Salvador Dalí’s Avant-Garde Christmas Cards
Although known as the “Painter of Light”, Thomas Kinkade’s work is often filled with nostalgia and good cheer. His paintings are often featured on Christmas decorations, ornaments, and cards. But did you know that Salvador Dali created a series of 19 Christmas cards for a Barcelona card company that used American and Central European elements of traditional imagery?
Dali designed these unique cards between 1958-1976. The imagery he created did not depict classic themes such as the Nativity or the Wise men, but rather they appropriated elements such as the Christmas Tree, which he sometimes used as “an allegorical depiction of the year’s events” or infused with distinctive elements of Spanish culture.
One of the earliest Dali images used for commercializing the holiday season was actually a sketch for a cover of Vogue magazine in 1946. The image exhibits characteristics of Dalí’s surrealist style, including the barren, expansive landscape and the incorporation of double-images of traditional Christmas trees that he characterizes as a depiction of the Spanish Civil War.
In 1958 he created the first of his eventual 19 greeting cards for Hoeschts, and the publishing company would annually send these artsy holiday cards to doctors and pharmacists throughout Spain. The majority of Dalí’s cards contain a short, hand-written greeting or description penned by the surrealist painter himself. In 1962, Dali celebrated space exploration and scientific advances in his card and it seemed, the holiday was not the main focus of that year's card as the tree was barely visible.
While Dalí’s holiday artwork may have found an audience in Spain, his designs were met with much less enthusiasm in the United States. Despite the relative success of his Vogue covers and hosiery advertisements in the 1940s, Dalí could not entirely win over America’s largest greeting card company, Hallmark, or the 1950s public who supported it. By the early 1950s, Hallmark had become such a culturally relevant force in the US that it was an attractive creative partner for many high-profile artists.
Dalí did try his hand at more traditional Christmas iconography for the American greeting-card titan Hallmark, but his take on Christmas was a bit too avant garde for the average greeting card buyer. Hallmark preferred the more traditional and Norman Rockwell was undoubtedly among the best known American artist at that time. Rockwell went on to create 32 traditional Christmas designs for Hallmark. But it was Dali, who brought the surrealist into the holiday season with his unique style and flare for symbolism.