30.00

18" by 24"

Hand SIgned & Numbered

Giclee' Print on 200gsm Enhanced Paper

Limited Edition of 50

Surrealist painter Salvador Dali delved into film many times during his career. His films with fellow surrealist Luis Bunuel, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'or in the 1930's were surrealist benchmarks and had enough social commentary in them to be condemned by the catholic church and images so shocking that in Paris the League of the Patriots a right wing group threw ink at the screens leading to violence in the theater.

Years later Dali worked in film again, collaborating with Walt DIsney on the dream sequence in Dumbo. The two even planned on collaborating further on a six minute short called Destino, which was eventually posthumously completed in 2003. Dali also collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence in Spellbound.

It wouldn't be until Impressions de la haute Mongolie in 1975 that Dali would finally direct a film himself for the first and only time.

But in 1937 Dali had intended to do just that. Giraffes on Horseback Salad would have been a collaboration between Dali and the Marx brothers. Dali greatly admired Harpo Marx and the two had developed a friendship with an intention on one day working together. The film would have followed a spanish Aristocrat played by Harpo in love with a woman who's face the audience never sees. Throughout the film Dali intended to show "the continuous struggle between the imaginative life as depicted in the old myths and the practical and rational life of contemporary society." The film would have been anarchic and absurd. Scenes included a horde of burning giraffes wearing gas masks, and Harpo catching dwarves with a net. A loosely plotted script was assembled by Dali but outside of Harpo the other Marx brothers had reservations about the project. Groucho didnt find the film funny. It's unclear how far along the project actually got before being cancelled but without the enthusiasm of Groucho and Chico the film lacked the momentum to get very far past Dali's imagination.

Years later another doomed production, Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune, lured Salvador Dali back to the movies, this time playing the mad emperor of the galaxy. One of his conditions was that his throne room include the flaming giraffes with gas masks from Giraffes on Horseback Salad. An image that he'd wanted to put on the screen dating back all the way to 1937.