A complete portfolio of 25 lithographs, "Aliyah, The Rebirth of Israel" by the Paris Surrealist Salvador Dali will be exhibited from September 8 through November 30, 2015 at Donna Leatherman llc, 780 Madison Avenue 4a, New York, New York 10065.
Published by Shorewood Publishers, New York in 1968 to commemorate the 20 year anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, the edition of 250 portfolios took two years to complete. The two leading European ateliers for lithographs, Fernand Mourlot of Paris and Wolfensgerger of Zurich provided Dali the necessary space and and facilities convert the image of paintings to lithographs. The stones were destroyed once the edition was complete.
The terrible brutality of displacement is embodied in this masterfully wrought series by Dali. Yet, beyond challenges of exile, the the message of hope and faith remains strong. This message resonates today.
Dr. Elliott H. King
Guest Curator, "Dalí: The Late Work," High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2010
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) is one of the most famous and popular artists of the twentieth century. Until recently, however, most critics and art historians considered only a small portion of his prolific output — that executed between 1929 and 1939, when he was in direct contact with the Paris Surrealists — to be worthy of serious study. Over the past decade, there has been a revitalization of interest in Dalí's art and writing of the 1940s through the 1980s, though that "renaissance" has concerned chiefly his paintings — his 1950s "Nuclear Mysticism," his 1960s proto-Pop Art paintings, and his 1970s experiments with optical illusions — and, to a lesser extent, his films. His enormous body of limited-edition graphic suites, in contrast, continues to await proper reassessment. The Exhibit, Aliyah, The Rebirth of Israel (1968), organized as part of the dedicatory year for the Marcus Hillel Center of Emory University, leads that effort, buttressing the growing critical awareness and appreciation of Dalí's later work through its reconsideration of what is surely one of the artist's most visually appealing — and historically significant — graphic commissions.
Despite Dalí's perceived distance from the avant-garde in the later twentieth century, the 1960s were his most prolific years in terms of sheer volume, thanks largely to the graphic suites that became a steady income stream through the efforts of his business manager, Captain John Peter Moore. Though ever popular with collectors and the public at-large, critics and scholars have widely judged these graphics as predominantly commercial ventures with little artistic interest or merit. Dalí did not aid his case: "Each morning after breakfast, I like to start the day by earning $20,000," he boasted, referring to the ease with which he could sign stacks of printed lithographs for a ludicrously quick profit. Yet neglecting the graphics has meant a lacuna for Dalí scholarship: after all, their creation comprised the vast majority of the artist's 1960s and 1970s activity, with literally hundreds of post-war commissions that ranged from Boccaccio's Decameron and Shakespeare's Macbeth to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, writings by the Marquis de Sade, and The Holy Bible. Further, just as fresh investigations into the inspirations underlying his much-ridiculed religious paintings have brought to light a much more profound intention than previously assumed, so explorations into Dalí's graphics reveal a surprising knowledge of his subjects, a seriousness that he adopted as a professional artist, and a refreshing willingness to experiment with new styles and media.
The Exhibit's most important contribution may be the welcome attention it gives to the artist's direct references to Jewish history, which have been heretofore dismissed as inconsequential or ignored altogether. Through the curators' choice to rearrange the lithographs in a thematic-historical sequence that underscores Dalí's quotations from Jewish history, Aliyah is seen here afresh and with newfound gravitas.
Some viewers may be surprised that the Aliyah illustrations are so loose and expressionistic in contrast with the refined, photographic quality characteristic of Dalí's paintings. One of the appealing elements of Dalí's graphics is the unusual means by which he would often create the original gouaches or, in this case, watercolors. This began in 1957 with his first lithograph series, Pages choisies de Don Quichotte de la Mancha, for which he pioneered the use of what he dubbed "bulletism": shooting the plates with paint-filled bullets using an antique arquebus. The same "splatter" effect can be seen in several of the Aliyah paintings, aligning them not only with earlier Abstract Expressionism (albeit with a Dalinian flair) but suggesting an element of performance as well.
Also noteworthy, four of the Aliyah paintings relate directly to the major 1966-1967 oil painting Tuna Fishing, a mammoth canvas (approximately 9 x 13 ft) intended as a hallucinogenic compendium of Dalí's artistic influences, from 19th academic painting through Pop Art. Two of the Aliyah paintings relate to the spearing of fish — "We shall go up at once and possess it" (plate 4), in which the spear in Tuna Fishingis replaced by the flag of Israel, and "Let them have dominion" (plate 10) — while another two — Angels of Rebirth (plate 8) and "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death" (plate 14) — quote Tuna Fishing's abstruse Op Art sections. These quotations may be "paranoiac" in nature, by which I mean that they incorporate Dalí's "paranoiac critical method": a self-induced "psychosis" the artist theorized in the early 1930s that encouraged him to misread his environment and thereby tap his subconscious. This most directly guided the double-image paintings that typified his 1930s output, though the same mechanism directed his illustrative projects as well: rather than directly illustrating a text, he instead illustrated the images that the text invoked for him. As the artist wrote in 1934, "It is too evident that the 'illustrative fact' cannot in any way restrain the course of my delirious ideas, but that, on the contrary, it makes them bloom. Therefore for me, of course, it can only be a question of paranoiac illustrations." This may explain the seemingly unrelated images included in Aliyah — specifically plates 8 and 10. As for the links Dalí makes between Aliyah and Tuna Fishing, one can speculate that in 1968 Tuna Fishingwas still clearly on Dalí's mind, having consumed him for the past two years, and so when his imagination was unleashed upon Aliyah, it was to this reservoir that his thoughts turned — not out of lethargy but for reasons that were possibly as mysterious and intriguing to himself as they are to viewers today.
While the Exhibit substantiates a fascinating historical context for Aliyah, it does not shy away from important questions and controversies. Did Dalí have any sincere connections to Jews, Judaism, or Zionism? David Blumenthal addresses this query in his essay, inviting investigation and speculation. The Surrealists famously attacked Dalí from the 1940s onwards as an anti-Semite, though the basis for this is unclear. In retort, Dalí identified his heroes as Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, and it should be noted that he also maintained a friendship and productive thirty-year collaboration with the Jewish Latvian-American photographer Philippe Halsman. Adding to the mystery, nearly a decade before painting Aliyah, Dalí planned to include a scene in his unfinished film The Prodigious Story of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros (1954-62) in which Paul Goldman's 1957 photograph of David Ben-Gurion doing a headstand at Sharon Hotel beach would transform into a skull.
What might be surmised from this about the artist's personal — or "paranoiac" — views of Judaism? Whatever his intention, it could not have been straightforward. "I hate simplicity in all its forms," Dalí wrote in 1935, and with this in mind, I hope that the Exhibit, Aliyah, The Rebirth of Israel, leads to further discussion and (re)discovery, not only of Dalí's "Jewish" works but of his graphic production as a whole... and all the inherent complexities.
