It seems that the eccentric Salvador Dalí mastered all the languages of art to create and exploit all the possibilities for his artistic discourse. His stages as a painter, sculptor, engraver or draftsman are well known in the artistic universe, as well as his incursion into theater, cinema and literature. However, Dalí was also interested in jewelry, and it could not be any other way, since a jewel completed the luminous personality of one of the greatest artists from the last century.
Influenced by the Renaissance masters, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael (of whom Dalí knew all about) or Cellini, the artist combined his pictorial stage with his ability to design and visualize portable art: jewelry. With Dalí’s involvement in jewelry, he made it clear that his overflowing imagery had a place in any form or matter.
Dalí was actively involved in the design and conception of these pieces, but also with the materials that were used, selected with great decorum by the artist according to the color, value and symbolism of the precious stones and noble metals.
The polyhedral genius would take paper and pencil and draw the jewel in question with the greatest possible precision and detail. The sketch included the shape, materials and colors that Dalí had conceived in his memory. The team in charge of making the pieces tangible was led by goldsmith Carlos Alemany, in New York, always under the artist’s supervision.
Dalí’s jewelry collection could not be a foreign concept to the surrealist’s ambitious, eccentric, perverse, schizoid and unpredictable personality. It is possible to say that the artist transferred his inventiveness to goldsmithing, and replaced inks and graffiti with gold, platinum, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, topaz or any other precious stone; pearls, corals and noble metals with which he worked together to represent his iconography far from any conception of jewelry: lips, eyes, animal or vegetable forms, even symbols of mythology and religion.
In 1941, 22 of the jewels designed by Dalí were acquired by the millionaire Cummins Catherwood; in 1958, the collection became the property of The Owen Cheatham Foundation, dedicated to lending the jewels to different institutions and organizations in order to raise funds through their exhibition.
The lot eventually came to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Some time later, in the 1970s, the jewels were exhibited at the Dalí Theater-Museum in Figueres, where Dalí attended. After belonging to another wealthy Saudi and several Japanese, the collection was finally sold to the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation in 1999.
Among the jewels in the collection are “The Eye of Time” (1949), “The Real Heart” (1953), “The Elephant in Space” (1961) and “The Persistence of Memory” (1949) (the gold and diamond version of the painter’s famous 1931 painting), considered symbols among Dalí’s work, almost as highly valued as his work in the plastic arts.
The collection is on permanent display as part of the Dalí-Jewels exhibition at the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation. It features 39 gold and precious stone jewels belonging to the Owen Cheatham set, as well as more than twenty drawings and paintings on paper that Dalí made as sketches of the pieces.
“Without an audience, without the presence of spectators, these jewels would not achieve the function for which they were created. The viewer, then, is the ultimate artist. His or her sight, heart, mind-with a greater or lesser ability to understand the creator’s intention-gives life to the jewelry.”
This story was originally published in Spanish by Cultura Colectiva.
