Salvador Dalí
Limp Cranes and "Cranian" Harp
1935

A theatrical and provocative persona among the Parisian Surrealists, Salvador Dali was obsessed with depicting what he called his own hallucinations. He made some fifteen hundred prints over the course of his lifetime, fifty-seven of which were created during the 1930s, the key decade for his artistic development and the period when Surrealism gained widespread recognition. Most of Dali's prints from this era appeared as illustrations and frontispieces in books by André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Tristan Tzara, among others, reflecting the artist's close association with the movement's literary figures.
In 1930 Dali was invited to illustrate Les Chants de Maldoror, an 1869 text rediscovered by the Surrealists in the 1930s that told a nightmarish tale of an unrepentantly evil protagonist. The book was filled with scenes of violence, perversion, and blasphemy.