Artfully Adorned: Salvador Dalí's Surrealist Jewels

Lost in the melting clocks and contorted figures of Salvador Dalí's warped reality, one must be reminded not to take the artist's fantastical work at face value Like his paintings and sculpture, Dalí's jewels are certainly a reflection of their eccentric and ambitious creator, but the artist himself once warned spectators not to think of them as mere whimsy "Paladin of a new Renaissance, I too refuse to be confined.

My art encompasses physics, mathematics, architecture, nuclear science-the psycho-nuclear, the mystico-nuclear-and jewelry-not paint alone," Dalí wrote in the introduction of a 1959 catalogue of his jewels Around 40 jewels were made by Dalí between 1941 and 1970 Their painstaking craftsmanship and singular imagination is what makes Dalí's jewels so genius.

In 1949, the Philadelphia banker and philanthropist Cummins Catherwood and his wife Ellengowen, both patrons and later friends of Dalí's, acquired 22 pieces of jewelry, directly from the artist The collection would be exhibited to raise money for various charitable and cultural causes at both the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and the Dalí Theatre-Museum of Figueres, where the artist was born. . Source