Salvador Dalí Figurative Prints

One of the most recognizable names in 20th-century art, Spanish printmaker, painter, photographer and sculptor Salvador Dalí (1904–89) forged a distinctive approach to dreamlike imagery in his work, a practice buoyed by his bombastic public persona.

Although after moving to Paris in 1929 he collaborated with Surrealists, including Spanish director Luis Buñuel on the film Un Chien Andalou (1929), Dalí was more interested in taking his own route in referencing the style of Old Masters in otherworldly work that was steeped in symbolism. Eggs, eyes, crutches, keys and other recurring motifs reflected on how creativity could open gateways to the unconscious. Now-iconic images, like the dripping clocks in the famed painting The Persistence of Memory (1931) and the Lobster Telephone (1936), a Surrealist object commissioned by British poet and arts patron Edward James, played with expectations for reality and hinted at the subversive thoughts of the psyche.

Dalí brought that same unconventional spirit to his printmaking, which he mainly engaged with between the 1930s and 1970s. His experiments included using a 15th-century musket to fire bullets of printer’s ink at lithography stones, leaving chaotic splatters. He employed a rhinoceros horn filled with bread soaked in ink to produce sloshes on the stones as well as materials such as sea urchins, gravel and eggs, their unpredictable patterns giving the resulting prints a performative feel.

While many of his etchings, engravings, lithographs and woodcuts were stand-alone works of art, he also regularly partnered with publishers on books. For a 1946 edition of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote De La Mancha, Dalí created drawings and watercolors with the Spanish hero tilting at chimerical windmills and riding a horse formed from a tangle of frenetic lines. For a 1969 edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he made 12 vibrant heliogravures, with the Persistence of Memory clock making an unearthly appearance at the Mad Tea-Party. Dalí’s illustrations gave the recipes for gargantuan towers and chickens splayed like sacrifices in the 1973 Les Dîners de Gala — named for his wife and muse, Gala — a hedonistic eroticism.

These publications brought Dalí’s hypnagogic imagery to a broader audience, yet his later habit of presigning blank paper for his prints led to rampant forgeries in the 1980s and ’90s. Still, this recognition of the power of marketing his work widely while maintaining a distinct vision has paved the way for contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, who similarly merge the uncanny with the commercial.

On 1stDibs, browse a collection of Salvador Dalí prints, including figurative prints, nude prints and other works on paper.