L'Amour de Pierrot | Attributed to Salvador Dalí | c. 1904

L’Amour de Pierrot, c. 1904, is a metamorphic French postcard that is frequently—but incorrectly—attributed to Salvador Dalí. At first glance, the composition appears to depict a skull. Look closer, however, and the image breaks apart into an intimate scene of two figures dressed as Pierrot seated at a table, leaning toward one another in conversation. Their heads form the skull’s eye sockets, while the folds of the tablecloth create its teeth, forcing the viewer’s gaze to alternate between love and death without being able to hold both images at once. The illusion belongs to a broader tradition of metamorphic postcards that circulated throughout Europe around 1900, many of which transformed couples and everyday scenes into skulls as modern echoes of the Baroque vanitas. Pierrot was an especially fitting subject, having become by the late nineteenth century a symbol of the melancholy and doomed lover. Although the image is widely circulated today as a Dalí work from 1920, the postcard was already in print around 1904, the year Dalí was born, and it does not appear in the catalogue raisonné of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí. The mistaken attribution is understandable, however, since Dalí would later explore remarkably similar double images in verified works such as Ballerina in a Death’s Head (1939) and In Voluptate Mors (1951).