Les Chants de Maldoror, illustrés par Salvador Dali,
Geneve: Etienne et Christian Braillard [printers], nd. Paperback. Black paper wraps with black staples; gilt lettering. 48 pp. with 44 bw illustrations. No text, except for the title page. VG- clean, free of extraneous marks; no chips or tears; some faint age toning to pages; light shelf wear in general with owner's blind stamp (art dealer/curator) on title page. Item #162274
In 1930 Dali was invited to illustrate Les Chants de Maldoror, an 1869 text [by the Comte de Lautreamont, whose actual name was Isidore-Lucien Ducasse] rediscovered by the Surrealists in the 1930s that told a nightmarish tale of an unrepentantly evil protagonist. The book was filled with scenes of violence, perversion, and blasphemy. Dali, who worked in a method he called "paranoiac-critical," used a stream-of-consciousness process to access hallucinations and delusions. These personal visions, rather than scenes described in the prose poem, became the subjects of his illustrations. The individual prints Dali executed in the 1930s, made predominately at the workshop of Roger Lacourière, were experiments in intaglio and were never published as editions. Limp Cranes and "Cranian" Harp, composed as an accumulation of sketches, juxtaposes an array of Dali's quintessential motifs—soft watches, mutating shoes, and the stretched harp and deformed skulls referred to in the title. The harp and skull were, for Dali, evocative of melancholy and death. He claimed that his particular obsession with skull imagery was rooted in a childhood memory of encountering an encephalitic whose skull had been deformed by disease. - Publication excerpt from Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 98.
OCLC: 908548689
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