DALI : ENIGME DU DESIR

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (1904 – 1989), was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueras, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography.

The most notorious of the Surrealists because of his outrageous self-promotion, encouraged by his greedy wife Gala, who had been married to Paul Eluard before, Dali is IMHO one of the most talented painter and draftman of all times. His eccentric megalomania that was only a provocative game and a form of self-derision that few people really understood have pleagued him all his life. But he has his fans and admirers because his genius is unequivocal and the troubling charm that his work exudes will attract amateurs and the general public for the times to come.

His Enigme du Désir (Desire enigma), ma mère, ma mère, is symptomatic of the incomprehension that falls on Dali's work at times : it represents an indescriptible object that has no sense, no real form, no meaning. Probably like the desire itself was the message that Dali tried to convey.

This picture made in 1929 was bought in 1946 by Mr Oskar Schlag, a psychoanalyst living in Zürich, who hung it in his waiting room to see his clients's reactions. In 1981 the Staatsgemaldesammlungen Munchen bought it for £ 453,600 ( $ 816,180).

EDWARD JAMES'S COLLECTION : DALI AND PICASSO

Edward James was born August 16, 1907, the only son of William James, an American railroad magnate who moved to England and married Evelyn Forbes, a Scots socialite, who was reputedly fathered by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). James was educated briefly at Eton, and then at Le Rosey in Switzerland, then at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton. In 1912 he inherited the 8,000-acre (32 km²) West Dean Estate in Sussex, on the death of his father.

James is best known as a passionate and early supporter of Surrealism. He sponsored Salvador Dalí for the whole of 1938 and his collection of paintings and art objects that subsequently came to be accepted as the finest collection of surrealist work in private hands. He also provided practical help, supporting Dalí for about two years and allowing Magritte to stay in his London house to do some paintings.

Before the war he chose to live in Mexico where he lived an eccentric and luxurous life, building fantastic residences and statues, notably Los Pozas ("the Pools") a gigantic sculpture garden ; in 1964 he gave his estate to the West Dean charity.

In 1981 he decided to sell the paintings Le Sommeil (above ) by Dali and the print La Minotauromachie (right) by Picasso. Le Sommeil went for $ 813,000 et La Minotauromachie for $ 160,800. It is now at the MOMA in New York.

He died in 1984. The rest of his fabulous collection of Surrealists and Latin America paintings was auctioned off in 1986 by Christie's.