Bidspirit auction | DALI SALVADOR: (1904-1989) & DALI

DALI SALVADOR: (1904-1989) & DALI GALA: (1894-1982) - DALI SALVADOR: (1904-1989) Spanish surrealist artist & DALI GALA: (1894-1982) Russian artist´s model and muse, the wife of Paul Eluard (from 1917-29) and later of Salvador Dali (from 1934). D.S., Salvador Dali and Gala Dali , one page, 4to, n.p. (Port Lligat, Cadaques), n.d. (1965). The partially printed document, completed in typescript, is a loan agreement between Salvador and Gala Dali and The Gallery of Modern Art in New York in which the artist and his wife agree to loan a painting entitled Autoportrait au cou raphaélesque ( Self-Portrait with the Neck of Raphael ) for the exhibition Salvador Dali 1918-1965 , stipulating that the painting should arrive no later than 1st December 1965, and will be returned on 14th March 1966, and declaring an insurance valuation of $40,000. Signed by both Salvador and Gala Dali at the foot of the document. Documents signed by the legendary surrealist couple are rare. Some very light, extremely minor creasing, VG Dalí painted Autoportrait au cou raphaélesque (Self-Portrait with the Neck of Raphael) around 1921, when he was only seventeen years old. The oil on canvas depicts the young artist before the coastal landscape of Cadaqués and represents one of his earliest exercises in artistic self-fashioning. Dalí consciously modelled his pose and elongated neck upon Raphael's celebrated Self-Portrait of 1506, reflecting the profound admiration for the Renaissance master which would remain with him throughout his career. Combining two dominant subjects of Dalí's youthful work—self-portraiture and the landscape of Cadaqués—the painting is particularly significant as an early manifestation of his determination to construct his own artistic persona, years before the development of the flamboyant Surrealist identity for which he became famous. The work is today in the collection of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres. The major retrospective Salvador Dali, 1910–1965 (incorrectly titled 1918-1965 in the present document) was held at the Gallery of Modern Art, including the Huntington Hartford Collection, New York, from 18th December 1965 to 28th February 1966. Incorporating the important Reynolds Morse Collection, the exhibition surveyed more than half a century of Dalí's extraordinarily varied career, from his earliest works through Cubism and Surrealism to his more recent paintings. The Gallery itself had opened only the previous year at Columbus Circle, having been founded by the millionaire collector Huntington Hartford partly as an alternative to the prevailing conception of modernism represented by New York's Museum of Modern Art; Hartford was notably sympathetic to Dalí's later work. The present loan agreement consequently documents the return to public view, in a major retrospective devoted to the sixty-one-year-old artist, of one of the formative self-portraits he had painted as a teenager more than four decades earlier.