Description: Up for sale is a rare limited edition hand signed etching with unique hand coloring and gold embellishments, titled "Terpsichore (The Muse Of Dance & Chorus) : From The Muses Suite" by renowned surrealist artist Salvador Dali, published in 1971. This masterpiece is signed in pencil on the lower right by Dali, and numbered in pencil 87 of 145 on the lower left. The coloring and gold embellishing was done by hand, and each copy in the edition is unique. On proper watermarked Arches paper with ‘Dali 1971’ blindstamp at lower left; with deckled edge and full margins. Image/Plate Marks: 12 3/4 x 16”. The sheet is 19.75 x 25.5”. Unframed. In very good condition with bold colors. Printed by Jean Estrade, Paris; published by Les Heures Claires, Paris. The reference numbers are Prestel 510 and Field 71-18-D. Provenance: Private collection, Switzerland. I will also provide a certificate of authenticity (COA) with this piece. Guaranteed 100% authentic. There are known later fakes on Arches ‘infinity’ paper/various papers. I have been dealing in Dali works on paper since 2004. Please feel free to contact me with any questions, and can also view other Dali original prints in my eBay store. In addition to buying from me, I offer up to three FREE opinions of authenticity of any Dali works on paper you may have questions about. There are many fakes of his work, for example be very careful of any “E.A.” or artist’s proofs by the master. I invite you to watch an educational Antiques Roadshow PBS video which highlights this: https://www.pbs.org/video/antiques-roadshow-appraisal-1971-salvador-dali-etching/ Discussion: “Terpsichore: The Muse of Dance Who Moved in Time with the Rhythm of the Cosmos” by Caleb Strom. In ancient Greece, nine goddesses were believed to rule over all the major literary and artistic spheres. They were called the Muses. The Muse ruling dance and choral music was Terpsichore. In addition to dance, she has more recently been invoked as a metaphor for rhythm and ordered movement in the universe, such as mechanical oscillations. In Archaic Greece, the Muses were simply goddesses associated with song and dance. There were also originally only three Muses. During the Classical Age, the number of Muses increased to nine. It was also during the Classical Age that the Muses were each assigned a literary sphere: Calliope the Muse of epic poetry, Clio the Muse of history, Euterpe the Muse of lyric poetry, Erato the Muse of love poetry, Melpomene the Muse of tragedy, Polyhymnia the Muse of hymns, Thalia the Muse of comedy, Urania the Muse of astronomy, and Terpsichore the Muse of dance and choral music. In mythological terms, the Muses are descended from Zeus by Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. They dwelt in the land of Pieria in the foothills of Mount Olympus, which was watered by springs from the mountain. According to Greek mythology, they would go up from Pieria to the slopes of Olympus to sing of the gods and of their father Zeus, ruler of the universe. In later mythology, the Muses were compared to the sirens. Both were female figures known for being singers of beautiful songs. The main difference is that the Muses were associated with Olympus and sang to enrich men’s souls. The sirens were chthonic and sang to trap men and destroy them. All the arts were believed to come from the muses; including skills such as writing poems, interpreting the stars, and singing. It is appropriate that their mother was the goddess of memory. Dance was considered as an equally important art as poetry and songs, possibly because it could be used as a physical demonstration of past stories. In art and sculpture, Terpsichore is depicted as being seated with a lyre. She is still associated with dance today. This is reflected in the adjective terpsichorean which refers to things related to dance. The importance of Terpsichore and the other muses in Greek thought illustrates the importance of music in Greek culture. In ancient Greece, music was considered the mark of a civilized man. Music, however, was broader than just what is thought of as music today. Music also covered dance and poetry in addition to instrumental music and singing. These all together were considered to nourish the soul. There is a discussion within classical studies as to whether the Muses were personifications. Although the Muses were closely associated with their artistic spheres, they also had an existence beyond it. Terpsichore, for example, was also a mother and a wife. (In later mythology, she became the mother of several sirens including Parthenope by the river god Achelous.) Because of this, they appear to have been more than mere abstract entities to the ancient Greeks. Today, Terpsichore is used often as a metaphor for, or personification of, dance. Terpsichore is also invoked in subjects beyond dance that have a sort of ordered movement or rhythm. An example of Terpsichore being referenced outside of dance is in the realm of physics. The planets orbit the sun and the sun, with other stars, orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Additionally, the planets go through cycles called Milankovitch cycles in which their orbits around the sun adjust in very regular, periodic, or rhythmic, ways. Furthermore, electromagnetic and mechanical oscillations, such as a pendulum in a clock, are also very common in nature. If these regular, ordered patterns of movement in the universe could be thought of as a sort of natural dance, then these natural movements could be thought of as terpsichorean in a sense. It could be said that Terpsichore’s influence goes beyond just the human arts. It also can be seen in the observable universe. In addition to the mechanical movements of planets and pendulums, herds of antelope, flocks of birds, and schools of fish all move in a coordinated way that could be considered a type of dance. Some science writers and historians have taken note of the “terpsichorean motion” seen in nature and have referenced Terpsichore as a metaphor for periodic motion as well as the periodicity of cycles used to keep track of time, such as phases of the moon. The earliest forms of dance had a specifically religious purpose. One purpose of these early dances was probably to somehow participate in these patterns that govern the universe. Dances in ancient Greece tended to be religious processions or re-enactments of myths, though there were also forms of dancing that were just for entertainment. As a result, dance also played an important role in the religious life of the ancient Greeks. Thus, it makes sense that they would have a goddess devoted to dance. Terpsichore still is important in the domain of dance, though her reign appears to have broadened. She is now the Muse not just of human dance but also the cosmic dance in which the whole universe participates.” Salvador Dali Biography: From the Smithsonian Magazine by Stanley Meisler, April 2005 “The Surreal World of Salvador Dalí” Salvador Dalí spent much of his life promoting himself and shocking the world. He relished courting the masses, and he was probably better known, especially in the United States, than any other 20th-century painter, including even fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso. He loved creating a sensation, not to mention controversy… Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech was born May 11, 1904, in the Catalonian town of Figueres in northeastern Spain. His authoritarian father, Salvador Dalí Cusí, was a well-paid official with the authority to draw up legal documents. His mother, Felipa Domènech Ferres, came from a family that designed and sold decorated fans, boxes and other art objects. Although she stopped working in the family business after marriage, she would amuse her young son by molding wax figurines out of colored candles, and she encouraged his creativity. According to Dalí biographer Ian Gibson, she was proud of Salvador’s childhood drawings. “When he says he’ll draw a swan,” she would boast, “he draws a swan, and when he says he’ll do a duck, it’s a duck.” Dalí had an older brother, also named Salvador, who died just nine months before the future artist’s birth. A sister, Ana María, was born four years later. Dreamy, imaginative, spoiled and self-centered, the young Salvador was used to getting his own way. “At the age of six,” he wrote in his 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, “I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” He prided himself on being different and felt himself blessed with a delicate sensitivity. Grasshoppers frightened him so much that other children threw them at him to delight in his terror. Dalí was 16 when his mother died of cancer. “This was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I worshiped her. . . . I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death and destiny with the swords of light that some day would savagely gleam around my glorious name!” Yet eight years after her death, he would sketch the outline of Christ in an ink drawing and scrawl across it the words about spitting on his mother’s portrait. (Although Dalí probably intended the work as an anticlerical statement, not a personal slur against his mother, news of it infuriated his father, who threw him out of the house.) The precocious Dalí was just 14 when his works were first exhibited, as part of a show in Figueres. Three years later, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid but, once there, felt there was more to learn about the latest currents in Paris from French art magazines than from his teachers, whom he believed were out of touch. (On a brief excursion to Paris with his father in 1926, he called on his idol, Pablo Picasso. “I have come to see you before visiting the Louvre,” Dalí said. “You’re quite right,” Picasso replied.) When it came time for his year-end oral exam in art history at the academy, Dalí balked at the trio of examiners. “I am very sorry,” he declared, “but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. I know this subject much too well.” Academy officials expelled him without a diploma. It was probably inevitable that the then-current ideas of the French Surrealists—artists such as Jean Arp, René Magritte and Max Ernst—would attract Dalí. They were trying to apply the new, psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to painting and writing. Dalí was well acquainted with Freud and his ideas about sexual repression taking the form of dreams and delusions, and he was fascinated with the Surrealists’ attempts to capture these dreams in paint. It was Spanish artist Joan Miró, a fellow Catalan allied to the Surrealists, who would bring Dalí to their attention. Miró even had his own Paris dealer look at Dalí’s paintings on a visit to Figueres. Afterward, Dalí wrote to his friend the Spanish playwright and poet Federico García Lorca, whom he had met during their student days in Madrid, that Miró “thinks that I’m much better than all the young painters in Paris put together, and he’s written to me telling me that I’ve got everything set up for me there in order to make a great hit.” Miró continued to drum up interest in Dalí’s work in Paris, and when the artist arrived there in 1929, Miró introduced him to many of the Surrealists. Dalí had come to Paris to take part in the filming of Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), which Spanish film directorLuis Buñuel, whom Dalí had also known since his studentdays, was directing from a script on which he and Dalíhad collaborated. The 17-minute film, as incoherent as adream, riveted—and appalled—audiences with its overt sexualand graphic imagery. Even today, it’s hard not to cringe atimages of a man wielding a razor against the eye of a woman, priests towing dead donkeys, and ants devouring a rottinghand. Dalí boasted that the movie, which was praised byavant-garde critics, “plunged like a dagger into the heart of Paris.” In the summer of that same year, Dalí, 25, met his future wife and lifelong companion, Gala, at his family’s vacation home in Cadaqués, a picturesque fishing village on the craggy Mediterranean coast, 20 miles from Figueres. Among the visitors that summer were Buñuel, Magritte and French poet Paul Éluard and his Russian-born wife, Helena Diakanoff Devulina, better known as Gala. Ten years older than Dalí, Gala was at first put off by Dalí’s showoff manner, heavily pomaded hair and air of dandyism that included a necklace of imitation pearls. His demeanor struck her as “professional Argentine tango slickness.” But the two were ultimately drawn to each other, and when Gala’s husband and the others left Cadaqués, she stayed behind with Dalí. The affair proceeded slowly. It was not until the next year, according to Dalí, that in a hotel in the south of France, he “consummated love with the same speculative fanaticism that I put into my work.” Dalí’s father was so upset by the liaison and by Dalí’s eccentric behavior that he branded him “a perverted son on whom you cannot depend for anything” and permanently banished him from the family homes. Critic Robert Hughes described Gala in his Guardian article as a “very nasty and very extravagant harpy.” But Dalí was completely dependent on her. (The couple would marry in 1934.) “Without Gala,” he once claimed, “Divine Dalí would be insane.” International acclaim for Dalí’s art came not long after he met Gala. In 1933, he enjoyed solo exhibitions in Paris and New York City and became, as Dawn Ades, who curated the exhibition in Venice, puts it, “Surrealism’s most exotic and prominent figure.” French poet and critic André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, wrote that Dalí’s name was “synonymous with revelation in the most resplendent sense of the word.” In 1936, Dalí, at 32, made the cover of Time magazine. In addition to Freudian imagery—staircases, keys, dripping candles—he also used a host of his own symbols, which had special, usually sexual, significance to him alone: the grasshoppers that once tormented him, ants, crutches, and a William Tell who approaches his son not with a bow and arrow but a pair of scissors. When Dalí finally met Freud in London in 1938 and started to sketch him, the 82-year-old psychoanalyst whispered to others in the room, “That boy looks like a fanatic.” The remark, repeated to Dalí, delighted him. Dalí’s Surrealist paintings are surely his finest work—even though his penchant for excess often led him to paint too many shocking images on a single canvas and too many canvases that seem to repeat themselves. But at his best, Dalí, a superb draftsman, could be spare and orderly. The Persistenceof Memory, for example, features three “melting” watches, and a fourth covered by a swarm of ants. One of the watches saddles a strange biomorphic form that looks like some kind of mollusk but is meant to be the deflated head of Dalí. When New York dealer Julien Levy bought the painting for $250 in 1931, he called it “10 x 14 inches of Dalí dynamite.” The work, which was acquired by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1934, excited viewers even as it puzzled them. One critic urged readers to “page Dr. Freud” to uncover the meaning in the canvas. As his fame grew, Dalí’s reputation was undermined by his outrageous pronouncements. He confessed that he dreamed of Adolph Hitler “as a woman” whose flesh “ravished me.” Although he insisted he rejected Hitlerism despite such fantasies, the Surrealists, who were allied to the French Communist Party, expelled him in 1939. He also later extolled Spain’s fascist leader Gen. Francisco Franco for establishing “clarity, truth and order” in Spain.Yet just before the civil war began, Dalí painted Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonitionof Civil War), in which a tormented figure, straight out of the works of Francisco Goya, tears itself apart in what Dalí called “a delirium of autostrangulation.” The work is a powerful antiwar statement. Dalí and Gala visited the United States often in the late 1930s and made it their home during World War II. The American sojourn ushered in the era of Dalí’s greatest notoriety. “Every morning upon awakening,” he wrote in 1953, “I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.” Dalí admitted having a “pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash.” He felt impelled, he said, to accumulate millions of dollars. So he created jewelry, designed clothes and furniture (including a sofa in the form of actress Mae West’s lips), painted sets for ballets and plays, wrote fiction, produced a dream sequence for the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Spellbound and designed displays for store windows. He took these commissions seriously. In 1939, he was so enraged when his Bonwit Teller window display in Manhattan was changed that he shoved a bathtub in it so hard that both he and the tub crashed through the window. In 1948 Dalí and Gala moved back to their house (which Dalí had festooned with sculptures of eggs) in Port Lligat, Spain, a couple of miles along the Mediterranean coast from Cadaqués. Dalí was 44; for the next 30 years, he would paint most of the year in Port Lligat and, with Gala, divide his winters between the Hotel Meurice in Paris and the St.RegisHotel in New York City. World War II changed Dalí’s ideas about painting. As he had once been in thrall to Freud, he now became obsessed with the splitting of the atom and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Karl Heisenberg, leader of the German scientists who failed to develop an atomic bomb. “Dalí was acutely aware of his times,” says the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Michael R.Taylor, who curated the show in Philadelphia. “He said to himself: Velázquez and Raphael—if they had lived in a nuclear age, what would they paint?” In 1951, Dalí painted a delicate, Raphaelite head, then let it burst apart into countless pieces, swirling like cascading atoms (Raphaelesque Head Exploding). In a Surrealist touch, the flying particles are tiny rhinoceros horns, which Dalí regarded as symbols of chastity. Dalí dubbed his new style Nuclear Mysticism. His work during these years was often self-indulgent. He posed Gala too many times, for instance, as an unlikely Virgin Mary and painted enormous canvases with historical and religious scenes that look overblown today. Yet this new religious imagery often pulsed with power. His stunts, too, were self-indulgent, though some were quite funny. In 1955 he showed up for a lecture in Paris in a Rolls Royce stuffed with cauliflower. To promote The Worldof Salvador Dalí, a book he produced with French photographer Robert Descharnes in 1962, Dalí dressed in a golden robe and lay on a bed in a Manhattan bookstore. Attended by a doctor, a nurse and Gala, he signed books while wired to a machine that recorded his brain waves and blood pressure. A copy of this data was then presented to the purchaser. For a television commercial in 1967, he sat in an airplane alongside Whitey Ford, the New York Yankees star pitcher, and proclaimed the advertising campaign slogan of Braniff Airlines in heavily accented English—“If you got it, flaunt it.” Said Ford, “That’s telling ’em, Dalí baby.” But while Dalí could play the buffoon, he was also generous in reaching out to young artists and critics. When American Pop Art painter James Rosenquist was a struggling artist painting billboards in New York City, Dalí invited him to lunch at the St. Regis, then spent hours discussing art and encouraging his young guest. As a graduate student in the late 1960s, Dawn Ades knocked unannounced on Dalí’s door at Port Lligat. He invited her in. “Please sit down and watch me paint,” he said, then answered her questions as he worked. And Dalí’s public popularity never waned. In 1974, when he was 70 years old, the town of Figueres opened the Dalí Theatre-Museum with an array of works donated by its renowned native son. The building was more of a Surrealist happening than a museum, featuring bizarre Dalí favorites such as the long black Cadillac that rained inside itself whenever a visitor dropped a coin into a slot. Hundreds of thousands of visitors still tour the museum each year. Dalí’s last years were not joyful. He had bought a castle as a retreat for Gala in the town of Púbol, and beginning in 1971, she stayed there for weeks at a time. Dalí decorated parts of the castle with ostentatious furniture, but by his own account was allowed to visit only by written invitation. His fear that Gala might abandon him almost certainly contributed to his depression and decline in health. After Gala’s death in 1982 at the age of 87, Dalí’s depression worsened, and he moved into the Púbol castle attended by nurses. His incessant use of a call button caused a short circuit that set off a fire in his bed and burned his leg. Doctors transferred him to Figueres, where he lay bedridden in the Torre Galatea, an old building with a tower that had been purchased after Gala’s death as an extension to the museum. “He does not want to walk, to speak, to eat,” the French photographer Descharnes, then managing Dalí’s affairs, told a newspaper reporter in 1986. “If he wants, he can draw, but he does not want.” Dalí died in the Torre Galatea on January 23, 1989, at age 84 and was buried in the Dalí Theatre-Museum. For the most part, posthumous critical judgment has been harsh. “Critics believed that everything he painted after 1939 was awful junk,” says the Philadelphia Museum’s Taylor. “But I don’t agree. There were masterpieces in his later work, perhaps not as good as the early masterpieces, but masterpieces nevertheless. Dalí should be ranked with Picasso and Matisse as one of the three greatest painters of the 20th century, and I hope our exhibition will make this clear.” About the seller: Aside from being a professional artist, I have been working with original works on paper by 19th and 20th century modern and contemporary masters since 2004, with a focus on the great Salvador Dali. Regarding my fine art background and expertise, I take great pride in any original work on paper that I represent. The fine art world can be overwhelming and there are a lot of false experts, my goal has always been with educating the buyer. I have learned a lot in my nearly 20 years of working with fine art masters, as well as many highly reputable galleries and private dealers. All items I sell have been extensively researched, documented in the official catalogue raisonnes of the artists when applicable, and I provide a signed lifetime guarantee/ certificate of authenticity of the fine art I sell, legally binding me to my word. I stay away from dubious works of art, and if there is a concern I am unaware of I fortunately know the right people to ask. In 2000 after high school I moved from Connecticut to attend the George Washington University and was curator for Galerie Lareuse with expert Jean-Michel Lareuse for 11 years in Georgetown; member of the IFPDA (International Fine Print Dealers Association) specializing in original works on paper by 19th & 20th century masters such as Picasso, Dali, Chagall, Miro, Braque, Renoir, Leger, Matisse, Magritte, Kandinsky, Buffet, Dufy, Lautrec, Calder, Cassatt, Delaunay, Haring, Warhol, Degas, and many others. I oversaw and personally handled hundreds of original works on paper and was tasked with extensive research, appraisals, sales, certification, private acquisitions, as well as museum-quality professional framing. I assisted with transactions involving many prestigious museums and organizations, including a 2006 sale via Galerie Lareuse of Picasso's rare 1912 etching "Nature Morte, Bouteille" to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, a 2011 sale of Vincent van Gogh's very rare c.1890 etching "Portrait of Dr. Gachet", and a 2012 sale of a unique original gouache drawing by Sonia Delaunay which is now located in The Phillips Collection. I also assisted in the art estate of the late and great Eunice Shriver, and many other private collections in the DC area. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me as I am here to help! Kind regards, Kreg
Price: 8900 USD
Location: Key West, Florida
End Time: 2024-09-13T14:24:06.000Z
Shipping Cost: N/A USD
Product Images
Item Specifics
All returns accepted: ReturnsNotAccepted
Artist: Salvador Dali, Salvador Dalí
Unit of Sale: Single Piece
Signed By: Salvador Dali
Size: Medium (up to 36in.)
Framing: Unframed
Region of Origin: France
Listed By: Dealer or Reseller
Year of Production: 1971
Item Height: 25 in
Style: Surrealism
Features: Signed
Item Width: 19 in
Time Period Produced: 1970-1979
Image Orientation: Portrait
Signed: Hand Signed
Title: Terpsichore : Muse Of Dance And Chorus / Music
Material: Ink, Paper
Certificate of Authenticity (COA): Yes
Original/Licensed Reprint: Limited Edition Print
Subject: Dancing, Flowers, Mythology, Roses, Surrealism, Surreal, Salvador Dali, Muse, Muses, Terpsichore, Dance, Chorus, Music, Singing
Type: Etching With Hand Coloring And Gold Embellishments
Edition Type: Limited Edition
Original/Reproduction: Original Print
Theme: Dance, Inspirational, Music, Surrealism, Surreal Art, Salvador Dali, Muse, Muses, Terpsichore, Chorus, Mythology, Roses, Flowers, Dancing, Singing
Production Technique: Etching With Hand Coloring And Gold Embellishing
Country/Region of Manufacture: France
