© Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí - 2026
© Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí - 2026

Description

Número de catàleg raonat OG:
OG 013
Propietari:
Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí
Ens dipositari:
TEATRE-MUSEU DALI
Fons:
Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

The bookplate for the French poet André Breton was probably commissioned during the autumn of 1930. Dalí created an ink drawing depicting Breton as an anteater whose head evokes the figure of the Great Masturbator, surrounded by ants, insects that, it seems, both men detested. Documents from the period show that, a year earlier, both Dalí and Breton had used the image of the anteater in their respective works. On October 24, 1929, the Barcelona newspaper Mirador published an article about Un Chien Andalou, recently premiered in Paris and about to be shown in Barcelona, in which Dalí stated that the film was a ‘simple anotació, constatació de fets’ (simple annotation, confirmation of facts). To illustrate this idea clearly, he offered the anteater as an example: ‘…it can grow larger than a horse, possesses enormous ferocity, has exceptional muscular strength, is a terrible animal. The anteater eats only ants, using a tongue half a metre long, as thin as a wire.’ (1) A month later, André Breton compared Dalí to an anteater. In the preface to the catalogue of the artist’s first exhibition in Paris, which opened on 25 November 1929, at the Galerie Goemans – a show that included the oil painting The Great Masturbator (Cat. P 235) – Breton wrote: ‘Life presents itself to man with seductions comparable to those that the anteater’s tongue must offer to ants.’ (2) Another instance of the close collaboration between the two can be seen in the letter Breton sent to Dalí on 10 January 1931, shortly before taking the drawing to the printer, in which he asks for one last correction: ‘…if there is still time […] change the banner on the bookplate from ‘André le fourmilier’ to ‘André le tamanoir’.’ (3) This is how it appears in Dalí’s final bookplate, reproduced using rotogravure at a Parisian printing house. Breton’s poem, ‘Après le Grand Tamanoir’, dated in Lyons-la-Forêt on May 20, 1931, was published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution no. 3 in December of the same year. (4) Later, Breton included it in Le Revolver à cheveux blancs, a volume of poems published in June 1932 and illustrated with a frontispiece by Dalí. __________ (1) Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica > Lista de Números (mcu.es) (2) (ID 47343) ‘André Breton : 42, rue Fontaine : tableaux modernes, scuptures, estampes, tableaux anciens’, Calmels Cohen, Paris, 2003, p. 141. ‘La vie est donnée à l’homme avec des séductions comparables à celles que doit offrir aux fourmis la langue du fourmilier.’ (3) Memoria de los sueños: Salvador Dalí, 1904-1989, MUVIM 2001, p. 95. (4) Bonnet, M. (ed.), André Breton Oeuvres complètes II, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1992, p. 1333. Marguerite Bonnet suggests that: ‘The image of the anteater […] represents the waiting, at once neutral and attentive, before beings and things, which for Breton is the essence of the poetic attitude.’

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  1. Original prints (1)