Artist: Salvador Dalí
Title: Aliyah (Title Artwork of the Aliyah, The Rebirth of Israel Suite)
Year created: 1968
Medium: Hand-Signed Colored Lithograph on Arches Paper
Edition: Numbered 146/250 from the Limited Edition on Arches Paper
Height (inches): 27-3/8
Width (inches): 21-5/8
Signed by the artist
Signed Area: front
This piece is framed.
Includes a certificate of authenticity.
Description of piece:
At once dramatic and celebratory, Salvador Dalí’s original lithograph, Aliyah, was created in 1968.
In the year 1968, Israeli Independence Day fell on April 3rd. It was a very important moment because the State of Israel was celebrating its 20th anniversary. To commemorate this landmark anniversary, Salvador Dalí worked for two years to create his “Aliyah, the Rebirth of Israel” Suite, conceived and created to commemorate the twenty-year anniversary of the proclamation of the State of Israel.
This work— Aliyah— is the titular centerpiece, and lithograph #1, of Dalí’s “Aliyah, the Rebirth of Israel” Suite.
To illustrate the various meanings of the Hebrew world “Aliyah”, which means literally “migration to the land of Israel”, the artist took inspiration from the Old Testament as well as contemporary history, and created a series of 25 mixed media paintings using gouache, watercolors and India ink on paper. The works are bold and dramatic, and artistically and historically sensitive.
Europe's two leading studios specializing in fine-art lithography— Fernard Mourlot's of Paris and Wolfensgerger of Zurich— extended their facilities for the conversion of the paintings into lithographs, each of which is signed by Dalí. After the stones necessary for each subject were prepared, the required number of impressions were printed, following which the stones were destroyed, thereby assuring that these lithographs will never be reprinted.
The series of lithographs was presented with an accompanying letter of introduction by David Ben-Gurion, a key figure in the history of Israel.
Aliyah is the first in the suite of the twenty-five lithographs from the collection. The title of the work (עֲלִיָּה aliyah) means, literally: “ascent”; the immigration of Jews from the diaspora to the Land of Israel.
The work is hand-signed by Dalí, in pencil, lower right margin. The work was signed by Dalí in New York, and bears the edition number 146/250; from the limited edition of 250 pieces created on Arches paper. The total tirage is only 275 on all papers, with additional unnumbered artist proofs.
Aliyah comes custom framed and ready for display in an elegant, ornate gold frame measuring 27-3/8” in height x 21-5/8” width, with cream custom archival matting.
Catalogued in Dalí expert Albert Field's authoritative Official Catalog of The Graphic Works of Salvador Dalí, Reference 68-1, page 152, Aliyah was commissioned and published by Shorewood Press, 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".