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Lot Essay
"With the drawers, it is now possible to see the soul of the Venus de Milo through her body."
- Salvador Dalí
Conceived in 1964, Venus de Milo aux tiroirs is one of Dalí’s iconic sculptures. Dalí had developed the concept of the surrealist object in 1931, calling for the creation of an artwork that was "absolutely useless…and created wholly for the purpose of materialising in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character" (quoted in "Notable Acquisitions at The Art Institute of Chicago" in The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 2006, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 64-65). Deriving from the Dada tradition of Marcel Duchamp's readymades, in which such banal found objects as a shovel, a bottle-stand or a urinal were elevated to the status of an artwork through the artist's expression of intention, Dalí encouraged his fellow Surrealists to engage in the collective production of new objects that would have a psychological rather than aesthetic dimension.
By using this famous portrayal of Venus and perforating the sensuous feminine curves of her greatly admired form, Dalí demonstrates his irreverence for this classical symbol of beauty, whilst also suggesting new layers of depth were possible within this classical subject. As legend has it, the idea for these furniture-human hybrids emerged while Dalí was staying with his great patron and collaborator, Edward James, in London. The artist, who still understood only a little English in 1936, heard his host use the typical British phrase "chest of drawers" in passing and, unfamiliar with the term, was immediately struck by the image of a human being with drawers in his or her rib cage. Building on this idea, Dalí created several sketches and paintings along this theme, featuring elegant figures with torsos subdivided into a series of open drawers, such as the oil of Le cabinet anthropomorphique (1936).
- Salvador Dalí
Conceived in 1964, Venus de Milo aux tiroirs is one of Dalí’s iconic sculptures. Dalí had developed the concept of the surrealist object in 1931, calling for the creation of an artwork that was "absolutely useless…and created wholly for the purpose of materialising in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character" (quoted in "Notable Acquisitions at The Art Institute of Chicago" in The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 2006, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 64-65). Deriving from the Dada tradition of Marcel Duchamp's readymades, in which such banal found objects as a shovel, a bottle-stand or a urinal were elevated to the status of an artwork through the artist's expression of intention, Dalí encouraged his fellow Surrealists to engage in the collective production of new objects that would have a psychological rather than aesthetic dimension.
By using this famous portrayal of Venus and perforating the sensuous feminine curves of her greatly admired form, Dalí demonstrates his irreverence for this classical symbol of beauty, whilst also suggesting new layers of depth were possible within this classical subject. As legend has it, the idea for these furniture-human hybrids emerged while Dalí was staying with his great patron and collaborator, Edward James, in London. The artist, who still understood only a little English in 1936, heard his host use the typical British phrase "chest of drawers" in passing and, unfamiliar with the term, was immediately struck by the image of a human being with drawers in his or her rib cage. Building on this idea, Dalí created several sketches and paintings along this theme, featuring elegant figures with torsos subdivided into a series of open drawers, such as the oil of Le cabinet anthropomorphique (1936).