"Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel", limited edition lithograph.



Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel is a series of 25 Lithographs published by Salvador Dali in
1973. The prints depict scenes from the La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, a satirical story
following the exploits of two giants, written in the mid-sixteenth Century by the French doctor
and monk François Rabelais.

Prints in the series were not individually titled but they are given an alphabetic index in
Albert Field's Official Catalogue of Dali Prints.

Each print is signed in pencil from the edition of 250 printed in colour on Japon Paper, with a
further 50 prints printed without colour. In addition the edition, there are also 50 A/E
(Artist's Proofs) in colour and 50 A/E without colour.


Artist Biography

Salvador Dali was a Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, designer, film maker and writer.
After working in a variety of styles, influenced by Cubism, Futurism, and Metaphysical Painting,
he had turned to Surrealism by 1929. In that year he had a sell-out exhibition at the Galerie
Camille Goemans in Paris; André Breton wrote the catalogue preface, and this marked Dali's official
membership of the movement. His talent for self-publicity rapidly made him its most famous
representative - its symbol in the mind of the general public.

Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism, claiming that this was the
source of his creative energy (one of his most outrageous stunts was delivering a lecture at the
London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 dressed in a diving suit; he almost suffocated
when the helmet got stuck).

He adopted the Surrealist idea of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method that
he named 'critical paranoia'. This involved elaborating on the images of his dreams and fantasies
and substituting them for - or merging them with - the world of natural appearances. It resulted
particularly in the ambiguous double images that play such a large part in his work, in which a
form can be read, for example, as part of a landscape or part of the human body.

During the heyday of Surrealism in the 1930's Dali produced several of the established 'icons' of
the movement, using a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal 'dream'
space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory character of his imagery. He described his
pictures as 'hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favourite and recurring images, such
as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burring giraffes, and watches bent
and flowing as if made of melting wax (The Persistence of Memory, 1931, MoMA, New York). Dali
himself said that the melting watches - one of the most parodied images in 20th century art were
inspired by eating a ripe camembert cheese, but some commentators have sought deeper meanings,
seeing them, for example, as expressing a fear of impotence.