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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. 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.

*ORIGINAL FILM ON VIEW DURING EXHIBITION
La Profanation de l'hostie, circa 1930

Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL

ON LOAN

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. 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

ON LOAN

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. 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
  ON LOAN
Paysage, 1931

Private Collection

ON LOAN

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. This early patronage allowed Dalí and his wife, Gala, to establish a home and studio in Port Lligat in the artist’s native Catalonia. 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

ON LOAN

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.
- 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

ON LOAN

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

Private Collection, New York

ON LOAN

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.
Cour centrale de l'Île des morts (obsession reconstitutive d'après Böcklin), 1934

Private Collection

ON LOAN

Dalí’s Cour centrale de l’Île des morts (obsession reconstitutive d’après Böcklin) (1934) revisits the Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin’s (1827–1901) most celebrated subject, The Isle of the Dead. Drawing inspiration from the elder artist, Dalí restaged Böcklin’s eerily disquieting scene as a triptych—the present work comprising the central panel. On the extreme left of the canvas stands a hulking skeletal apparition in front of a crush of cypresses. Böcklin, too, had punctuated his paintings with the same trees, which have been symbols of death since antiquity. Speaking to Dalí’s fascination with the psyche, the present work is a physical manifestation of both an ever-looming fear of death and the unknowable reality of what lies behind the veil in an afterlife.
Le sevrage du meuble-aliment, 1934

Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL

ON LOAN

Set on a beach in Dalí’s beloved home of Port Lligat, the present work presents a deeply personal and highly iconographic scene. In the words of Dalí himself, this piece is about "the absence of a beloved person [leaving] a sentimental void in us." The solitary figure seated on the beach is a stand in for Dalí’s beloved childhood nanny, Llúcia. She sits in the posture assumed by centuries of woman mending fishing net, hunched over her work. As a child, Dalí heavily associated his night table and bottle with his nurse, as seen along the right of the composition the weaning of the title takes on a literal presence. Echoing the void within the table, the female figure has been hollowed out, her only support a crutch. Representing the need for emotional support in Dalí’s complex visual language, the crutch here is a physical manifestation of a significant early relationship for the artist.
Nu féminin, hystérique et aérodynamique, 1934/73

Private Collection

ON LOAN

In the present work, a figure reclines across a low, wave-like base, her body arched and twisted in a sweeping line. From this organic core, a large blade-like form erupts upward and to the left—distinct from the figure yet complimentary in its composition. Reinforcing the sense of motion in the tableau, the figure’s head has been streamlined to an aerodynamic form. Dalí referred to the work as “Aerodynamic Woman” in his publication, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), a title that foregrounds the mechanics of the body rather highlighting its eroticism.
Vestiges ataviques après la pluie, circa 1934

Private Collection

ON LOAN

In 1932, Dalí was seized by a sudden obsession with Jean-François Millet’s painting L’Angélus (1857–59). He remembered from childhood that a reproduction of the work had “produced in me an obscure anguish, so poignant that the memory of those two motionless silhouettes pursued me for several years” before disappearing from his mind. Decades later, using his paranoic-critical method, the artist sought to uncover what he saw as the true meaning of the painting—developing a complex narrative of interpretations and associations around Millet’s work. Meticulously rendered and symbolically layered, Vestiges ataviques après la pluie exemplifies the highly personal nature of Dalí’s oeuvre in the 1930s.
Personnage aux tiroirs, circa 1934–38

Private Collection, New York

ON LOAN

Dalí’s expert draftsmanship is on display within the elegant and elongated lines that comprise a solitary female figure replete with an arched head in profil perdu. This large-scale work from circa 1934–38 was made during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), a period when Dalí’s mannequin-like figures adopted an exaggerated height and angular boniness. Their emaciated appearance, perhaps alluding to the suffering felt by his fellow Catalans during wartime. In the present work, the figure is incorporated with vertical succession of dresser drawers and harkens back to his celebrated painted plaster object Venus de Milo with Drawers (1934). The compartmentalized drawers of Freud’s theory now opened to reveal the trauma of a country tearing itself apart.
Spectre du soir sur la plage, 1935

Private Collection

In this powerful dreamscape Dalí depicts the beach near his native Figueres in Catalonia. Dominated by the expanse of sand and a large sky with almost anthropomorphic clouds, the composition conjures up memories of the landscape in which the artist spent many summers of his childhood. Rendered with a precision and finesse that Dalí owed to his admiration and study of European old masters, the miniature figures accentuate the vastness and melancholic atmosphere of the beach. This eerie landscape, with its craggy rocks, sea and sand haunted the artist’s subconscious mind, providing the setting for many of his most important and groundbreaking compositions.
illustration pour l'article "The American City Night and Day by Dalí" du journal American Weekly du 31 mars 1935, 1935

Private Collection

The present work was executed in charcoal for the popular publication,The American Weekly, shortly after Dalí's arrival in New York. Commissioned by the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Dalí published seven illustrated articles between December 1934 and July 1935. He would continue to provide illustrations through 1938, as a record of his impressions of daily life in the United States. The characters who feature within the vignettes in the publication appear as stereotypes—the denizens of the city as Dalí both perceives and imagines them to be. These illustrations ultimately proved a critique of underlying social structures, at once both satirical and exactingly sharp.
Femme-tiroir, 1936

Private Collection

ON LOAN

Femme-tiroir (1936) is an exceptional work on paper dating from the height of Salvador Dalí’s "hand-painted dream photograph" period—his term for the illusionistic rendering of irrational, internally generated imagery. The figure is rendered in Dalí's distinctive technique of dense white lines against a black ground. The face has been replaced by an open drawer—a motif Dalí developed throughout the 1930s in direct dialogue with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic writings. For Dalí, the human body concealed "secret drawers" accessible only through the methods of psychoanalysis.
Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs, 1936/64

Private Collection

ON LOAN

Conceived in 1936, the present work is one of the icons of Surrealism. Recasting the famed Venus de Milo statue as a “Surrealist object,” Dalí transformed the pinnacle of classicism into a modern masterwork. Key to the sculpture’s new meaning was Dalí’s addition of drawers throughout the body of the sculpture. One of the artist’s most enduring and evocative motifs, drawers represented for Dalí access to the subconscious. An earlier, plaster example was included in the seminal Salvador Dalí exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1939. This present 1964 edition demonstrates Dalí’s method of painting bronze to appear as marble—furthering the dialogue between the modern and antiquity.
Paysage (Illustration pour Sécheresse), 1936

Private Collection

Paysage (Illustration pour Trois sécheresses) (1936) deploys a uniquely Dalían visual lexicon: the drawer motif, a barren coastal landscape evocative of his native Cadaqués and the isolated human figure. It was reproduced in Minotaure (June 1936), the celebrated Surrealist journal that served as one of the movement’s principal platforms during this period—accompanied by the British poet and art patron Edward James’ text “Trois sécheresses.” That Dalí chose to illustrate James’ poetry with imagery drawn from his most personal artistic vocabulary underscores the depth of their creative exchange.
Téléphone homard, circa 1936/77

Private Collection

In 1935, Salvador Dalí was asked by The American Weekly to make a series of drawings based on his impressions of New York. The following year, Dalí, along with his friend and patron Edward James, created his first Téléphone homard, which was exhibited in 1938 at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Téléphone homard was one of several works meant to be included in James’s London home, which Dalí and James conceived as a single elaborate artwork that would transform the quotidian space into an evocative and eclectic environment. Téléphone homard furthered the Duchampian language of the readymade to what Dalí termed “the Surrealist object.” The artist believed that by combining the everyday in absurd juxtaposes, the true spectrum of human imagination could be uncovered.
Portrait de Harpo Marx avec girafes en feu, 1937

Private Collection

After meeting the beloved comedian in the summer of 1936 in Paris, Dalí swiftly became enamored with Harpo Marx and sent him a self-designed harp, complete with barbed-wire strings and revolving cutlery-adorned knobs. Marx, excited by the eccentric gift, invited Dalí to visit him in Hollywood, and within a month, the two artists began to collaborate. Dalí completed two fantastical drawings of Marx: the first portrait was featured in the June 1937 issue of Harper’s Bazaar; and the second portrait, the present work, was reproduced in Time Magazine in December 1938 and shows Marx playing the harp that Dalí had gifted him. He is surrounded by a group of three standing giraffes whose necks are on fire, a recurrent motif from this period.
Anatomies, circa 1937

The Ted Chernick Collection

ON LOAN

Anatomies (circa 1937) is a significant example from an intensely creative and psychoanalytically charged period within Dalí’s oeuvre. Against a uniformly black ground, seven spectral female torsos emerge in a palette of white, red, pink and green. The composition exemplifies the tension Dalí cultivated between technical control and contingency: Areas of the work are rendered with deliberate precision, while others are surrendered to the unpredictable.
- Conquest of the Air, 1937
  Private Collection, New York
  ON LOAN
- Bouche de Mae West, pouvant servir de canapé, 1930
  Private Collection
  ON LOAN
SANS TITRE, 1938

Private Collection

ON LOAN

Painted in 1938, the present work exemplifies the mature Surrealist language of Salvador Dalí, in which optical illusion and metamorphosis play a central role. At the center of the composition a swan is perched at the water’s edge, its graceful form mirrored in the reflective surface below. In a characteristic act of visual transformation, the swan’s reflection resolves into the distinct shape of an elephant, with the bird’s neck and body forming the contours of the mammal’s head and trunk. Rendered in a dark, atmospheric palette and rife with optical ambiguity, the present work captures the poetic essence of Dalí’s Surrealist vision.
Ballerine en tête de mort, circa 1939

Private Collection

ON LOAN

In the late 1930s, Dalí was working on the production of Bacchanale with the dance troupe Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a successor of the original Ballets Russes after the death of its founder Serge Diaghilev. Described by Dalí as the first of “paranoiac” spectacles, it was also his first of many collaborations with the company. Ballerine en tête de mort depicts a ballerina in a lavish white dress, whose figure morphs into a skull, the positioning of her arms and costume doubling as eye sockets, nasal cavity and teeth. This type of double imagery is characteristic of Dalí’s "paranoiac-critical method," which he formulated in 1930 and which involved self-induced hallucinations that would ignite his imagination and inspire his art.
Deux études de scénographie et costume pour le ballet Bacchanale, 1939

Private Collection

Executed in ink and heightened with white gouache, the present work balances meticulous draftsmanship with luminous accents suggestive of theatrical lights. At the upper right, an elongated, winged, biomorphic figure unfurls in a sweeping arc, its attenuated arm and feathered contours evoking both dancer and swan. Below, a cluster of diminutive, tutu-clad dancers appears in vignetted silhouette, grounding the fantastical invention in the familiar lexicon of classical ballet. Both refined and hallucinatory, the present study reveals how Dalí conceived the ballet stage as a living Surrealist tableau—one in which fashion, choreography, and dream imagery converged in ecstatic transformation.
Untitled (Dream of Venus), 1939

The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph R. Shapiro, 1987.318

ON LOAN

Conceived as part of Dalí’s immersive attraction Dream of Venus, the present work comprised the left-most portion of the mural backdrop for the artist’s pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Installed behind glass tanks, and costumed “mermaids,” the mural enhanced a dreamlike marine setting that enveloped visitors in Dalí’s fantastical vision. Within the present composition, biomorphic forms, shadowy figures, and fluid architectural elements merge in a shallow yet illusionistic space. Evoking both classical mythology and subconscious fantasy, Dalí’s meticulous technique—precise draftsmanship, smooth modeling, and jewel-like color—contrasts with the irrational juxtapositions that animate the scene.
Étude à l'architecture, chevalier et personnages, 1939

Private Collection

Etude à l’Architecture, Chevalier et Personnages (1939–42) is an evocative drawing that combines architectural precision with dreamlike figuration, showcasing Dalí’s mastery of line and composition. The work features a monumental arch that frames a distant horizon, crowned by a solitary knight poised atop the Neoclassical structure. Below, a mounted rider and shadowy human form animate the scene, merging classical motifs with Surrealist ambiguity. Dedicated to the French writer André Maurois, the inscription reveals Dalí’s personal connection to the intellectual and artistic circles of his time.
Carl Van Vechten, Portrait of Salvador Dalí, 1939.

Dalí: The Great Years, 1929–1939

April 16 – June 13, 2026

744 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10065

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