Artist: Salvador Dalí
Title: Spectacles with Holograms and Computers for Seeing Imagined Objects (from Dalí's Imaginations & Objects of the Future portfolio)
Year created: 1975
Medium: Original Etching and Lithograph with Pochoir Hand-Coloring, on Japon Paper
Edition: XLI/LXXV (41/75) Hand-Signed & Numbered Limited Edition, from the rare Roman Numeral Limited Edition in English on Japon Paper
Height (inches): 39-1/2
Width (inches): 27
Signed by the artist
Signed Area: front
This piece is framed.
Description of piece:
This surrealist masterpiece from Salvador Dalí, Spectacles with Holograms and Computers for Seeing Imagined Objects, is from Dalí’s significant Imaginations and Objects of the Future portfolio.
In the early 1970s gallerist Robert Chase proposed to Salvador Dalí the concept of Dalí picturing himself as the 20th century Leonardo da Vinci, giving to the world what he imagined the future would hold.
Knowing that Dalí greatly admired da Vinci as both a thinker and a creative genius was still not adequate preparation for Dalí’s reaction to the concept. Dalí reportedly rolled his eyes as indication of an extraordinary epiphany, and (the artist speaking in an outrageously exaggerated French-Catalan accent) Dalí loudly exclaimed, "Fantastique! Bravo! Dal-i create the fu-ture!"
And thus Dalí created his imaginatively creative and predictively futuristic “Imaginations and Objects of the Future”— a suite of ten drypoint etchings combined with lithography, added color by the method of pochoir, and collage. Each extravagantly surrealist, the suite included artworks predicting self-driving cars and smart-phones, along with inventions that could only have come from the extraordinary imagination of the artist— all expressed through the fantastical lens of Dalí, as the modern da Vinci.
Composed of original etching, lithograph and color hand-applied by pochoir method, Spectacles with Holograms and Computers for Seeing Imagined Objects is hand-signed by Dalí, lower right, directly in the image area. Dalí has signed boldly, in pencil. The work bears the edition number XLI/LXXV (41/75), lower left, also in pencil.
In text on the original, oversized Title sleeve, which served as a chemise for the artwork and which will accompany the framed work, are the artist’s own words describing his inventive Spectacles with Holograms and Computers for Seeing Imagined Objects:
“A major scientific breakthrough, which allows us to give visual form to our thoughts. Already today, we can program simple mathematical objects and project them immediately in holographic form in space. The next stepwise be to create cybernetically prepared spectacles through which we can program the ideas we are thinking in our brain. Initially, this will allow programming on the basis of simple geometric images. However, we will soon be able to project through these spectacles on a screen whatever we can imagine. We will see what we are thinking. Bravo!”
Dalí’s magnificent Spectacles with Holograms and Computers for Seeing Imagined Objects predicts a technology that would enable a subject (dreamer, or thinker) to project their thoughts visually onto a screen. Some have imagined that Dalí had thus predicted developments such as CAT (Computerized Axial Tomography) Scans and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) Scans, creating Spectacles that reflected humankind's ability to comprehend brain activity with greater precision than ever before. More recent scientific developments are coming even closer to more literally accomplishing Dalí’s fantastical artistic prediction.
Here, the subject's dream of ants— iconic Dalí imagery, positioned as a dream within the dreamer’s brain— is refracted through the imaginative Spectacles, and projected as a hologram onto the far left screen. A complex geometric pattern arcs off to the right of the dreamer, evocative of brain wave patterns.
The vibrant, colored portion of the composition is offset and balanced with linear renderings accomplished with a draughtman’s precision. Circles are interspersed with and connected by lines, while one circle is drawn in perspective to resemble a portal. The large figure of the dreamer from the primary composition is echoed, linearly, in a smaller reverse image.
One of the hidden treasures in the work are the written words by Dalí, interspersed among the linear drawings, written backwards (as in the projecting, reversing mirrors of a camera). One may read the words in forward direction by holding the artwork to a mirror.
Images presented in the auction images show some of these portions of the artwork as their mirror image, for reading; and the final image presented in the auction images shows gallerist Robert Chase seated with Dalí in front of the original artwork from which Spectacles with Holograms and Computers for Seeing Imagined Objects was created.
Stored flat since 1975, the artwork has now been framed for the first time (hinged with easily removable tape) in an elegant and substantial frame measuring 39-1/2” in height x 27” width, with custom archival matting in ivory. On the reverse side of the frame is a special full-sized pocket, created to hold the original Title chemise which accompanies the artwork.
Catalogued in Dalí expert Albert Field's authoritative Official Catalog of The Graphic Works of Salvador Dalí, Reference 75-11 A, page 104, Spectacles with Holograms and Computers for Seeing Imagined Objects was created by Desjobert (lithograph), Rigal (engraving); and published by Merrill Chase, Chicago / Alan Rich, New York.
Spectacles with Holograms and Computers for Seeing Imagined Objects comes accompanied by its original protective Title chemise, and 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".
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