Viewing Rooms | Di Donna Galleries

Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, 1929.

Di Donna Galleries is delighted to present Dalí: The Great Years, 1929–1939, the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the most transformative decade of the artist’s life. Organized chronologically, the exhibition is an invitation to a fuller understanding of Dalí’s groundbreaking early oeuvre. Between 1929 and 1939, Dalí produced the most psychologically searching and formally inventive work of his life. Galvanized by his paranoiac-critical method—his rigorous procedure for harnessing the imagery of the unconscious as a vehicle for pictorial truth—the paintings of these years achieve a hallucinatory precision that still echoes today.

The decade was equally one of sweeping personal change and cultural engagement: Dalí forged his lifelong partnership with his future wife, Gala; collaborated with Luis Buñuel on films that scandalized Paris; designed for Coco Chanel and drafted a scenario for the Marx Brothers. His arrival in New York in 1934 marked a further transformation—the city received him not merely as an artist but as a cultural phenomenon, and consecrated his passage from Surrealist provocateur to international icon.

Tracing Dalí’s trajectory from Cadaqués to New York, the exhibition features over thirty paintings, works on paper and sculptures, displayed alongside archival material from distinguished public and private collections—among them the Art Institute of Chicago; Salvador Dalí Museum; Philadelphia Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Together, these works chronicle the artist’s decade of evolution distinguished by relentless ambition and creative prowess to tell the story of when Dalí became Dalí.
Un Chien Andalou, 1929/68. Lithograph poster.

First screened in Paris in 1929, Un Chien Andalou stands as one of the most influential works of Surrealist cinema. Structured as a sequence of dreamlike episodes, the film’s narrative was governed by the logic of the unconscious rather than by conventional narrative. The film’s most famous scene—an unsettling image of a razor slicing across a woman’s eye—immediately established its reputation for startling visual intensity. Throughout, seemingly unrelated episodes unfold in a dreamlike progression: Ants swarm from a hand, pianos containing dead animals are dragged across a room and time shifts abruptly without explanation. Such juxtapositions reflect the influence of psychoanalytic ideas circulating among the Surrealists.

Un Chien Andalou premiered in June 1929 to an audience of Surrealist artists and intellectuals in Paris and was immediatelyembraced by the movement’s leading figures. The film’s rejection of narrative coherence and its reliance on shocking, poetic imagery exemplified the Surrealist ambition to liberate artistic expression from rational control.

Provocative and deliberately irrational, Un Chien Andalou achieved a notoriety that extended far beyond Surrealist circles. Beginning on October 1, 1929, the film ran in Paris for nearly eight months and immediately elicited public outrage. Such scandal delighted the Surrealists, who viewed provocation as a powerful artistic strategy. Nearly a century after its debut, Un Chien Andalou remains a landmark in the history of experimental cinema.
La Profanation de l'hostie, circa 1930

Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL

Both Dali’s strained relationship with the Catholic Church and his turbulent relationship with his conservative father are addressed in this work painted circa 1930. Here, upon a gradient polychrome ground, a blasphemous desecration of the consecrated Eucharist takes place. Committing what is considered severe sacrilege by the Church, a figure, almost certainly a self-portrait, emits blood red-tinged saliva upon the host and into a chalice. This self-portrait, the motif of which first appeared in The Great Masturbator (1929), is repeated in three other instances in the work, bursting forth from the central form. Foregrounded in the work is a shame-ridden figure, perhaps representing the artist’s father, portrayed in shadow as a half-dressed youth. Highly personal iconography is included throughout the composition—including direct reference to the artist’s childhood phobia of grasshoppers. While the inclusion of ants crawling across the central form symbolize Dalí’s ever present fear of death and decay.
Complexe d'Oedipe, 1930

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Purchase

Sigmund Freud first introduced the term “Oedipus complex” in a 1910 paper titled "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men”—describing the psychological phenomenon in which sons have erotic feelings towards their mothers while simultaneously viewing their father with hostility as a rival. This text was subsequently translated into Spanish in the early 1920s, during Dalí’s student days at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where the artist was an early reader of and advocate for Freud’s psychoanalytical theories.

Dalí’s 1930 pastel, Oedipus Complex, shows a large yellow rock with seven shallow cavities carved out —each evocatively inscribed ma mère—the French word for mother. The artist’s own mother had died when he was only a teenager, with his father going on to remarry his deceased wife’s sister. The ballon-like rocks which refer to the landscape of the artist’s native Catalonia first appeared in the late 1920s, including in The Enigma of Desire (1929) which also bears the heartrending inscription of ma mère throughout.

In Oedipus Complex, congregated near the center of the form are a swarm of ants, alluding to Dalí’s ever present fear of death and decay. The scene is further populated by a mysterious white figure who stares out at the sea, while an ocean line billows out plumes of smoke in the far distance. A solitary plant is overturned in the foreground, discordantly placed in a domestic vase but adrift in a barren landscape. The present work is world unto itself populated with hallucinatory objects.
- La Femme visible, La Chasse aux papillons, 1930
  Private Collection
- Composition pour le programme du film L'Âge d'or, circa 1930
  Private Collection
Paysage, 1931

Private Collection

Mysteriously perched atop a monument, Dalí’s famed red shoe appears in the barren landscape of the present work. Compositionally, Dalí divided the present work into two distinct areas. On the right of the work lies a flat, nondescript stretch of land with an expanse of sky dominated by a large rock and its shadow along the horizon line. On the left of the canvas Dalí chose to display a discordant assemblage of objects. Many of the motifs from his highly complex and personal iconography appear in the present work, including the hanging sheet, which often hints at the unknowable within one’s own psyche. Dalí also depicted two partially obscured cypresses; the trees were also laden with meaning for the artist, who often conflated their traditional associations with death with a highly charged eroticism.
Étude pour le portrait de la vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles,

circa 1931–32

Private Collection

During the late 1920s, the French aristocratic couple Vicomte Charles and Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles, renowned for their avant-garde tastes, purchased several works by the young Salvador Dalí, including his 1929 painting Le Jeu lugubre. They would go on to also fund the Surrealist film L’Âge d’or (1930), directed by Luis Buñuel and co-written by Dalí. This early patronage allowed Dalí and his wife, Gala, to establish a home and studio in Port Lligat in the artist’s native Catalonia. Executed in pen and ink with pencil, this delicate preparatory sketch was made for an elaborate portrait of the Vicomtesse Marie-Laure, which was later meticulously rendered in oil. Dalí’s loop-like composition contains several recurring elements from his Surrealist oeuvre. These include elongated Louis XV spoons alluding to the theme of consumption, and a small clock tucked into a cut-out niche. Within the circular border sits a Swiss cheese-like boulder with cavities, while water flows from a trompe l’oeil crack in the wall, passing both figurative and floral elements to create a fountain-like effect set within a perspectival stage.
Symbole agnostique, 1932

Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950-134-40

A thin, elongated spoon emerges from a cracked wall in the top right of the canvas, jutting towards the opposite corner, only snaking around a rock that stands in its way. On close inspection, a tiny clock can be seen inside the spoon. The precise, sharp rendering of the metal spoon stands in contrast to the plain, softly painted background. In rendering this mysterious scene dominated by a familiar, yet distorted object and its shadow, Dalí explores the world of hallucination and irrationality. The imagery of clocks and spoons is a recurrent motif in Dalí’s art in this period, used for their evocative rather than symbolic value.

Agnostic Symbol (1932) was first in the collection of Ladislas Szecsi, a Hungarian-born art collector, critic, dealer and painter. Based in Paris in the interwar period, Szecsi later moved to New York, changing his name to Ladislas Segy. In 1937, Agnostic Symbol was acquired by the famed American collectors Louise and Walter C. Arensberg. Based in New York and later in California, the Arensbergs were avid collectors of avant-garde art. Their homes were a meeting place for the leading artists, writers and intellectuals of the day, and they became particularly close to Marcel Duchamp. In 1950, the Arensbergs presented their collection of over a thousand works, including the present painting, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
- Jeune fille au cerceau et montre molle, circa 1932
  Private Collection
- Le Revolver à cheveux blancs, circa 1932
  Private Collection
Buste rétrospectif de femme, 1933/77

Private Collection

Provocative and enigmatic, Buste rétrospectif de femme (1933/77) represents one of Dalí’s most impactful contributions to art of the twentieth century, the "Surrealist object.” Of the artist’s many critical advancements of Surrealism, his development of the “Surrealist object” was among his most radical as he expanded the principles of the movement into three-dimensions. As seen in the present work in combining familiar objects in an irrational manner, Dalí achieved a form of pure thought, devoid of any pragmatic function, whose sole purpose was furthering the human imagination.
Le Cannibalisme des objets, 1933

Gale and Ira Drukier

Le Cannibalisme des objets (1933) centers on one of the most charged motifs in Dalí's Surrealist vocabulary, a woman's high-heeled shoe. At the center of the present composition, it floats surrounded by two hands, while a spoon sits posed at the ready above. While overhead a dense, swirling mass coalesces into a human form, seemingly sucking matter from the interior of the shoe into its mouth. In the present work, Dalí has created an image that is simultaneously erotic, violent, absurd and unsettling. The title, inscribed by the artist in the upper left corner, describes that the act depicted is not ordinary destruction but a very particular kind of self-consumption, in which objects turn on themselves and devour their own meaning.

The present work was acquired directly from the artist by its first owner, Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny Lucinge, who was among a circle of twelve Parisian collectors known as the Zodiac group. Formed at the end of 1932, the group provided Dalí with a guaranteed monthly income in exchange for works on paper and paintings, offering the financial foundation that allowed him to work with exceptional freedom and productivity during this pivotal period.

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Reject non essential