Fantaisie érotique orientale pour le projet d'illustration de l'ouvrage Les Mille et Une Nuits

Nicolas and Olivier Descharnes have confirmed the authenticity of this work.

Throughout his career, Dalí executed illustrations for many editions of classical literature, including Don Quixotte, The Divine Comedy and Macbeth. Salvador Dalí’s One Thousand and One Nights, however, commissioned from the artist by the family of the present owner in the 1960s, remained unpublished until 2014. Thus this group of works offers new and exceptional insight into Dalí’s original and unique relationship with classical and literary tradition, and his constant search for an avant-garde re-interpretation of myths and iconographies.

Extremely varied in its graphic style and entrancing with its dramatic imagery, Dalí’s series of illustrations for One Thousand and One Nights shows the artist’s interpretation of central figures and events in a complex and evolving narrative that may date back in its origins to the 9th Century. The stories of Scheherazade as retold in One Thousand and One Nights include some of the most recognisable images of Arabic, Persian, Mesopotamian, Indian, and Egyptian folklore. For many hundreds of years these stories and their characters were central to a European understanding and imagining of Arabian and Persian history and visual culture.

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