Designed by Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989)
Manufactured by Schiffer Prints (American, mid-20th century)
Leaf Hands
INV-2428
Designed by Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989)
Manufactured by Schiffer Prints (American, mid-20th century)1949
Surrealismmid-century modernweaving - printedtextile
Date
1949
Medium
Cotton and rayon, plain weave; screen printed with vat-dyes
Dimensions
195.8 × 123.4 cm (77 1/8 × 48 1/2 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Mr. and Mrs. John Farwell III Endowment
Disembodied green hands with gently pointed magenta fingernails and dark brown veins float across a fractured white ground in Salvador Dalí’s Leaf Hands design for Schiffer Prints. In the mid-twentieth century, Schiffer, a division of Mil-Art Company, Inc., commissioned artists, such as Dalí, Edward Wormley, and Ray Eames, to produce designs for fabrics, expecting to market them to clients interested in a modernist aesthetic for their homes. Dalí found this design process fruitful and went on to use the leaf hands motif for brooches, which were cast in eighteen-carat gold and feature red enamel fingernails.
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