In 1974, Dalí made a series of drypoint etchings based on La Fontaine's fables. One shows a tree broken by a storm, and a reed that survived because it bent.
The foundation's collection holds Salvador Dalí's 1974 print "Le Chêne et le Roseau" ("The Oak and the Reed") – a drypoint etching on Arches paper, printed in an edition of 682. It belongs to a larger series of illustrations Dalí made for the fables of Jean de La Fontaine, rendered in his signature style of elongated, molten-looking forms.
The fable itself dates back to Aesop: a mighty oak boasts to a reed of its own strength, mocking the reed for bending at the slightest breeze. The reed answers that it has never yet been broken – and when a real storm arrives, it is the unyielding oak that is torn up by the roots, while the supple reed simply bows to the ground and survives.
For Dalí, who spent his career working at the intersection of classical tradition and his own obsession with deformed, melting forms, a fable about flexibility versus rigidity offered an obvious opening: his oak and reed aren't an illustration in the ordinary sense so much as another variation on the fluidity that runs through his whole body of work, from the soft watches to the melting landscapes.
The print is catalogued in Albert Field's reference guide to Dalí's graphic work, published by the Salvador Dalí Archives, under numbers 92–93. Impressions from the "Fables de La Fontaine" series today are held in private collections and museum print rooms around the world.
