Les Chants de Maldoror

"In 1930 Dali was invited to illustrate Les Chants de Maldoror, an 1869 text rediscovered by the Surrealists in the 1930s that told a nightmarish tale of an unrepentantly evil protagonist. The book was filled with scenes of violence, perversion, and blasphemy. Dali, who worked in a method he called 'paranoiac-critical,' used a stream-of-consciousness process to access hallucinations and delusions. These personal visions, rather than scenes described in the prose poem, became the subjects of his illustrations" (Excerpt from an essay by Harper Montgomery and Sarah Suzuki, in Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 98).