Salvador Dalí

SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÈNECH (Figueras, Girona, 1904–1989).
“La Quête du Graal (The Quest for the Grail).”
Engraving, E.A. edition.
Signed and numbered by hand.
Measurements: 40 x 27 cm (print); 50 x 37 cm (paper); 57 cm (frame height).

In this print, the chivalric world of the quest for the Grail takes on a dreamlike quality, expressed through a drawing of fine lines and open contours. The figure of the knight and his mount occupy the composition with a stylized silhouette, in which the details of the armor and tack coexist with lines that seem to dissolve into the background. The elongated plume on the helmet, the curves of the horse, and the expansiveness of the empty spaces lend movement and a sense of unreality that links the scene to the visual language of Salvador Dalí. The medieval narrative thus becomes a poetic image, in which the chivalric adventure can be interpreted as a spiritual quest.

A painter and sculptor, Salvador Dalí was one of the leading figures of the Surrealist movement. He held his first solo exhibition in 1925 at the Dalmau Galleries in Barcelona. In 1926, after being expelled from the San Fernando School of Fine Arts for indiscipline, he left for Paris. There he met the young Picasso and, four years later, joined the Surrealist movement. Dalí’s work during this period was based on Freud’s theories, which were championed by Breton: the depiction of dreamlike images and everyday objects in unexpected and surprising compositional forms. Some of the characteristics of his work from this time became hallmarks of his entire later body of work. He also absorbed influences from various artistic styles, ranging from classical academicism to the most groundbreaking avant-garde movements. His work had an enormous influence on the direction of Surrealism in the years that followed, and he was hailed as the creator of the paranoiac-critical method—an essential fusion of the real and the imaginary. Following his first solo exhibition in New York in 1934, his international reputation was definitively established. The majority of his body of work is housed at the Dalí Theater-Museum in Figueras, followed by the collection at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg (Florida), the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Salvador Dalí Gallery in Pacific Palisades (California), the Espace Dalí in Montmartre (Paris), and the Dalí Universe in London.