.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate by Robert Descharnes.
This self-portrait, or rather meta-portrait, by Dalí was executed in 1973 as part of a suite of twelve works entitled Memories of Surrealism. The work is constructed around a central photo-montage which shows Dalí's two most striking features - his eyes and moustache - superimposed upon those of the Mona Lisa. This montage was originally created in 1954 in collaboration with the photographer Philippe Halsman, with whom Dalí enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship from when they first met in 1941. The resultant portrait, called Mona Dalí, was included in the pair's publication Dalí's Mustache [sic.], and not only showed the artist's features in place of the iconic original but also had Dalí's hands clutching a handful of silver in reference to the moniker 'Avidos Dollar' famously given him by André Breton.
The present lot, together with the 1954 work, can be understood, to one degree, as a post-modern engagement with an image whose iconic status has come to challenge perceived boundaries between high and popular culture, between art as aesthetic and cultural reference point. Dalí considered Marcel Duchamp's 1919 parody of the Mona Lisa in his two essays, The King and Queen traversed by swift nudes (1959) and Why they attack the Mona Lisa (1963). The latter read Duchamp's 'desecration' of Leonardo's work as an act of Freudian rebellion against female idealization, through the act of 'masculinising' the original, by the pencilling on of a moustache. Yet, whilst being an act of rebellion, it is also a re-invention of the Mona Lisa itself, so that it becomes a site for artistic exploration of issues of identity and gender - issues questioned further and, to an extent, parodied in this self-portrait by Dalí.
By re-shaping and imprinting his own features on the Mona Lisa, and then adding further 'alien' layers to the portrait, in the headdress, the body, the hand holding flowers and the butterflies, Dalí distances his own physiognomy from the picture, thereby emphasising and exposing his own, by now iconic, moustache and eyes. As a result, instead of self-portraiture understood as, and confined to, physical likeness, it is conceived as a deeper representation of his artistic self such that one understands this self as being subject to change, composite it nature and built on memory. Indeed, one might see the many butterflies as a symbol of this continual metamorphosis and of the multiplicity of the soul itself. They also serve to act as a garland to frame the portrait, perhaps purposefully, and subversively, reminiscent of the manner in which flowers would encircle portraits of the Madonna during the Renaissance. The whole work, with its composite construction and blurring of gender, is highly suggestive of Dalí's own mischievous humour and playful identity.
This self-portrait, or rather meta-portrait, by Dalí was executed in 1973 as part of a suite of twelve works entitled Memories of Surrealism. The work is constructed around a central photo-montage which shows Dalí's two most striking features - his eyes and moustache - superimposed upon those of the Mona Lisa. This montage was originally created in 1954 in collaboration with the photographer Philippe Halsman, with whom Dalí enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship from when they first met in 1941. The resultant portrait, called Mona Dalí, was included in the pair's publication Dalí's Mustache [sic.], and not only showed the artist's features in place of the iconic original but also had Dalí's hands clutching a handful of silver in reference to the moniker 'Avidos Dollar' famously given him by André Breton.
The present lot, together with the 1954 work, can be understood, to one degree, as a post-modern engagement with an image whose iconic status has come to challenge perceived boundaries between high and popular culture, between art as aesthetic and cultural reference point. Dalí considered Marcel Duchamp's 1919 parody of the Mona Lisa in his two essays, The King and Queen traversed by swift nudes (1959) and Why they attack the Mona Lisa (1963). The latter read Duchamp's 'desecration' of Leonardo's work as an act of Freudian rebellion against female idealization, through the act of 'masculinising' the original, by the pencilling on of a moustache. Yet, whilst being an act of rebellion, it is also a re-invention of the Mona Lisa itself, so that it becomes a site for artistic exploration of issues of identity and gender - issues questioned further and, to an extent, parodied in this self-portrait by Dalí.
By re-shaping and imprinting his own features on the Mona Lisa, and then adding further 'alien' layers to the portrait, in the headdress, the body, the hand holding flowers and the butterflies, Dalí distances his own physiognomy from the picture, thereby emphasising and exposing his own, by now iconic, moustache and eyes. As a result, instead of self-portraiture understood as, and confined to, physical likeness, it is conceived as a deeper representation of his artistic self such that one understands this self as being subject to change, composite it nature and built on memory. Indeed, one might see the many butterflies as a symbol of this continual metamorphosis and of the multiplicity of the soul itself. They also serve to act as a garland to frame the portrait, perhaps purposefully, and subversively, reminiscent of the manner in which flowers would encircle portraits of the Madonna during the Renaissance. The whole work, with its composite construction and blurring of gender, is highly suggestive of Dalí's own mischievous humour and playful identity.