Artist: Salvador Dalí
Title: Melting Space-Time (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
Description of piece:
This surrealist masterpiece from Salvador Dalí, Melting Space-Time, is from Dalí’s significant Imaginations and Objects of the Future portfolio. The most sought-after single artwork in the entire portfolio, Melting Space-Time is evocative of Dalí’s most famous artistic creation, The Persistence of Memory, sharing the imagery of a melting clock face.
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, Melting Space-Time is hand-signed by Dalí, lower right, in an especially large signature which spans the entire width of the lower margin, into 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 Melting Space-Time:
“A person will no longer wear a watch on the wrist. The roads upon which we travel will be full of such information. Computerized movable roads on which not only time but space will be summarized. Space and time will become a single continuum. They will blend into a soft, flexible new reality . . . as in the famous Salvador Dalí soft watches. Perfect!”
Dalí’s magnificent Melting Space-Time predicts technology that would conjoin time and space into a single dimension; a flexible continuum in which one moves, forward and back in time and space, as a traveler on a road. Physicist Albert Einstein helped develop the concept of ‘space-time’ as part of his theory of relativity. Space-time is a mathematical model that combines the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional manifold. Thus the theoretical physics model which would correspond to Dalí’s fantastical artistic concept.
Here, in Dalí’s Melting Space-Time, we encounter an iconic Dalí landscape, with the melting clock imagery magnificently transformed and transforming into the road in Dalí’s inventive physics-bending universe. The road (as melting clock) winds through the Dalínean landscape, replete with distant blue cloud-forms, purple mountains, and light blue boulders, perhaps made of ice.
In the center and foreground, are iconographic Dalí figures: a staff-carrying desert wanderer, whose long shadow is cast upon the earth; a kinetically charged linear figure on horseback, reminiscent of Dalí’s frequently recurring Don Quixote imagery; and a seated angelic figure, also with staff, with enormous brightly colored wings.
The vibrant, colored portions of the composition are offset and balanced with linear renderings accomplished with a draughtman’s precision. Dalí’s judicious use of bold color, juxtaposed with his linear renderings, creates a balance and visual flow to this masterful and fluid artwork. The special Japon paper used for this rare edition adds an added element of depth and delicateness, and instills an almost luminescent quality to the artwork.
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 G, page 104, Melting Space-Time was created by Desjobert (lithograph), Rigal (engraving); and published by Merrill Chase, Chicago / Alan Rich, New York. This rare artwork is designated as "scarce". The final image presented in the auction images shows gallerist Robert Chase seated with Dalí in front of some of the original artworks from which the Imaginations and Objects of the Future portfolio was created.
Melting Space-Time 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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