Salvador Dali (1904-1989) - Les Chants de Maldoror

SALVADOR DALÍ (1904–1989)

LES CHANTS DE MALDOROR — LOS CANTOS DE MALDOROR

Individual title: (Les Chants de Maldoror — Los cantos de Maldoror), Salvador Dalí, 1934.

Series: Les Chants de Maldoror, illustrations for the work of the Count of Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse).

Date of creation: 1933–1934.
First edition: Albert Skira, Paris, 1934.
Original printer: Atelier Roger Lacourière, Paris.
Technique of the series: Heliogravure and plate etching procedures, with dry-point intervention.
Support: Printmaking paper.
Sheet dimensions: 33.5 × 24 cm.
Print date of the exemplar: To be determined by examination of the sheet and its provenance.

Work cataloged:

* Michler & Löpsinger, Salvador Dalí. Catalogue Raisonné of Etchings and Mixed-Media Prints 1924–1980, Volume I, numbers 11–54.
* Albert Field, The Official Catalog of the Graphic Works of Salvador Dalí, reference 34-2.
* Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, catalogue raisonné of graphic works, OG 018.
* Monod, bibliographic reference 6899.

Description:

Extraordinary surrealist composition by Salvador Dalí, belonging to his famous series Les Chants de Maldoror, created between 1933 and 1934 to illustrate the literary work of the Count of Lautréamont, one of the most influential authors in the birth of the Surrealist movement.

This body of work occupies a prominent place in Dalí’s graphic career, corresponding to his first mature stage of surrealism, during the years in which he developed some of his most emblematic and revolutionary images.

In these compositions, the artist unfolds a universe of extraordinary imagination, populated by transformed human figures, impossible anatomical structures, bone fragments, organic forms, and metaphysical landscapes of unsettling beauty.

Through a drawing of great precision and a delicate combination of lines, shading, and perspective, Dalí recreates Lautréamont’s hallucinatory and provocative world, merging literature, psychoanalysis, and surrealism in a series of extraordinary visual power.

The original edition was published in Paris in 1934 by the prestigious publisher Albert Skira and illustrated with 42 prints, including full-page compositions and vignettes.

The historical importance of this series is widely recognized by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, whose collections preserve copies and documentation of the original compositions.

Exemplar with ample margins, belonging to one of the foundational bibliographic series of 20th-century European surrealism.

Distinguished graphic work by Salvador Dalí, of great interest to collectors of historical surrealism, graphic art, artist’s books, and avant-garde bibliophilia.

Provenance: collection linked to Enrique Sabater