Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE DUTCH COLLECTION
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

Profile of Time

Details
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Profile of Time
signed 'Dalí (on top of the base); stamped with the foundry mark and numbered 'CERA PERSA PERSEO SA MENDRISIO 2/8' (at the back of the base)
bronze with gold, green and brown patina
Height: 151.6 in. (385 cm.)
Conceived in 1977 and cast in 1984 in a numbered edition of eight plus four artist's proofs
Provenance
Opera Gallery, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006.
Literature
R. & N. Descharnes, Dalí, The Hard and The Soft, Spells for The Magic of Form, Sculptures & Objects, Paris, 2004, no. 615, p. 238 (another cast illustrated).
Stratton Foundation, ed., Dalí in the Third Dimension, Turin, 2010 (another cast illustrated pp. 192-195 & 313).
Special Notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

Brought to you by

Giovanna Bertazzoni
Giovanna Bertazzoni

Lot Essay

Restaging the theme of the melting clock on a grand, monumental scale, Profile of Time brings one of the most entrancing inventions of Salvador Dalí into the third-dimension. First conceived in 1977, the work was cast in 1984 in an edition of eight. Melting clocks had first made their appearance in Dalí’s work in 1931, in the painting The Persistence of Memory, bought by the Museum of Modern Art in 1934. In his autobiography, the artist narrated the accidental genesis of that memorable image:

‘We had topped off our meal with a very strong Camembert, and after everyone had gone I remained for a long time seated at the table meditating on the philosophic problems of the “super-soft” which the cheese presented to my mind. I got up and went into the studio, where I lit the light in order to cast a final glance, as is my habit, at the picture I was in the midst of painting. This picture represented a landscape near Port Lligat, whose rocks were lighted by a transparent and melancholy twilight; in the foreground an olive tree with its branches cut, and without leaves. I knew that the atmosphere which I had succeeded in creating with this landscape was to serve as a setting for some idea, for some surprising image, but I did not in the least know what it was going to be. I was about to turn out the light, when instantaneously I “saw” the solution, I saw two soft watches, one of them hanging lamentably on the branch of the olive tree’ (S. Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York, 1942, p. 317).

Over three meters high, Profile of Time transports Dalí’s personal hallucination into the communal space of landscape. Towering above the viewer, the sculpture acts as a reminder of man’s struggle with time. Melting away, the clock takes the shape of a human profile, reminiscent of the long head appearing in Dalí’s seminal work The Great Masturbator (1929, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), in itself a symbolic portrait of the artist. A tear slowly falls from his eye, lightly chiselled next to the tenth hour, possibly symbolising man’s existence, inexorably in thrall to the passing of time.

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