A recently discovered artwork by Salvador DalÍ has gone on to support at-risk youth in North Carolina.
The original wood engraving, which now hangs at the Seaside Art Gallery in Nags Head, was found among a cache of donated goods at a thrift shop that supports the Outer Banks Hotline, a nonprofit and shelter for runaway teens and victims of domestic violence and human trafficking.
An anonymous couple from Portsmouth nearby the Outer Banks recently purchased the piece for $1,200, the Virginian-Pilot reported.
“It is rare that a work like this was just sitting in a thrift shop,” Melanie Smith, owner of the Nags Head gallery who verified and appraised the original work, told the newspaper. “Most of the time, people know what it is.”
Smith discovered that the piece is one of a series of 100 commissioned artworks tied to verses of “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri.
Thrift shop volunteer Wendy Hawkins was sifting through donated art when she recognized a distinctly DalÍ-esque piece, WAVY reported last week.
WAVY“One day I saw this, with a bunch of other paintings lined up on the floor,” said Hawkins, “and I said, ‘This is old, this is something special.’ ”
Hawkins took the artwork to art expert Smith, who determined that the medium, style and signature matched DalÍ’s own.
“Everything fits,” she said. “He is one of the great artists of the 20th century.”
In the 1950s, the Italian government commissioned DalÍ to work on an illustrated edition of the “The Divine Comedy.”
However, Italian citizens did not approve of a Spaniard artist directing a deluxe version of the epic poem by one of the greatest Italian artists of all time. When Italy dropped the project, DalÍ took his works to a French publisher who later released the work.
The works could be divided into three groups, coinciding with the three phases of existence explained in “The Divine Comedy” — inferno, purgatory and paradise. The wood-block print, which seems to depict a woman in blue next to a man in red, represented a verse from purgatory.
According to Smith, each work was planned and painted first in watercolor. Then, each drawing was carved into a number of hardwood blocks — one for each color used in the watercolor plan. The blocks were then overlayed color-by-color to re-create the original plan. In the end, 3,500 wood engravings were used for the project.
DalÍ also made copies of each work, some of which were signed.
This piece, now considered a collectible, is one of 150 copies and signed by DalÍ with a wood stamp as well as a purple pencil.
“That’s why you can find such a wide range of values,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of nuances.”
