Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs (1936)

Dalí, Salvador (1904-1989)

Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs (Venus de Milo with Drawers)
1936
Painted plaster with metal pulls and mink pompons, 98 × 32.5 × 34 cm
Art Institute of ChicagoChicago

© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2018

This plaster sculpture, created by Dalí in 1936, takes as its reference the Venus de Milo in the Musée du Louvre. This icon of antiquity had fascinated the artist from childhood. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí he relates that as a boy he made a copy of this sculpture in clay, and how this first attempt at sculpture produced in him ‘an unmistakable and delightful erotic pleasure’. Later, in an interview he gave to Playboy magazine in 1964, Dalí explained that ‘With the addition of the drawers it is possible to look inside the body of the Venus de Milo to the soul: Thus Dalí creates a Freudian and Christian appearance in the Greek civilization.’ It is likely that this same plaster sculpture was part of an ephemeral installation at the exhibition Salvador Dalí 1939 held at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. (Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí)

Among Salvador Dalí’s many memorable works, perhaps none is more deeply embedded in the popular imagination than Venus de Milo with Drawers, a half-size plaster reproduction of the famous marble statue (130 /120 BC; Musée du Louvre, Paris), altered with pom-pom-decorated drawers in the figure’s forehead, breasts, stomach, abdomen, and left knee. The combination of cool painted plaster and silky mink tufts illustrates the Surrealist interest in uniting different elements to spark a new reality. For the Surrealists, the best means of provoking this revolution of consciousness was a special kind of sculpture that, as Dalí explained in a 1931 essay, was “absolutely useless … and created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character.” Dalí’s essay, which drew upon the ideas of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, inaugurated object making as an integral part of Surrealist activities. Influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, Dalí envisioned the idea of a cabinet transformed into a female figure, which he called an “anthropomorphic cabinet.” Venus de Milo with Drawers is the culmination of his explorations into the deep, psychological mysteries of sexual desire, which are symbolized in the figure of the ancient goddess of love. (AIC)