Christmas according to Dalí: 1958–1976

In 1958 Salvador Dalí accepted a commission from a pharmaceutical laboratory to create a Christmas picture for the company. During the Christmases of the next two decades, until 1976, the continuity of this connection remained unaltered. The outcome is 19 offerings on paper, subsequently multiplied by printing, and 19 literary reflections to usher in a new annual cycle. Dalí accompanied each picture with a brief handwritten expression, an imperishable testimony to his distinct personality and a personal way of announcing the arrival of the new year. As usual in Dalí, his images, with their strong sense of narrative, occupy a variegated space in which drawing exercises its formal dominion. The artist conceives these scenes as games of decipherment containing allusions to sexuality and the realm of dreams and with evocations of religious and historical themes, overlaid with emblematic elements and symbols and all interrelated in time through the recurrent presence of the Christmas tree.