Elsa Schiaparelli And Anthropomorphic Chest Of Drawers By Salvador Dali

Surrealism, who has not heard this word nowadays? World of the dreams and everything that is irrational, impossible or grotesque, a cultural movement founded immediately after the First World War and still embraced nowadays by many artists. In order to understand it better it is necessary to look deeper into the work of two outstanding artists strongly connected with this movement, and for whom this style was an integral part of their lives. This essay's primary objective is to look closer at Desk Suit , 1936, by Elsa Schiaparelli and compare it to Anthropomorphic Chest of Drawers, 1936, by Salvador Dali. These two pieces of art although so different, have a lot in common. To find out more and explore the world of surrealism, it will be

The painting was exhibited for the first time in 1936 at the Lefevre Gallery in London. This art work was painted in oil on wood in that same year, although before painting it, Dali did several pencil and ink drawings. The first thing that strikes the viewer is a monstrous figure of a woman half-lying on the ground. Her body looks distorted and frightening. She keeps her head down and with her hand raised up she gives an impression of rejecting the outside world. A set of pulled out drawers on her chest representing the feminine parts of the woman’s body, gives the image a sexual meaning. With regard to his paintings featuring drawers and their meaning Dali said: “The only difference between the immortal Greece and contemporary times is Sigmund Freud, who discovered that the human body, purely platonic at the Greece epoch, nowadays is full of secret drawers that only the psychoanalysis is capable to open”( Dali). Gibson notes that "The drawers include everything - Freud, Christianity, the possibility of penetration into the interior of a human being with its secret compartment all full of meaning" (Gibson p187 ). The woman portrayed in Anthropomorphic Chest of Drawers is lying down in the darkness, which could mean that she does not want to see and be seen by others. The smaller image on the right top corner of the painting represents the outside world, an ordinary day and

She was the first artist who was not afraid to bring surreal elements into garments. Andrew Bolton states: "Schiaparelli worked in the 1939s, in the heyday of surrealism and I think that the surrealists strategies of displacement for the objects, the idea of playing with scale was something that very much appealed to Schiaparelli's sense of playfulness and her idea of trying to expand the boundaries of fashion and what we mean by fashion" (Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations). Schiaparelli became even more popular for her collaboration with Salvador Dali. She believed that fashion is also a form of art. Victoria Pass wrote that Schiaparelli was "the woman who rages against the sky, creating revolutionary style, blurring the boundaries between art and fashion (Pass, 1981). The author added regarding to Schiaparelli's style: "Schiaparelli and the Surrealists both used the uncanny conflation of incongruous elements to create convulsive beauty. This shared aesthetic connects Schiaparelli much more deeply with Surrealism than most fashion and art historians have yet acknowledged" (Pass, 2011 p234). Partly, as a result of her collaboration with Dali, surreal fashion has been explored, developed and practiced by many current artists up to these days. "Dali's collaborations with Schiaparelli turned