Salvador Dalí

SALVADOR DALÍ (Figueres, 1904–1989).
“Five or Six at Least,” from the series “Dalí’s Goya’s Caprichos.”
Etching, print no. 95/200.
Signed and numbered by hand.
Measurements: 23 x 17 cm (print); 44 x 30 cm (paper); 47 x 34 cm (frame).

Part of the famous series in which Salvador Dalí establishes a direct dialogue with Francisco de Goya, “At Least Five or Six” is based on Capricho No. 59 by the Aragonese master, retaining both its numbering and the original title. Dalí appropriates Goya’s unsettling scene—a group of figures painstakingly supporting an enormous tilted structure—and transforms it by incorporating color and new elements drawn from his unique surrealist imagination. This intervention alters the interpretation of the engraving without negating its origin: Goya’s tormented figures and intense chiaroscuro coexist with fantastical forms, chromatic accents, and dreamlike elements introduced by Dalí, creating a deliberate encounter between two of the great visionary worlds of Spanish art.

The choice of *Los Caprichos* is particularly significant, as Goya’s imaginative freedom, the distortion of the human figure, and the presence of the irrational served as fundamental precursors for the Surrealists.

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, he 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.