Les Sacs du Meunier

Ink and watercolour on paper, signed and dated “Dalí 1949” lower left. Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. A stage design from Dalí’s years working for the theatre. Through the late 1940s he was designing sets and costumes across Europe and the United States — for Peter Brook’s Salome at Covent Garden, for the Ballets Russes, for productions in Rome and New York — and the drawings from this period share a common register: a rapid line, a washed grisaille ground, and one motif enlarged to an impossible scale. Here the miller’s sacks hang along a wall in diminishing perspective, their shadows falling in a rhythm that belongs more to the paranoiac-critical method than to any real stage. Against them, at the right, two small figures in eighteenth-century costume are sketched in a few strokes, and the contrast of scale does the work: the everyday object becomes monumental and slightly menacing, the human presence incidental. The grey paper is not incidental either. Dalí used its tone as the middle value of the composition, reserving the white heightening for the volume of the sacks and letting the ink carry the shadow. It is an economical way of working, and a revealing one — the drawing was made to be read at a distance, from the stalls.