Cat. no. OE
27

Monument à Kant

Monument to Kant

Monument to Kant

Cat. no. OE 27

Monument to Kant

1936

Description

Unique Original Work
Date:
1936
Technique:
Assemblage
Dimensions:
Unknown
Location:
Unknown
Description:
The catalogue of the Exposition surréaliste d’objets, held at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris in 1936, lists a Surrealist object by Dalí entitled Hommage à Kant, a title that can be linked to one of the works that appear in photographs of this exhibition. According to the catalogue of the 1936 Surrealism exhibition, held fifty years later at the Zabriskie Gallery in New York, the base of this object quotes an excerpt from the Prussian philosopher’s Critique of Pure Reason. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the artist remarks that during his adolescence, his favourite reading was Kant: ‘I felt that a man like Kant, who wrote such important and useless books, must be a real angel! My eagerness to read what I did not understand, stronger than my will, must have obeyed a violent necessity for spiritual nourishment of my soul, and just as a calcium deficiency in certain weakened organisms of children causes them blindly and irresistibly to break off and eat the lime and plaster on walls, so my spirit must have needed that categorical imperative, which I chewed and rechewed for two consecutive years without succeeding in swallowing it. But one day I did swallow it’.