Hollywood

By the time Dalí returned to Europe in 1948 after spending nearly a decade in the United States, the artist had amassed great popularity. He became known to the American public as the embodiment of Surrealism itself, a perception which Phillippe Halsman’s iconic photo portraits of Dalí and his prominent mustache would help to solidify. Dalí's self-proclaimed "dazzling" fame and notoriety had led, as the artist remarked in his 1942 autobiography, to the receipt of "a shower of extravagant offers, each more unexpected than the last" (The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York, 1942, p. 344).
While in the United States, Dalí embarked on new endeavors that would extend his oeuvre into the realms of theater, film, advertising and fashion. The artist’s engagement in mediums outside of the traditional academic realm suited the American public’s post-war consumer culture, of which Dalí was keenly aware of and which would be echoed most prominently by Andy Warhol in the years to come. Dalí declared: “I am a man of the Renaissance…I would sign a pair of pants if someone commissioned me to. After all, Michelangelo…designed the uniforms for the [Pope’s] Swiss Guards..As a Renaissance man…I feel no separation between myself as an artist and the mass of the people. I stand ready to design anything the people want” (quoted in E.H. King, Salvador Dalí: The Late Work, exh. cat., High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2010, p. 40). In 1940, he worked alongside Duke Fulco di Verdura to produce a line of Surrealist jewelry. A few years later he was recruited by Alfred Hitchcock to assist with a dream sequence in his film Spellbound (1945). As if his influence on American media and culture were not great enough, Dalí also produced dozens of collages for advertisements and publications like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Town and Country.
A superb example of one of these interdisciplinary projects, the present work was commissioned for the cover of a 1947 edition of Sunset magazine, an American lifestyle publication whose readership may well have been familiar with Dalí’s cover art for Vogue from the year prior. Hollywood is replete with Dalí’s iconic motifs in his depiction of an otherworldly movie set, an ode to the magazine’s titular subject. Set within a vast, receding landscape bordered by vertiginous mountains in the distance, highly-detailed ink figures flank a monumental red-bricked building on the left and a faceless, nude woman on the right. In the drama of the foreground, one figure mans a camera while another holds a loudspeaker as he orients a spotlight on the roof of the building. The juxtaposition of figures of such drastically different scales is disorienting, yet typically hallucinogenic. Most notably, Dalí created this work as a dual image intended to be viewed from multiple perspectives, as suggested by the two images of the work upside-down and right-side in Robert Descharnes’s catalogue raisonné of works by the artist. Indeed, the uniformed officer depicted on the façade of the building is constructed from upside down cutouts of a woman’s face—her mouth serves as the officer’s visor and her nose doubles as his face and neck. Indeed, Dalí’s lifelong interest in the subconscious often materialized as optical illusions. The duality of this officer-face heightens on the left the absence of the nude’s excised likeness on the right. Depicted with visible bones, cut-out holes, and stitched-up skin, this model embodies artifice for art’s sake, posed as she is for the camera directed at her. With its bold coloration and graphic lines, Holywood demonstrates the artist's experimentation with new media, beyond the traditional bounds of art.