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Anatomy of an Artwork

Anatomy of an Artwork: Salvador Dalí's 'L'Àngelus'

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Rendered in painstaking detail with a glowing palette, L'Àngelus belongs to a small number of related works, nearly all of which are held in museum collections. These oils—one of the most significant groups from Dalí’s association with the Surrealists—all relate to the artist’s obsession with Jean-François Millet’s L'Àngelus, one of the most well-known paintings of the nineteenth century. The present work also references other works within his own oeuvre. Unseen by the public until the twenty-first century this work has featured prominently in virtually every exhibition dedicated to Dalí since that time.

Salvador Dalí, L'Àngelus, circa 1934-35
Estimate $4,000,000–6,000,000

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Past Auction
Modern Evening Auction
16 November 2021 | 7:00 PM EST | New York

Anatomy of an Artwork: Salvador Dalí's 'L'Àngelus'

  • Salvador Dalí L'Àngelus
     Salvador Dalí's 'L'Àngelus,' circa 1934-35.
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  • Male and Female Figure
    The male and female figure in the present work are directly associated with Jean-François Millet’s L’Àngelus, one of the most reproduced paintings from the nineteenth century. Salvador Dalí was particularly impacted by this painting writing that Millet’s L’Àngelus produced in me an obscure anguish, so poignant that the memory of those two motionless silhouettes pursued me for several years with the constant uneasiness provoked by their continual and ambiguous presence.”
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  • Car Out of Rock Formations
    The rocky outcropping in the background of the painting references the artist’s memory of the rock formations of Cape Creus near Port Lligat. From these rocks springs—as from the artist’s surreal imagination—a fossilized automobile. A car made of either fossils or bricks appeared in the Dalí’s work throughout the 1930s.
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  • Twilight Setting
    Chromatically, the extraordinarily vivid palette of the present work magnifies “the atavisms of dusk” and the twilight world of Millet’s original version, evoking the Metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Dalí has here composed a hallucinated and characteristically surreal landscape with an afternoon sky set over a nocturnal stage, a visual and visionary prefiguration of Magritte’s legendary paintings series L’Empire des Lumières. While the jewel tones and long, deep shadows eloquently convey this focus, the shape of the rock itself directly references Dalí’s 1929 masterpiece The Great Masturbator, held in the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
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  • Musicians
    While Dalí would make other paintings during this period related to L’Àngelus, the present work is the only composition to include orchestra wings. Dalí wrote a play during this period and in his description of the stage outlined these niches: “On each side of the stage, two unequal niches… will be immersed in half-light like the two silhouettes, but dimly lit from the interior, one with a spectral violet light and the other with livid pink. These niches for the moment will be empty, only in the one on the right a cello will be observed.”
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  • Precise Rendering
    Done on a small scale, Dalí’s precise brushstrokes and careful use of incising in his diagonals add to the mystical sense of the work. His best works for the period were executed in this jewel-like scale and speak to his technical mastery of his medium.
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