Thursday, January 13, 2011

Dali: Les Chants de Maldoror - Exhibition of 44 Etchings, St. Petersburg, Florida, 1991.

Dali: Les Chants de Maldoror

Exhibition of 44 Etchings
February 5 - August 18, 1991

Salvador Dali Museum
St. Petersburg, Florida

This is a 24-page exhibition catalog of Dali's etchings for Comte de Lautreamont's (Isidore Ducasse) Les Chants de Maldoror.  These original engravings are among Dali's earliest, dating to 1934.

This catalog presents all 44 etchings of the deluxe uncropped Skira edition of 1934 (8 full-page, 36 quarter-page), which include remarques, or pencil-like drawings that appear on the bottom or top half of the plates. 

This feature makes this catalog a good reference source beyond Albert Field's Official Dali Catalog since some of Field's Maldoror reproductions (sized at 1/16th of a page) are either missing the remarques, or the remarques have been cropped out.

Elsewhere, one can find 43 Maldoror illustrations in the Pompidou Retrospective Catalog (1979/1980) sans remarques (sized at 1/9th of a page).

This exhibition catalog also features a short essay about the details of both the 1934 and 1975 print editions of the Dali etchings, and a brief essay about Lautreamont and his Maldoror text.

This catalog is not too common but it seems that there are several for sale for around $25.  Considering that the quality of the reproductions is not great (most are too light to achieve fine detail), that price might be a bit rich for this catalog.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi looked for this on the internet but difficult to locate, any pointers you can give me, thanks

Dali Collector said...

Try Amazon or AbeBooks.