Salvador Dalí Illustrates Don Quixote

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http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/09/salvador-dali-illustrates-don-quixote/

Salvador Dalí Illustrates Don Quixote

by Maria Popova

The art of fighting surrealist windmills.

Salvador Dalí was no stranger to literary illustration, from his heliogravures for Alice in Wonderland to his drawings for Montaigne’s essays. But arguably his most elegant take on a literary classic comes from this rare 1946 edition of Don Quixote De La Mancha (public library) by Miguel de Cervantes. (Cervantes’s exact birthday remains uncertain — September 29, 1547 is the commonly agreed upon date, but there are no surviving birth records; the only official record is that of his baptism on October 9, 1547.)

Scrumptiously surrealist, Dalí’s drawings — a combination of black-and-white sketches and watercolors — are the best visual take on the Cervantes classic since Spanish graphic design pioneer Roc Riera Rojas’s 1969 illustrations.

Complement with Dalí’s 1967 illustrations of the signs of the zodiac, then revisitMatisse’s etchings for Ulysses.

Thanks, Wendy