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Lot Essay
This sculpture is based on the figure in the painting entitled Phosfène de Laporte (Descharnes, no. 439), which Dalí painted in 1932. It is also a variant on the 1969 sculpture Hommage à Newton.
"It is said that Newton discovered the law of gravity when an apple fell from a tree onto his head. Of course he did not discover it in the sense that it was somewhere hidden and needed only to be found. What he did was to formulate the law of Gravity, and it is for this that Dalí renders him homage. The plumb line represents the fall of the apple, but it is transformed by Dalí from the random, unpredictable trajectory of a ripe (soft) apple into the rigid, perfectly straight and immutable (hard) line of attraction that requires it to be precisely perpendicular to the earth's surface and points toward its center. The apple itself has become a sphere of metal. It has lost both its impermanence and its capacity for regeneration and has become a uniform solid that can neither be changed nor cause a change.
Dalí shows that the living human being, Sir Isaac Newton, has become a name in science completely lacking in personality and in individuality, merely a label. He could not show the transformation from soft to hard by removing the flesh and leaving a skeleton, for such a figure would carry so many conventional associations that it would be completely banal and in no way Dalínian. Therefore, he introduced into the figure two large holes: one removes the viscera and the other the brain, leaving only the symbolic hardness of the metal statue. Newton the man is gone, while Newton's law is demonstrated to us voicelessly and permanently" (F. Passoni, A.R. Moore and A. Field, Dal/ai nella terza dimensione, Milan, 1987, p. 54).
Another cast of the present work is erected at the Plaza Dalí located in Madrid, forming an integral part of the monumental work Dolmen de Dalí; another cast may be found at the Teatre-Museu Dalí in Figuera, Spain.
"It is said that Newton discovered the law of gravity when an apple fell from a tree onto his head. Of course he did not discover it in the sense that it was somewhere hidden and needed only to be found. What he did was to formulate the law of Gravity, and it is for this that Dalí renders him homage. The plumb line represents the fall of the apple, but it is transformed by Dalí from the random, unpredictable trajectory of a ripe (soft) apple into the rigid, perfectly straight and immutable (hard) line of attraction that requires it to be precisely perpendicular to the earth's surface and points toward its center. The apple itself has become a sphere of metal. It has lost both its impermanence and its capacity for regeneration and has become a uniform solid that can neither be changed nor cause a change.
Dalí shows that the living human being, Sir Isaac Newton, has become a name in science completely lacking in personality and in individuality, merely a label. He could not show the transformation from soft to hard by removing the flesh and leaving a skeleton, for such a figure would carry so many conventional associations that it would be completely banal and in no way Dalínian. Therefore, he introduced into the figure two large holes: one removes the viscera and the other the brain, leaving only the symbolic hardness of the metal statue. Newton the man is gone, while Newton's law is demonstrated to us voicelessly and permanently" (F. Passoni, A.R. Moore and A. Field, Dal/ai nella terza dimensione, Milan, 1987, p. 54).
Another cast of the present work is erected at the Plaza Dalí located in Madrid, forming an integral part of the monumental work Dolmen de Dalí; another cast may be found at the Teatre-Museu Dalí in Figuera, Spain.