Salvador Dalí

Tex McCrary & Jinx Falkenburg, New York (a gift from the artist circa 1955)
Thence by descent

The canvas is not lined. The surface is slightly dirty especially around the edges and there is staining at upper right and lower right edges, outside of the image area. There is a small dimple toward the lower left corner and a faint stretcher bar mark around the perimeter. The work would benefit from a cleaning but is otherwise in good original condition.
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The present work was painted by Salvador Dalí during a nationally televised appearance on “At Home with Tex & Jinx,” a pioneering talk show that combined news, celebrity interviews and household tips. Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenberg knew how to “coax human interest stories as well as news and views out of guests” (William Safire, "Of Tex and Jinx" in The New York Times, September 15, 2003). Their show alternated between television and radio and ran through the mid-50s, interviewing such celebrities as Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart, Esther Williams and Dorothy Lamour. 

Dalí gave this painting to the show's glamorous hosts after the production, and it has remained in their family's collection. Illustrating the artist's expressive and abstracted signature rendered in his favored rich red tone, this work underscores Dalí's significance as not only a major Surrealist painter, but an early proponent of abstraction, with an evolving aesthetic which ran parallel to that of Kline, Pollock and Motherwell. Reminiscent of the repetitive looping scribbles of Cy Twombly (see fig. 1), the boldness of the signature and the performative nature of its very being speaks to the rise of Warhol and the subversive celebrity culture of the 1950s. An undeniable harbinger of the soon to be pervasive Abstract Expressionist movement, this important painting captures the zeitgeist of a critical juncture in post-war America.