892. Salvador Dalí (and Marcel Duchamp),

Spanish, (1904-1989), Venus de Milo with Drawers, 1936.

Original plaster of 1936 with metal knobs and white

fur tuft covers, 98 x 32.5 x 34 cm. Museum Boijmans

Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Surrealism.

 

 

Conceived and executed in plaster in 1936 then cast in bronze in 1964 by Max Clarc, the Venus de Milo aux tiroirs (Venus de Milo with Drawers) is perhaps Salvador Dalí’s most iconic sculpture. To create this sculpture he used a small model of the original Venus de Milo located in the Louvre museum in Paris. Dalí then chose the famous Dada artist, Marcel Duchamp, to create the maquette for the work and created a Venus with a new sense of character and presence, interrupting her smooth torso and drapery by inserting cube shaped drawers. He perceived the face of the original sculpture to be its weakest attribute, inadequate for the goddess of the classical ideal of feminine beauty. In his own interpretation, he introduces drawers into the body of the sculpture, which was a direct response to Freud’s notions of the “tiroirs de l’âme humaine” (drawers to the human soul). The drawers themselves are symbols of repressed sexuality from the pangs of the Christian conscience. Whereas Dalí’s previous works were based on dreams and the metaphysical state of the mind, he began at this point to draw inspirations from different religious sources appropriating traditional motifs while creating a daring and innovative visual vocabulary.