Salvador Dalí’s Surreal Jewelry Designs: From Throbbing Heart Necklaces to Medusa Brooches
Upon hearing the name of Salvador Dalí, even a total layman in the art world is bound to get visions of melting clocks. Surprisingly, for an artist who showed so much self-marketing savvy, Dalí never brought an actual timepiece in that distinctively, even canonically surreal shape to market. But that hardly stopped Cartier from putting out the Crash, whose distorted shape may have always brought The Persistence of Memory to mind, but whose name hints at the inspiration of a watch smashed up in a car wreck. The Crash came out in swinging-sixties London at its very height, by which time Dalí himself had been designing real jewelry for more than a quarter century. ?si=v8xd7w6Tr3ZQzIIq You can see a few of Dalí’s jewels in the 1960 British Pathé clip at the top of the post. Unsurprisingly, they occupy a realm apart from, or at least orthogonal to, that of conventional jewelry. Some of them move: Living Flower, for instance, which “opens to reveal stamen and petals paved with diamonds. The mechanism is embedded in malachite from the …
