealist Women. The left-hand figure leans nonchalantly on what appears to be a stage door, turning toward the central group of players, inviting the audience to view their outlandish mise-en-scène. Just as this doorway leads onto a figurative stage, so too does it lead into the fantastical penetralia of Dalí's imagination. The orthogonal lines beneath the figures anchor their anguished poses, generating at once a wooden stage floor and the sublime, attenuated environment so characteristic of Dalí's Surrealist compositions.
This confluence of the dreamlike and the hyperreal is a hallmark of the 'paranoiac-critical' method Dalí was then championing, which involved obtaining artistic imagery from states of self-induced delirium. As Dawn Ades writes, Dalí's aim was 'to give form to the formless and invisible, to dreams, reveries, delusions, desires and fears... His desire to give substance to the phantoms destined always to remain virtual led to one of the most sustained investigations into the relationship between vision, perception and representation of the century' (D. Ades, Dalí's Optical Illusions, exh. cat., Washington, D.C. & Edinburgh, 2000, p. 10).
Dalí indeed brought a flower-headed figure to life in a performance piece staged for the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. In it, the artist Sheila Legge posed in Trafalgar Square, her face entirely hidden by a mask of roses. The costume may well have been inspired by Schiaparelli herself. In her 1954 memoir, Shocking Life, Schiaparelli recalls thinking herself unprepossessing as a young girl, and wanting to plant flower seeds in her mouth, nose and ears in order to hide her face. The present work appears as an iteration of the Trafalgar Square performance, with its backdrop of Neoclassical architecture resembling that of central London. These elegant domes and colonnades also imbue the scene with the quality of an arcadian vision. Indeed, Dalí often peopled his Surrealist compositions with characters and myths of the classical world. With their botanical and anthropomorphic hybridity, Dalí's flower-headed nymphs appear to be midway through a transformation – an effect crystallised by the yellow butterfly held gingerly in one of their fingers. The effect is strikingly similar to Botticelli's inclusion of the nymph Chloris in Primavera, mid-way through her metamorphosis into the goddess Flora at the touch of Zephyrus.
Drawn in a rapid style, the present work's resemblance to a fashion designer's off-the-cuff sketches seems wholly purposeful. Indeed, the exaggerated, squared shoulders and triangular torsos of Dalí's figures embody the starkly angular forms of Schiaparelli's silhouettes. Dalí's surreal personnages appear to have been carved from wood, as the central figure produces drawers from within folds of silken skin. Aside from an amusing pun on 'chest of drawers', this alludes to the various outlandish Dalí-Schiaparelli inventions that inhabited the Place Vendôme boutique. These included a pink stuffed teddy bear with drawers in his stomach, as well as suits with drawer-like pockets adorned with plastic handles. Included in contemporaneous works such as The Anthropomorphic Cabinet (1936) and Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936), the figure with a chest of drawers also alludes to the psychic realms of Dalí's inner world. As William Jeffet explains: 'the drawers suggest the obscure recesses of the human mind, in the sense of Freud's conception of the unconscious' (W. Jeffet, Dalí: The Centenary Restrospective, exh. cat., Venice, 2004, p. 258).
It is no surprise that Dalí and Schiaparelli would become such close collaborators, given the alignment of their paradoxical modus operandi – combining the macabre with the minimal, the garish with the glamorous, the playful with the precise. Schiaparelli considered herself a sculptor, who could transform a woman's persona by concealing one facet in order to reveal another: 'Dress designing, incidentally, is to me not a profession but an art... A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to, glorifies or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty. More often it becomes an indifferent object, or even a pitiful caricature of what you wanted it to be – a dream, an expression' (E. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life, London, 1954, p. 46).
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