Dali

Dali — marelibri

La Femme Visible

1930rif. 2476Paris: Éditions Surréalistes 1930. First edition. 72 pp. Original aluminum foil paper wrappers covered by red tissue paper title printed in black on the cover. Unbound sheets as this variant was issued. Photo-lithographed portrait of Gala heliogravure frontispiece retouched with a burin and six heliographic plates. A bit of wear to the extremities else a beautiful copy of a very fragile production. Of an edition of 204 copies one of the very few on Rodingold vellum in sheets justified on the colophon by the Service de Presse stamp. With Dalí’s autograph dedication on the half-title “Hommage de l’auteur. Salvador Dali.” Laid in is the prière d’insérer announcement with text by André Breton and Paul Eluard. This issue of La Femme Visible is unbound sheets laid into the foil and red wrappers. For these few copies Dali apparently often added a simple autograph homage. The book did not meet with great success as Eluard reveals in a letter to Gala on January 27 1931: “La Femme visible a une presse immonde. Pourquoi Dali n’a-t-il pas mis dans ses dédicaces le nom des gens. Comme cela on n’en parlera pas ou en mal.” La Femme Visible is receiving dreadful publicity. Why didn’t Dali put people’s names in his dedications That way people won’t talk about it or talk about it badly. Georges Sebbag in his bibliography of Editions Surréalistes does not mention these press copies nor the printing of the book in sheets. One of Dalí’s earliest books containing four texts: “L’Âne Pourri” “La Chèvre Sanitaire” “L’Amour” and “Le Grand Masturbateur.” In these writings inspired by Freudian and post-Freudian theories Dalí’s aim is to upset the frontiers between dream and reality and to break down the convictions that form the basis of so-called “bourgeois values.” He later spoke of it as “a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and delirious interpretations.” References: Michler and Löpsinger. Salvador Dalí: Catalogue Raisonné of Etchings and Mixed-Media Prints 1924-1980 no. 4. Cowling. The Magic Mirror. Dada and Surrealism from a Private Collection Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 1988 no. 92. Mundy ed. Surrealism: Desire Unbound. pp. 131-33; 148-49. Eluard. Letters to Gala 1989 trans. p. 98. Sebbag Les Editions Surréalistes 1993. pp. 63-64. Éditions Surréalistes unknown