Dimension Endowment of Art, Taipei
Acquir🦄ed from the above by the present owner in 2006

Paris, Galerie H. Odermatt - Ph. Cazeau, Maîtres des XIXe et XXe siècles, 1989 (titled Le Banquet)

Robert Descharnes, Dalí, L'œuvre et l'homme, Lausanne, 1984, illustrated p. 210
Dalí Architecture (exhibition catalogue), La Pedrera, Barcelona, 1985, no. 43, illustrated p. 100
Robert Descharnes & Gilles Néret, Salvador Dalí, 1904-1989, The Paintings, Cologne, 1993, vol. I, no. 658, illustrated p. 297

Executed on a strong sheet of buff-coloured wove paper, not laid down, T-hinged to the mount at the reverse of the top two corners. There are several artist's pinholes at the top two corners and a small piece of paper at the upper centre edge attached to the surface. Apart from some minor surface dirt and some discolouration to the extreme edges, due to an earlier mount (not visible when framed), this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the paper tone is slightly brighter in the original.
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Infused with a narrative that is at once inviting and impenetrable, Dîner surréaliste sur un lit incorporates the iconic traits of Dalí's prime Surrealist period. An extravagant dinner table is set out for unidentified guests upon an object that hovers between a dining table and an elongated bed. A chaise longue at upper left lingers with the forms of its prior inhabitants. The work relates to a collaboration between Dalí and the American filmmaker Harpo Marx (fig. 1). The two met in 1937 and decided to collaborate on a script . Dalí titled the script Giraffes on Horesback Salad and completed a series of film sets for the project. The film was not eventually produced but the script and drawings related to the project are a testament to the singular imagination that c🌸haracterises much of Dalí's inventive work of the 1930s.

The exaggerated perspective that dominates Dîner surréaliste sur un lit reveals the artist's appropriation of a filmic sensibility. Dawn Ades writes of Dalí's work in the 1930s and the artist's 'awareness of [film's] power to create and manipulate another reality in time its particular qualities of the static pictorial image. The reassertion of perspective, for example, was not a return to pre-Cubist realism but an unmasking of it, in a manner not unlike Marcel Duchamp's 'rehabilitation' of perspective in The Large Glass 1915-23, unmasked its artificiality while capitalising on its illusions. Sometimes Dalí used incompatible perspectives, as Giorgio de Chirico had done, and often exaggerated the effect of perspective on landscapes, buildings and objects, with forms dizzyingly receding. [...] Often, perspective, which traditionally functioned to centre and harmonise a composition, was used to precisely the opposite purpose' (D. Ades, 'Why Film?', in Dalí and Film (exhibition catalogue), Tate Modern, London; Los Angeles County Mꦯuseum of Art, Los Angeles; Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida & Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007-08, p. 22).

Fig. 1 Salvador Dalí and Harpo Marx, 1937