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Lot Essay
Salvador Dalí created Naissance de l’ameublement paranoïaque in preparation for the design and construction of one his most famous objects—the sexy, surrealist, yet functional pièce de décor Mae West Lips Sofa. Realized in collaboration with the English poet and collector Edward James, Dalí’s chief patron during the mid-1930s, five examples of the sofa were produced in 1938. One of the pair James had installed in the dining room of Monkton House, his country estate, was sold at Christie’s London, 28 February 2017, lot 130, and subsequently acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
“I am very proud of having predicted in 1928, at the highest peak of functional and practical anatomy, in the midst of the most scoffing skepticisms,” Salvador Dalí wrote in the surrealist journal Minotaure, February 1934, “the immanence of Mae West’s rounded and salivary muscles, horribly slimy with biological ulterior motives. I announce today that the whole new sexual attraction of women will come from the potential use of their spectral capacities and resources, their potential carnal and luminous dissociation and disintegration… Woman will become spectral through the disarticulation and deformation of her anatomy” (H. Finkelstein, ed., The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge, 1998, p. 206).
The artist was likely referring to Mae West’s play Diamond Lil, featuring a character rather like her bawdy, risqué self, which in 1928 became a Broadway hit for the actress-author and attracted the attention of Hollywood. She reprised this role as Lady Lou in the 1933 film She Done Him Wrong, with Cary Grant, resulting in an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture; the box office proceeds saved Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy. Mae West became the highest-paid woman in America. “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere else,” she declared in She Done Him Wrong—prior to enforcement of the Movie Production Code.
While in America during 1934-1935, as a tribute to his cinematic muse, Dalí painted over a magazine cover showing a Paramount publicity shot of West, an image on which the studio also based one of their She Done Him Wrong posters. Subjecting the actress’s features to spectral “disarticulation and deformation”, Dalí created Mae West’s Face which May Be Used as a Surrealist Apartment. Seeking to transform Monkton House into an amalgam of surrealist environments, James was drawn to the idea of the Mae West lips sofa and the dual-chambered nostrils fireplace. Dalí extracted these elements from the full-face gouache and precisely modeled them in the present drawing, from which working designs could be prepared. The fireplace, however, was not undertaken. The complete Mae West Room was not realized until it was built and incorporated into the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Catalunya, inaugurated in 1974.
“I am very proud of having predicted in 1928, at the highest peak of functional and practical anatomy, in the midst of the most scoffing skepticisms,” Salvador Dalí wrote in the surrealist journal Minotaure, February 1934, “the immanence of Mae West’s rounded and salivary muscles, horribly slimy with biological ulterior motives. I announce today that the whole new sexual attraction of women will come from the potential use of their spectral capacities and resources, their potential carnal and luminous dissociation and disintegration… Woman will become spectral through the disarticulation and deformation of her anatomy” (H. Finkelstein, ed., The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge, 1998, p. 206).
The artist was likely referring to Mae West’s play Diamond Lil, featuring a character rather like her bawdy, risqué self, which in 1928 became a Broadway hit for the actress-author and attracted the attention of Hollywood. She reprised this role as Lady Lou in the 1933 film She Done Him Wrong, with Cary Grant, resulting in an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture; the box office proceeds saved Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy. Mae West became the highest-paid woman in America. “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere else,” she declared in She Done Him Wrong—prior to enforcement of the Movie Production Code.
While in America during 1934-1935, as a tribute to his cinematic muse, Dalí painted over a magazine cover showing a Paramount publicity shot of West, an image on which the studio also based one of their She Done Him Wrong posters. Subjecting the actress’s features to spectral “disarticulation and deformation”, Dalí created Mae West’s Face which May Be Used as a Surrealist Apartment. Seeking to transform Monkton House into an amalgam of surrealist environments, James was drawn to the idea of the Mae West lips sofa and the dual-chambered nostrils fireplace. Dalí extracted these elements from the full-face gouache and precisely modeled them in the present drawing, from which working designs could be prepared. The fireplace, however, was not undertaken. The complete Mae West Room was not realized until it was built and incorporated into the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Catalunya, inaugurated in 1974.