Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Nicolas Descharnes and the late Robert Descharnes.

Provenance
Anon. sale, Galerie Pierre-Yves Gabus, Geneva, 23 June 1991, lot 496.
Private collection, Switzerland (acquired at the above sale).
Private collection, Switzerland (by descent from the above).


Executed in 1971 as a preparatory drawing for Salvador Dalí's illustrations to André Malraux's Roi, je t'attends à Babylone, published by Albert Skira in 1973, the present work brings together two of Dalí's most enduring fascinations: mythic womanhood and the monumental presence of the elephant. Here, the Amazon is rendered from a bold, low vantage point, her sculptural body defined in thick, confident contours of ink, softened by delicate flourishes and a gentle aura of charcoal shading. Beneath her towers the elephant, its trunk curling in a sinuous arc, its eye moist and luminous, a drop suspended from its mouth. The horizon stretches thin across the composition with the unmistakable emptiness of Dalí's Surreal landscapes, situating these figures in the timeless theatre of the dream.

The composition encapsulates Dalí's instinct for conflating strength, beauty and sexuality into a single, emblematic form. The Amazon, belonging to the mythical tribe of warrior women who once fought at Troy, is elevated into an eroticised archetype, at once commanding and vulnerable. The elephant, in turn, is a creature of layered symbolism: in Dalí's own lexicon, it often signified the endurance and potency of the libido, while in Indian tradition it stood as the pillar on which the earth rests. This union of Amazon and elephant becomes a Surrealist allegory of desire and power, myth and psychology, the real and the imagined.

For Skira's illustrated publication of Malraux's work, Dalí supplied a suite of etchings that translated such imagery into the refined language of drypoint. Amazons, elephants, hybrid creatures and erotic distortions populate the pages in a series of prints widely regarded as among the artist's most beautiful illustrated cycles. Seen against that celebrated sequence, the present drawing offers a rare glimpse into Dalí's process: the immediacy of line, the exploratory balance between monumentality and Surreal fantasy, and the private invention that precedes the finished plates.

The collaboration between Malraux and Dalí is itself remarkable. Malraux's Roi, je t'attends à Babylone is not a conventional novel but a lyrical meditation on myth, art and human destiny, blending prose and poetry in a series of philosophical reflections on metamorphosis and the creative imagination. Dalí's images, whether in finished etching or in this preparatory drawing, respond in kind – unfurling visions of erotic archetypes and dream-charged symbols that stand as pictorial equivalents to Malraux's mytho-poetic text. Completed under Skira's guidance, the present work is a striking relic of this project: a confident, sensual and Surreal invention that bridges preparatory impulse and finished artwork, capturing the unique grandeur of both creators' limitless imaginations.