Executed circa 1930. This drawing is the original program design for the public opening of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1930 film L'Âge d'or at Studio 28 in Montmartre on November 28, 1930.



L’Âge d’or, co-written by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, was a
ground-breaking Surrealist film.

Radical and dreamlike—the film’s plot follows two lovers desperately trying to
unite and featured harsh critiques of establishment values, sexual repression
and capitalist authority. The present
work was created to illustrate the program during its run at Studio 28 in Paris.
The composition is populated with evocative and disparate vignettes—Dalí
references religion with a host and chalice near the center while a large swarm
of ants dominates the upper right corner. Accompanying the image in the printed
program, Dalí wrote that the film’s intention was “to
present the pure straight line of conduct of one who pursued love in spite of
the ignoble humanitarian and patriotic ideals and other miserable mechanisms of
reality.”