拍品專文
Robert Descharnes has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work and it is archived under no. A-16, D-1354.
'And on Fifth Avenue Harpo Marx has just lighted the fuse that projects from the behinds of a flock of expensive giraffes stuffed with dynamite. They run in all directions, sowing panic and obliging everyone to seek refuge pell-mell within the shops. All the fire-alarms of the city have just been turned on, but it is already too late. Boom! Boom! I salute you explosive giraffes of New York and all you fore-runners of the irrational -Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, and you too, unforgettable Buster Keaton, tragic and delirious like my rotten and mystic donkeys, desert roses of Spain' (Salvador Dalí, 'Projected Extract from 'Giraffes on Horseback Salad', in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York, 1942, p. 332).
The Surrealist Piano is a study for a scenario in an unrealized film to have been entitled Giraffes on Horseback Salad that Dalí prepared in collaboration with the Marx brothers in Hollywood in 1937. A lifelong fan of the Marx brothers, Dalí met Harpo Marx - his favourite Marx brother - in Hollywood in 1936, becoming close to the legendary comedian and painting his portrait. Together with Harpo and his brothers Groucho and Chico, Dali began work on preparation for a new film in which their unique brand of madcap comedy would ally itself with his own Surrealist imagination. Then currently obsessed by the themes of the burning Giraffe and the Surrealist Woman - a spectral figure with her face full of roses - Dali began to write and draw scenarios for the film.
The Surrealist Piano incorporates several typical Dalinean themes, from the phallic cypress tree reminiscent of Böcklin's Island of the Dead erupting through a piano, to the figure of a naked woman with the face of a clock. The scenario that the picture describes is the embracing of the 'Surrealist Woman' 'photographed from behind, or in circumstances where the face is hidden, in order to increase the enigmatic atmosphere of her personality' by the film's central character 'Jimmy' (Salvador Dalí, 'The Surrealist Woman': unpublished Marx brothers film scenario, 1937 reproduced in R. Descharnes, Salvador Dali, New York, 1984, p. 158). For Jimmy, as for Dalí, the Surrealist Woman personifies a 'world of fantasy, dreams and the imagination'; her friends are Harpo, Groucho and Chico Marx. In The Surrealist Piano, the Surrealist Woman is embraced at the piano which simultaneously serves a sacred spring filling a lake while at the top of the picture, in a scene that anticipates Dali's later work on the Hitchcock film Spellbound, a landscape where a lone figure and long mysterious shadows extend steeply towards a horizon.
Recalling such earlier paintings as Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the skins of an Orchestra of 1936 and Necrophilic Fountain Flowing from a Grand Piano of 1933, The Surrealist Piano, with its embracing couple standing at the meeting point of a cello-shaped pool and a dissolving grand piano, is both a typical Dalinean dreamscape, and a rare testament to the brief but fascinating collaboration between two of the most imaginative surrealist imaginations of the Twentieth Century.
'And on Fifth Avenue Harpo Marx has just lighted the fuse that projects from the behinds of a flock of expensive giraffes stuffed with dynamite. They run in all directions, sowing panic and obliging everyone to seek refuge pell-mell within the shops. All the fire-alarms of the city have just been turned on, but it is already too late. Boom! Boom! I salute you explosive giraffes of New York and all you fore-runners of the irrational -Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, and you too, unforgettable Buster Keaton, tragic and delirious like my rotten and mystic donkeys, desert roses of Spain' (Salvador Dalí, 'Projected Extract from 'Giraffes on Horseback Salad', in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York, 1942, p. 332).
The Surrealist Piano is a study for a scenario in an unrealized film to have been entitled Giraffes on Horseback Salad that Dalí prepared in collaboration with the Marx brothers in Hollywood in 1937. A lifelong fan of the Marx brothers, Dalí met Harpo Marx - his favourite Marx brother - in Hollywood in 1936, becoming close to the legendary comedian and painting his portrait. Together with Harpo and his brothers Groucho and Chico, Dali began work on preparation for a new film in which their unique brand of madcap comedy would ally itself with his own Surrealist imagination. Then currently obsessed by the themes of the burning Giraffe and the Surrealist Woman - a spectral figure with her face full of roses - Dali began to write and draw scenarios for the film.
The Surrealist Piano incorporates several typical Dalinean themes, from the phallic cypress tree reminiscent of Böcklin's Island of the Dead erupting through a piano, to the figure of a naked woman with the face of a clock. The scenario that the picture describes is the embracing of the 'Surrealist Woman' 'photographed from behind, or in circumstances where the face is hidden, in order to increase the enigmatic atmosphere of her personality' by the film's central character 'Jimmy' (Salvador Dalí, 'The Surrealist Woman': unpublished Marx brothers film scenario, 1937 reproduced in R. Descharnes, Salvador Dali, New York, 1984, p. 158). For Jimmy, as for Dalí, the Surrealist Woman personifies a 'world of fantasy, dreams and the imagination'; her friends are Harpo, Groucho and Chico Marx. In The Surrealist Piano, the Surrealist Woman is embraced at the piano which simultaneously serves a sacred spring filling a lake while at the top of the picture, in a scene that anticipates Dali's later work on the Hitchcock film Spellbound, a landscape where a lone figure and long mysterious shadows extend steeply towards a horizon.
Recalling such earlier paintings as Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the skins of an Orchestra of 1936 and Necrophilic Fountain Flowing from a Grand Piano of 1933, The Surrealist Piano, with its embracing couple standing at the meeting point of a cello-shaped pool and a dissolving grand piano, is both a typical Dalinean dreamscape, and a rare testament to the brief but fascinating collaboration between two of the most imaginative surrealist imaginations of the Twentieth Century.