I started exploring the illustrations of Salvador Dali after my parents handed me a collection of postcards and leaflets from the GOAP gallery in Prague of their current exhibition exploring the works of Dali, Warhol and Mucha. The exhibition specifically looked at their non-traditional works and works which are less known about.
I will be exploring briefly his literary illustrations, specifically of ‘Don Quixote De La Mancha’ by Miguel de Cervantes, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll and the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.
Surrealist artist Salvador Dali’s artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, photography, literature, and fine art. His eclectic talents extend themselves perfectly to the art of literary illustrations, where together his fine art and visual storytelling skills create intriguing images perfect for illustrating these works.
Dali’s 1957 illustrations for ‘Don Quixote De La Mancha’ by Miguel de Cervantes are what initially drew me into this subject, drawing my eye on the museum leaflet as I did not immediately recognise it as being Dali’s work, being so far removed from his distinguishable style of painting.
Comprising of a combination of elegant black-and-white sketches and watercolours, Dali’s surrealist drawings guide viewers through the adventures laid out in what is possibly the Spanish Golden Age’s most influential novel.
Perhaps his most well-known set of 12 photogravure illustrations, one for each chapter, are those of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy novel ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in 1969.
Dali’s standing within the Surrealism movement sets him as perhaps the perfect mind to create the illustrations for what is considered to be the best example of the literary nonsense genre. Alice in Wonderland’ plays with and subverts logic, time, and language, and creates the strange from the everyday, much like Surrealism.
Dali’s illustrations perfectly tap into the strange, dream-like twists of the novel, visualising the peculiar, unknowable, and irrational.
Dali was commissioned, in 1947, to create the illustrations for a special limited edition of Michel Montaigne’s 1580 essays.
The essays, varying from following his shifting train of thoughts to structured didacticism, explore his musings and himself, and, as a by-product, human nature. The essays have been argued to have greatly influenced Shakespeare, and to be the most prominent work of French Philosophy until the Enlightenment.
His essays are widely read, with some profound wisdom, implications and thoughts, looking into the absurd and everyday in great detail, producing some delightfully intriguing reflections such as:
"Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out."
Dali’s illustrations stand, perhaps, closest to his most recognised fine art style, showing otherworldly scenes of sublime Surrealism to complement the grasping musings of Montaigne.
Dali's illustrations, like all his work, visualise the wonder and adventure of these books, bringing bright vivacity to these influential texts in a way only Dali could achieve.
Written by Rosie Day