About the Catalogue Raisonné

There is still uncertainty about the date of Dalí’s first sculptural work. Dalí’s authorship of some of the works from the early 1920s, which are still being studied, is as yet unconfirmed. These pictorial interventions in decorative objects require further investigation before Dalí’s authorship can be firmly established.

The Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture and Three-dimensional Work by Salvador Dalí is a compendium of the sculptures and three-dimensional objects, including the installations, that can be identified as having been created by the artist and possess the characteristics required of an original work.

Dalí’s accredited authorship of each sculptural work is established through a process of detailed individual study, once the conditions of its creation and the artist’s direct connection with the work have been demonstrated.

The definitions in this glossary are based on authoritative dictionaries, thesauruses and works of reference such as the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms and the Art & Architecture Thesaurus of the Getty Research Institute. Some terms have been complemented with material from contemporaneous sources such as the 1938 Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, and with excerpts from those of Dalí’s writings that have a bearing on the sculptural work, which were especially significant during the 1930s. Consideration has also been given to the retrospective references to some of the sculptural works in the artist’s autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, published in 1942. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that a number of terms are specific to Dalí and his work: in other words, they relate to original creations by the artist, and as such their definition is based exclusively on Dalí’s testimony.

The digital publication of the Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture and Three-dimensional Work by Salvador Dalí is the result of a particular methodology especially conceived and implemented with the specific needs of Dalí’s sculptural work in mind. This approach is basically that of the Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, which was completed in December 2017, although the structure and presentation have been adapted to the specific needs of the three-dimensional work.

The description below of the phases of this process provides a clearer understanding of the work involved in the preparation of a publication of this nature.

The digital publication of the Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture and Three-dimensional Work by Salvador Dalí has been specially conceived and designed in accordance with the particular characteristics of the sculptural work of Dalí.

The About the Catalogue Raisonné section is structured in six parts, which establish both the general characteristics of Dalí’s original sculptural work and the contents and operation of this catalogue raisonné. On the one hand there is a chronological itinerary and the specific characteristics of Dalí’s original work, together with a glossary of terms, and on the other an outline of the methodology, a user manual for this catalogue raisonné and a list of the members of the work team. Visitors can access each of the works by means of the search tool, with different fields or keywords, or by using the artwork index or the collections index. In the first of these, all the works are itemised in chronological order, and the timeline can be browsed by way of the bar at the top, and in the second contains the works are classified according to the institution or collection in which they currently reside.

Composition of the work team