Limbs on a Tree

Salvador Dali

Around 1931 the publisher Albert Skira approached Salvador Dali about illustrating a new edition of Comte de Lautremont's 1869 text Les Chants de Maldoror. In all, Dali would produce 42 images including 30 plates and 12 vignettes using experimental celluloid engraving on copper plate, possibly reworked with drypoint. These were then handed over to Roger Lacouriere at his atelier in Paris, where he reduced the plate size for publication in the book.

According to Dali's estate, it was Pablo Picasso who suggested Dali for the commission. Skira intended to publish between 200 and 300 copies, but due to financial strain, he was limited to 100 copies. The book was published once more in 1974 by the publisher Pierre Argillet in collaboration with Dali, who created six more images for the reissue.

Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror) is a long-form prose poem written between 1868 and 1869 by Comte de Lautreamont, nom de plume of Uruguayan-born French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse (1846 - 1870). It is a meditation on evil as told through the lens of a character named Maldoror, a figure of pure evil who has forsaken God. Literary ciritc Alex De Jonge describes the book as such: "Lautreamont forces his readers to stop taking their world for granted. He shatters the complacent acceptance of the reality proposed by their cultural traditions and makes them see that reality for what it is: an unreal nightmare all the more hair-raising because the sleeper believes he is awake".

Ducasse's violent, bizarre imagery imbues the book with a darkness that Ducasse later contrastes with his second - and final - publication, Posies (I and II). It was the former, however, that captured the imagination of the Surrealists, including Dali, Man Ray, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, and many others.

Ducasse was only twenty-four when he died of ill health during the siege of Paris by Prussian forces.