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Lot Essay
Conceived in 1936, Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs is one of Salvador Dalí’s most iconic sculptures. At the centre of the artwork is a re-imagining of the renowned Venus de Milo, a second century BCE marble sculpture from the Greek island of Milos. Found in 1820, the statue entered the Louvre the following year, and has been exhibited there since. A representation of the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and desire, the Venus de Milo embodies the classical female ideal. The sculpture held a lasting influence over Dalí, who recounted in his memoirs, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, that a clay imitation of the statue was his very first attempt at sculptural work. His childhood admiration for the famed sculpture never waned, and Venus iconography recurs time and again throughout Dalí’s oeuvre. In Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs, Dalí replicated the renowned Hellenistic monument and transformed it into a surrealist object, with six drawers perforating the figure’s head, torso, and left leg.
The story of Dalí’s Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs is rich in myth and history. In 1934 Dalí met Edward James, the English poet and Surrealist collector, who would become a great friend as well as a key patron. While staying in London with James, Dalí heard the British expression ‘chest of drawers,’ and, the artist, struck by the unfamiliar turn of phrase, was utterly captivated. Dalí’s art subsequently began to feature human figures with compartments carved into their torsos and limbs, and, from 1936 onwards, drawers became a recognisably ‘Dalían’ motif.
The iconography of Dalí’s drawers directly recalls the work of Sigmund Freud, whose pioneering theories on psychoanalysis and the human subconscious were revered by the artist. For Dalí, the only difference between Classical Greece and his own day and age was ‘Sigmund Freud, who discovered that the human body, purely platonic in the Greek epoch, is nowadays full of secret drawers that only psychoanalysis is capable to open’ (quoted in ‘Notable Acquisitions at the Art Institute of Chicago,’ in Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 32, No.1, 2006, pp. 64-65). In Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs, the compartments, along with the voids they create, act as probes into human identity, exploring the internal landscape of a statue famed for its external appearance.
Yet James and Freud were not the only people whose presence helped shape Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs – the artist Marcel Duchamp assisted Dalí with the technical aspects of the original plaster model in 1936. Allegedly, when Duchamp unveiled the finished piece, an agitated Dalí declared that his Venus would not be made of plaster, but of bronze, and then painted white to resemble plaster, so as to confound the viewer’s expectations. This surprising aspect of the sculpture reveals how fundamental materiality and medium are to Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs; Dalí intended her to be touched. Ermine pompoms adorn the handles of each of the drawers on the present work, a titillating detail that accentuates the sensuality of the classical goddess of desire. The soft fur, so striking against her smooth curves, lures the viewer to physically engage with the artwork, and thus to feel astonished by the sensation of her firm cool bronze where they expected chalky plaster – exactly as Dalí intended.
The physicality of the Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs held a lasting significance for Dalí, revealed by the artist’s return to the sculpture in the 1960s. Using bronze – the medium he had always envisaged for the work – Dalí cast the work in an edition of five, with one artist’s proof, the present lot, which entered his personal collection. It was also in the sixties that Dalí added the ermine pompoms to the handles of each compartment. Photographs from a 1939 private exhibition of Dalí’s work at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, where a plaster version of the Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs was on display, depict this first realisation of the sculpture prior to the addition of the tantalising pompoms.
Dalí’s time with the Parisian Surrealists in the late 1920s had prompted his own ventures into the movement, which he officially joined in 1929, and he swiftly became an integral and innovative member of the group. Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs embodies the Surrealist concept of the ‘symbolically functioning object,’ an idea which Dalí himself had introduced in his 1931 essay on Surrealist objects in the journal Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. The concept of the found object as art had been pioneered by artists like Pablo Picasso and Duchamp, whereby mundane objects, such as matchboxes and newspapers for Picasso, and shovels or urinals for Duchamp, were elevated to the status of an artwork through the artist’s expression of intention. Dalí encouraged his fellow Surrealists to engage in the collective production of new objects that would have a psychological rather than an aesthetic dimension, blurring the boundary between object and art. In Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs, Dalí took a renowned artwork, the Venus de Milo, as the found object, and, by fragmenting the ancient statue with moveable compartments, transformed the goddess’s form into a functioning cabinet. When the viewer, motivated by their desire to touch the tantalising fur-capped handles, uses the drawers, Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs at once occupies the Surrealist threshold between art and object.
The story of Dalí’s Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs is rich in myth and history. In 1934 Dalí met Edward James, the English poet and Surrealist collector, who would become a great friend as well as a key patron. While staying in London with James, Dalí heard the British expression ‘chest of drawers,’ and, the artist, struck by the unfamiliar turn of phrase, was utterly captivated. Dalí’s art subsequently began to feature human figures with compartments carved into their torsos and limbs, and, from 1936 onwards, drawers became a recognisably ‘Dalían’ motif.
The iconography of Dalí’s drawers directly recalls the work of Sigmund Freud, whose pioneering theories on psychoanalysis and the human subconscious were revered by the artist. For Dalí, the only difference between Classical Greece and his own day and age was ‘Sigmund Freud, who discovered that the human body, purely platonic in the Greek epoch, is nowadays full of secret drawers that only psychoanalysis is capable to open’ (quoted in ‘Notable Acquisitions at the Art Institute of Chicago,’ in Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 32, No.1, 2006, pp. 64-65). In Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs, the compartments, along with the voids they create, act as probes into human identity, exploring the internal landscape of a statue famed for its external appearance.
Yet James and Freud were not the only people whose presence helped shape Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs – the artist Marcel Duchamp assisted Dalí with the technical aspects of the original plaster model in 1936. Allegedly, when Duchamp unveiled the finished piece, an agitated Dalí declared that his Venus would not be made of plaster, but of bronze, and then painted white to resemble plaster, so as to confound the viewer’s expectations. This surprising aspect of the sculpture reveals how fundamental materiality and medium are to Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs; Dalí intended her to be touched. Ermine pompoms adorn the handles of each of the drawers on the present work, a titillating detail that accentuates the sensuality of the classical goddess of desire. The soft fur, so striking against her smooth curves, lures the viewer to physically engage with the artwork, and thus to feel astonished by the sensation of her firm cool bronze where they expected chalky plaster – exactly as Dalí intended.
The physicality of the Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs held a lasting significance for Dalí, revealed by the artist’s return to the sculpture in the 1960s. Using bronze – the medium he had always envisaged for the work – Dalí cast the work in an edition of five, with one artist’s proof, the present lot, which entered his personal collection. It was also in the sixties that Dalí added the ermine pompoms to the handles of each compartment. Photographs from a 1939 private exhibition of Dalí’s work at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, where a plaster version of the Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs was on display, depict this first realisation of the sculpture prior to the addition of the tantalising pompoms.
Dalí’s time with the Parisian Surrealists in the late 1920s had prompted his own ventures into the movement, which he officially joined in 1929, and he swiftly became an integral and innovative member of the group. Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs embodies the Surrealist concept of the ‘symbolically functioning object,’ an idea which Dalí himself had introduced in his 1931 essay on Surrealist objects in the journal Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. The concept of the found object as art had been pioneered by artists like Pablo Picasso and Duchamp, whereby mundane objects, such as matchboxes and newspapers for Picasso, and shovels or urinals for Duchamp, were elevated to the status of an artwork through the artist’s expression of intention. Dalí encouraged his fellow Surrealists to engage in the collective production of new objects that would have a psychological rather than an aesthetic dimension, blurring the boundary between object and art. In Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs, Dalí took a renowned artwork, the Venus de Milo, as the found object, and, by fragmenting the ancient statue with moveable compartments, transformed the goddess’s form into a functioning cabinet. When the viewer, motivated by their desire to touch the tantalising fur-capped handles, uses the drawers, Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs at once occupies the Surrealist threshold between art and object.