Salvador Dalí

Executed circa 1976-77. This work is accompanied by a copy of a certificate of authenticity issued and signed by Nicolas and Olivier Descharnes, dated February 22, 2022.

Salvador Dalí, born in Figueres, Spain, showed artistic talent from an early age and studied at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid. A pivotal moment came in 1929 when he met Surrealists Paul and Gala Éluard, René Magritte, and dealer Camille Goemans, who organized his first Paris solo show. That year, Gala became his lifelong muse, and he formally joined the Surrealists, developing his paranoiac-critical method. Dalí collaborated on the Surrealist films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930), and in 1931 painted The Persistence of Memory, his most iconic work. Supported by patron Edward James and gallerist Julien Levy, he achieved international fame. Expelled from the Surrealist group in 1939, he insisted he remained its true representative. Dalí continued creating until his health declined in the 1980s, passing away in Figueres in 1989, six years after Gala.

The Cat with the Wine-loving Whiskers
The cat is in the middle of the land of death
Formed by each of its whiskers.
Here flow mellifluously the wines of propeller-cats
These propellor and anti-propellor wines which make up
The aphrodisiac whirlwind of Aphrodite’s goose pimples.
It is the unique chill that the sybarite of wines
Feels in his spine
When he has gulped them down. Gulp. glug. Glug. Glug. Glug...
— Salvador Dalí, Les Vins de Gala, 1977

Le Chat aux moustaches vinicoles (pour Les Vins de Gala) was created for the publication of Dalí’s 1977 book Les Vins de Gala (The Wines of Gala), which, blending poetry and prose, offers an eccentric and surreal guide to the world of wine. The various collages decorating the book are amalgamations of popular Neoclassical paintings with mythological subjects, as well as of the artist’s earlier works, enhanced with gouache and photographic elements. In this work, Dalí unites his painting Phosphène de Laporte (circa 1932) and William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Les Oréades (1902) with a photograph of a white Persian cat with heterochromia. The cat’s whiskers transform into fountains of wine, which cascade into the chalices of the nymphs and satyrs below. At the upper left, three humanoid heads and one catlike figure emerge from a yellow cloud.