Artist: Salvador Dalí
Title: Moses, from the Our Historical Heritage portfolio
Year created: 1975
Medium: Original Etching with Color Pochoir on Watermarked Arches Paper
Signed by the artist
Edition: 342/400 Signed & Numbered Limited Edition on Watermarked Arches Paper
Height (inches): 25.75
Width (inches): 19.75
This piece is unframed.
Includes a certificate of authenticity.
This original Salvador Dalí etching, Moses is hand-signed and numbered 342, from the limited edition tirage of 400 on Arches paper. An etching with color pochoir additions, this work is from Dalí's Our Historical Heritage portfolio, a series of 11 etchings which portray historical events and historic figures of the Old Testament.
In this masterful work, Dalí portrays Moses as a powerful presence, devoting fully half of the work image area to his portrait; Moses shares the upper portion of the work, the sky or heavens, with an image of the sun. In his portaiture, Dalí utilizes the subtle coloration used throughout his Our Historical Heritage portfolio.
Near the center of the work's image area is the tablet containing The Ten Commandments, wrought by God, and which Moses received on Mount Sinai to bring back to the Israelites whom he had led from Egypt to the base of the mountain. Subtle lines define the horizon, while iconically Dalíesque figures wander the expanse of the desert. A winged angel, holding a symbolic single stalk of wheat, sits atop an overturned book and watches. A red-robed figure completes the composition, the single spark of vibrant color.
In the lower right margin of the work is Dalí's original signature, prominent and with his unmistakable flourish, hand-signed in pencil. In the lower left margin it bears the edition number, also in pencil: 342/400. The work measures 25.75" in height x 19.75" width, and the paper bears the watermark "Arches France".
Moses is catalogued in Dalí expert Albert Field's authoritative Official Catalog of The Graphic Works of Salvador Dalí, Reference: 75-4 C, page 101. Published by Leon Amiel, Paris and New York, the work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
Artist bio:
Salvador Dalí, born Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, (1904-1989) was a prominent artist born in Figueres, Spain, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, sixteen miles from the French border, in Catalonia. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media, and he is best known for his surrealist work, including his most well-known painting, The Persistence of Memory. Highly imaginative, Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an ancestry of descent from the medieval Moors. His individualistic nature and resistance to conformity made waves, including among his colleagues. In 1934, when Dalí was subjected to a "trial", in which he was formally expelled from the Surrealist group, Dalí retorted, "le Surrealisme c'est moi": "I myself am surrealism".