Landscape

1910-1914 • Oil on Postcard • 3 ½ X 5 ½

Period of Work: Early

Major Themes / Influences:

• First painting
• Donated by Albert Fields

Description of Work:

Summary

• Oil on cardboard
  • The cardboard is a postcard
• Signed lower left corner: S.DALI
• This is believed to be the first painting by Salvador Dali, completed at the age of 6 (possibly 10), it is simply called Landscape
• Dali’s appointed authenticator, Albert Field (1916-2003), bequeathed a portion of his estate to the Dali Museum
  • Field’s personal collection of reference materials consisting of exhibition catalogs, rare books, prints, and sculptures, is housed in the Dali Museum
• This small oil on cardboard exhibits considerable talent, not only in composition but also in his color choice of pinks and greens

Comments

• We date this painting, between the years 1910-1914 since there is insufficient documentation available to give a more precise date
• In this specific case Fleur Cowles and Albert Field date this works of 1910, but they believe, as do other authors, that this date is somewhat early in the artist’s production and have therefore situated it between these dates

Albert Field

• Albert Field’s kinship to Dali was forged by his visit to Dali’s “Dream of Venus” pavilion in the 1939 World’s Fair and Dali’s major retrospective at MoMA in 1941.
• Field met Dali in the 1940s and spent time with him at the St. Regis Hotel where Dali took up residence.
• In 1955, Dali asked Field to be his archivist.
• Field worked vigilantly to determine the authenticity and provenance of Dali’s prints which he compiled in his Official Catalog of the Graphic Works of Salvador Dali.
• In the book’s introduction, Mr. Morse writes:
  

  “Only the labors and scholarship of Mr. Field can begin to restore any kind of order to the vast world of Dali reproductive prints.”

In Dalinean Context:

• 1910 
  • Goes to Colegio Hispano-Frances de la Inmaculada Concepción
• 1916
  • Dali begins his education at a private secondary school conducted by the Brothers of the Marist Order in Figueres
  • Spends holiday with Pitxot family at their Moli de la Torre (Mill Tower)
  • Studies drawing under Professor Juan Núñez at the Municipal Drawing School in Figueres

Art World Events:

• 1910

• • The Futurist Manifesto is published
  • First International Art Exhibition opens in Dusseldorf
  • First Post-Impressionist exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, is shown in the Grafton Galleries in London, the exhibition included works by Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin
  • Kandinsky creates the first purely abstract painting in modern art – Improvisation XIV
• 1914
  • Marsden Hartley – Portrait of a German Officer
  • Giorgio de Chirico- Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure)

World Events:

• 1910
  • Japan annexes Korea and takes both its internal administration and foreign affairs
  • Portuguese Republican revolutionaries overthrow the monarchy and establish the New Republic
• 1914
  • Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated
  • World War I begins
  • The Panama Canal opens