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Artist or Maker: Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

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Description: Portrait de Nada Pachevich
signed and dated 'S.Dalí 1948' (lower right)
oil on canvas
52 x 32 1/8 in. (132 x 81.5 cm.)
Painted in 1948

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Provenance: Centro Internazionale d'Arte, Milan.
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1985.

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Published: R. Descharnes & G. Néret, Salvador Dalí, 1904-1989, vol. II, 1947-1989, Cologne, 1994, no. 920 (illustrated p. 417).

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTOR

In the 1940s Dalí was very much involved in creating a number of fantastical designs for theatrical productions for the New York stage, an artistic preoccupation that was to lead to his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on the movie 'Spellbound', for which he designed the sets for the dream sequence. Returning to Europe in 1948, Dalí immediately travelled to Port Lligat, where he began work on two further theatrical commissions, designing the sets and costumes for Peter Brook's production of Richard Strauss's Salome and for Luchino Visconti's production of Shakespeare's As You Like It.

Reflecting Dalí's interest in the Renaissance and visual anachronism, the present work is a lavishly executed portrait, in which Dalí depicts his sitter Nada Pachevich in a sumptuous and extravagant gown that seems quite at odds with her surroundings. As is typical of Dalí's portraits of the 1940s and 1950s, Dalí subverts traditional ideas of portraiture by including narrative references from his own repertoire of visual imagery. Standing in a barren expanse of arid landscape, Nada Pachevich is quite unsuitably dressed for her current situation, where the only other signs of life are the dandelion in the foreground, the bare branch at her side and the lone figure on the horizon. She is bathed in soft but dramatic light from the clouds above her, which seem to form the image of two lovers kissing.

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