Salvador DALI writes to Pablo PICASSO. Illustrated card with original drawings.

Salvador Dalí (1904.1989)

Autographed card signed to Pablo Picasso.

An oblong octavo page in Catalan.

Slnd [probably 1958 or 1959].

Unpublished postcard showing the Dalí-Picasso correspondence.

On the back of a silver gelatin photograph postcard depicting a view of his house and the bay of Port-Lligat. Signed twice by Dalí.

Dalí invites Picasso to Port Lligat. A superb illustrated document from the Catalan painter to his elder. The surrealist invitation is adorned with small drawings of a shooting star, a guitar, three birds, and two snails illustrating a kiss.

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Ole!! 

Punt de Trobada Port LLigat

Pel juliol. Neither Dona nor Cargol.

A peto
Gala. Dali.

Translation: "Hello, meeting point Port Lligat. For July, neither woman nor snail. A kiss. Gala. Dalí"

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From their very first meeting in Paris in 1926, the Dalí-Picasso relationship was marked by ambivalence and imbalance: Dalí's fascination was met with Picasso's distance and silences. Despite Dalí's regular mailings and attempts to contact him, Picasso seems to have remained consistently silent and mute towards the Surrealist painter. Despite a few documented encounters, not a single letter from Picasso to Dalí is known. Fascinated and obsessed by the genius of his " best enemy ," appears to have indulged in an illusory and unrequited friendship: "Every year, I sent him a postcard that evoked an old story he had told me. Picasso never replied, but I knew he greatly appreciated my annual card and the memory." ( "How One Becomes Dalí").

Pel juliol. Neither Dona nor Cargol. This "old story" mentioned by Dalí echoes Picasso's memory of a stay in Cadaqués. Picasso, who had spent the summer of 1910 in Dalí's homeland with Fernande Olivier and Ramón Pitchot, witnessed the flight of María, Pitchot's sister. Dalí recounts it thus: "There was a contralto in Cadaqués […] One day when her lover wanted to kiss her, she refused and went out onto the balcony shouting: ' Pel juliol. Ni Dona ni Cargol. ' ('In July. Neither woman nor snail')." From then on, this saying was almost systematically mentioned by Dalí in his letters, hoping, through a shared and intimate memory, to evoke in Picasso a nostalgia for Catalan summers ( Dalí, Letters to Picasso, pp. 186-187).

Bibliography: Dalí. Letters to Picasso (1927-1970). L. Madeline. Ed. Le Promeneur.