La Femme Visible

Paris: Éditions Surréalistes, 1930. First edition. [72] pp. Original aluminum foil paper wrappers covered by red tissue paper, title printed in black on the cover. Unbound sheets, as this variant was issued. Photo-lithographed portrait of Gala, heliogravure frontispiece retouched with a burin, and six heliographic plates. A bit of wear to the extremities, else a beautiful copy of a very fragile production.

Of an edition of 204 copies, one of the very few on Rodingold vellum, in sheets, justified on the colophon by the Service de Presse stamp. With Dalí’s autograph dedication on the half-title, “Hommage de l’auteur. Salvador Dali.” Laid in is the prière d’insérer announcement with text by André Breton and Paul Eluard.

This issue of La Femme Visible is unbound sheets laid into the foil and red wrappers. For these few copies, Dali apparently often added a simple autograph homage. The book did not meet with great success, as Eluard reveals in a letter to Gala on January 27, 1931: “La Femme visible a une presse immonde. Pourquoi Dali n’a-t-il pas mis dans ses dédicaces le nom des gens. Comme cela, on n’en parlera pas, ou en mal.” [La Femme Visible is receiving dreadful publicity. Why didn’t Dali put people’s names in his dedications? That way, people won’t talk about it, or talk about it badly.] Georges Sebbag in his bibliography of Editions Surréalistes does not mention these press copies, nor the printing of the book in sheets.

One of Dalí’s earliest books, containing four texts: “L’Âne Pourri,” “La Chèvre Sanitaire,” “L’Amour,” and “Le Grand Masturbateur.” In these writings, inspired by Freudian and post-Freudian theories, Dalí’s aim is to upset the frontiers between dream and reality and to break down the convictions that form the basis of so-called “bourgeois values.” He later spoke of it as “a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge, based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and delirious interpretations.”

References: Michler and Löpsinger. Salvador Dalí: Catalogue Raisonné of Etchings and Mixed-Media Prints, 1924-1980, no. 4. Cowling. The Magic Mirror. Dada and Surrealism from a Private Collection, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1988, no. 92. Mundy, ed. Surrealism: Desire Unbound. pp. 131-33; 148-49. Eluard. Letters to Gala, 1989 (trans.) p. 98. Sebbag, Les Editions Surréalistes, 1993. pp. 63-64.