T his fantastical, elaborate work on paper from 1970 depicts one of the motifs Dalí most loved to return to over the course of his career.

Within Dalí’s repertoire, the drawer is a motif that has become as instantly recognizable as his melting clocks, and one that also demonstrates the artist’s obsessive desire to understand human nature and the psychological complexities of the mind. As a Surrealist dream object, the drawer delivers a metaphor for the extreme recesses of the mind, or the subconscious. Dalí first utilized the motif in 1936, when he executed Venus de Milo aux tiroirs (see fig. 1), likely in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp. In this piece, the artist manipulated the form of the Louvre’s most celebrated statue to visually depict Sigmund Freud’s idea that the human body is comprised of ambiguous drawers that can only be opened through methods of psychoanalysis. In Venus de Milo aux tiroirs, Le Giraffe en feu and again in the present work, the drawers illuminate Dalí’s innate ability to give form to the intangible subconscious (figs. 1 and 2). They suggest the psychological complexities intrinsic to Dalí’s mercurial oeuvre.

The imaginative scenarios portrayed in Dalí's works often incorporated elements of his biography, embellished and reinterpreted through the wild imagination of the irreverent Surrealist. The fantastical scene portrayed in the present work is set in Port Lligat, where Dalí resided with his wife Gala and which had been the setting for other important compositions of the artist's late career.

The typewritten labels that emerge from the drawers on ribbons of glitter contain the names of the twelve lithographs of the Memories of Surrealism series. The present work has been in a private collects ion since it was acquired just two years after its creation.