Unpublished 1921 Salvador Dalí painting goes on sale starting at €150k

An unpublished painting by Catalan artist Salvador Dalí will be auctioned in Barcelona on Thursday. The starting bid is €150,000.

The 1921 oil on canvas, 'Still Life,' was painted by a mourning Dalí after losing his mother, Felipa Domènch. It is a work from Dalí's first period and depicts a cup and a bottle on a blue background. He painted it very early in his career when he was just 17 years old.

"At that time, it was not the Dalí that we all know now, the surrealist artist, nor the histrionic person," Josep Solé, head of marketing at Subarna auction house, told Catalan News.

"We are talking about a starting point, a person that slowly starts to get influenced by avant-garde artistic movements," he added.

"The importance is that we are talking about a pre-surrealist Dalí, and a most sensorial one," Solé said.

Signed on the lower left on the reverse with the word Dalí, it was painted during one of the most existential crises Dalí had after losing his mother, who was one of the prominent supporters of his artistic career.

"If you observe it, it is just a cup and a bottle, this personal touch reminds us a little bit of the suffering or mourning for the love of a mother. Dalí was not painting a landscape nor something that makes you feel many emotions, it is just the most personal touch: a cup and a bottle," Solé explained.

"In the 'Still Life' painting, we see more cubism forms, more expressionism, and some of the first avant-garde styles, rather than the paintings seen after his time in Madrid and the death of his mother, which is when Dalí creates the histrionic and extremist image, the one that we all know," the marketing head at Subarna said.

He added, "We cannot feel surrealism in the painting yet, but we can start to see some cubism art styles, taking into account the different forms. " The painting has several influences, including Picasso, Joan Gris, and Greco.

The painting was previously exhibited in 1955 in the Spanish city of Cuenca between December 17, 1955, and January 15, 1956, during the first exposition on contemporary art at the Cuenca museum.

Despite the data protection law, it had been owned by Catalan poet and lawyer Eusebi Isern i Dalmau. 

"Our wish is that more people see the painting in person, so we would like for it to be exhibited in a museum, to be shown to a large audience, and not to be saved in someone's home, but after all, this is an auction, and any person can intervene," Solé said before adding that "it will be the bidders who will decide."

'Still Life' will be auctioned on Thursday afternoon at the Subarna auction house. Experts believe the final bidder could pay around €250,000.