The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Salvador Dalí Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

ARTIST Salvador Dalí

TITLE 'Printemps Nécrophilique'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $8 million to $12 million

Timing is everything in the auction business. So it’s no accident that this Surrealist canvas — once owned by Elsa Schiaparelli, a Paris couturier closely associated with the Surrealist movement and who collaborated with Dalí on designs — is being offered for sale just days before the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations.”

From 1936, “Printemps Nécrophilique” is an eerie dreamscape with two figures that is also coming up for sale as the interest in Surrealism continues to escalate. “It’s one of the last great isms of art history to be fully appreciated,” said Simon Shaw, who runs Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department in New York. “The roots of more recent art can be found in some of these Surrealist paintings, so it crosses over successfully, appealing to contemporary collectors too.”

The last time “Printemps Nécrophilique” was at auction, in London at Christie’s in 1998, it fetched $2.2 million.

When people think of famed surrealist Salvador Dalí, more often than not it’s one of his 1,500 paintings that comes to mind. Maybe even Destino, the Disney-animated short the Spanish artist produced in 1945.
Often overlooked, but as significant in understanding Dalí, are the hundreds of sculptures he created before he died in 1989 at age 84 in his birthplace, Figueres, Spain.
“Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality,” Dalí once said. Still, with raised Dalíesque eyebrows, people exclaim, “I did not know Dalí did sculpture.”
With the Wednesday opening of Dalí Miami at the Design District’s Moore Building, perhaps they will.
Along with his glass masterpiece Montre Molle (Melting Clock, 1971) the gouache Spring Rain (1949) and the rare intaglio The Grasshopper Child (1934), the 200 works on view will include 70 sculptures, among them Dalí’s 1964 bronze Venus de Milo with Drawers and the 1972 bronze, Winged Triton.