Artist: Salvador Dali
Title: The Judgement of Paris (Urteil des Paris)
Year created: 1979
Medium: Hand-Signed & Numbered Limited Edition Lithograph on Arches Paper
Edition: 18/250
Height (inches): 29.5
Width (inches): 21.375
This piece is unframed.
Signed by the artist
Includes a certificate of authenticity.
Description of piece: This rare, vibrantly colored original Dali, The Judgement of Paris, a lithograph from original gouache, is hand-signed and numbered 18, from a limited edition of 250 pieces, on Arches paper. The work is numbered in the lower left corner, and bears Dali's distinctive signature, prominently, hand-signed in pencil in the lower right area of the work. Dali archivist Albert Field notes that Dali signed the work in New York City.
Published by Levine and Levine in New York for DALART, below the edition number the work additionally bears the blind stamp "DALART N.V. Copyright 1979". The work's image size is 22.875” x 16”, with overall paper dimensions of 29.5" x 21.375." Referenced in The Official Catalog of The Graphic Works of Salvador Dali By Albert Field, Reference Number #79-3, page 184, the work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
The artwork's title and subject, "The Judgement of Paris," is from Greek mythology, referencing one of the events which led to the Trojan War and, in slightly later iterations, to the founding of Rome. Zeus held a celebratory wedding banquet, and slighted Eris, the goddess of discord, by not inviting her. Angered, Eris tossed a golden apple from the Garden of the Hesperides into the proceedings as a prize of beauty. Three goddesses claimed the apple: Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. They asked Zeus to judge which of them was fairest, and, reluctant to favor any goddess himself, Zeus declared that Paris, a Trojan mortal, would be the judge. This beautiful and delicately detailed Dali lithograph depicts the mortal Trojan, Paris, with the three goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite.
Artist bio: Salvador Dalí, born Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, (1904-1989) was a prominent artist born in Figueres, Spain, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, sixteen miles from the French border, in Catalonia. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media, and he is best known for his surrealist work, including his most well-known painting, The Persistence of Memory. Highly imaginative, Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an ancestry of descent from the medieval Moors. His individualistic nature and resistance to conformity made waves, including among his colleagues. In 1934, when Dalí was subjected to a "trial", in which he was formally expelled from the Surrealist group, Dalí retorted, "I myself am surrealism".