The Art Institute of Chicago has bought Salvador Dali’s 1936 “Venus de Milo with Drawers,” one of the rarest and most important sculptures in the artist’s output and a key object in Surrealism.
The piece, which was made from a commercial half-size plaster reproduction of the famous marble from antiquity, introduces six drawers from forehead to knee with white mink pompoms as drawer pulls.
The work was a highlight of the retrospective observing last year’s centenary of Dali’s birth. It also has a significant association: Dali said he engaged his friend Marcel Duchamp, one of the most daring and influential artists of the 20th Century, to help find a cabinetmaker to perform the alterations.
This is the first Dali sculpture to enter the Institute’s Surrealist collection and is on view in Gallery 236.
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