What is The Salvador Dali Clot Collection ?
Salvador Dali’s thirst for creativity was insatiable. For at least 5 days a week, Dali diligently stood in his studio painting, sketching and creating two-dimensional work. However, like a weight-lifter imagining his next session in the gym, Dali’s insatiable creative urges overtook him even during his down-time.
Dali would often lounge by his seaside pool with his secretary Robert Descharnes, sipping Moscato in the nude and admiring the bathing beauties on the beach below them. While he lounged he would furiously knead a ball of wax into intensely personal subconscious thoughts in three dimensions. Classic themes of art history such as the mythical forms of Triton, Perseus, Terpsichore (Muse of the Dance) and Apollo, as well as religious icons of Christ and the Madonna, permeate these studies. 
Carmen Castanets and Don Quixote portray icons of the Iberian Peninsula. Carmen’s flowing robes flit in a playful and alluring dance echoing the gypsies of old, clickety-clacking on castanets in a staccato rhythm of the indigenous landscape.
Dali’s muse Gala is reimagined as the Madonna of Port Lligat and reformed as the victorious angel in a highly personal vignette of the artist’s affections, Gala Gradiva. Sigmund Freud’s analysis of W. Jensen’s Gradiva, inspired Dali to recreate his wife Gala as the object of affection in Jensen’s story, “He was unable to explain what it was in her that aroused his interest; he only knew that from the first moment he had felt dominated by an intense attraction which time did not succeed in weakening”.
While abstract, each work echoes the push and pull of the artist’s hands with veracity and power absent in many of his more collaborative sculptures. The quality, surrealistic bent, and homage to past artistic traditions harmonize with Dali’s two dimensional sketches and paintings, creating a clearer picture of the master’s creative hunger.
The twenty-two sculptures of the Clot Collection were created between 1969 and 1976 at Dali’s home in Port Lligat while the artist was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Created at the behest of his publisher Isidro Clot, the modeled waxes were taken to a foundry and cast as bronze sculptures in the traditional lost wax method. Intervening years and countless claims to sculpture rights after the passing of Dali in 1989 have created confusion about which works were approved by Dali and which were not. After Dali signed documents allowing the serialized editions of his sculptures by Clot, the papers were subject to numerous transfers which left a large need for the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation to regulate the market which is typically reliant on the catalogue raisonne produced by Dali’s last secretary and biographer Robert Descharnes and his son, Nicolas.
Therefore, the Foundation recently coordinated with 2049 Obra Contemporanea in Spain, to whom the rights to the Clot collection have descended, to oversee the legacy of the collection. This collaboration provides clarity in what was once a cloudy marketplace. The agreement quantifies both the authenticity and academic integrity of the bronzes incorporated within the Clot Collection and provides the marketplace with the means by which to convey a valuable part of Dali’s artistic output.
Dali was always a multi-dimensional character. Should we not expect the same from his art?
The Salvador Dali Clot Collection was created by the insatiable creativity and artistic drive resulting from one of the artist’s most tumultuous times. The Clot Collection and Salvador Dali artwork for sale through Robin Rile Fine Art.
For information on The Clot Collection sculptures available for purchase through Robin Rile Fine Art, contact info@robinrile.com
The Salvador Dali Clot Collection
contact: info@robinrile.com for pricing and availability.
