Simply Abu Dhabi XI

Now Montegrappa have added a third legend to the Genio Creativo series – the incomparable Salvador Dalí. A visionary who personified surrealism, Dalí was not only a painter but also a writer, filmmaker and designer – a 20th Century ‘Renaissance Man’. Blessed not only with innate talent and exceptional technical skill, Dalí flourished with his unique visual sense of the world, internal and external, real and imaginary. He produced a number of significant works so original and startling that they have entered the global consciousness. Among the most famous is ‘The Persistence of Memory’, the universally familiar surrealistic landscape of soft, melting pocket watches painted in 1931, and his 1944 work, ‘Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.’ It is the latter painting that has inspired Montegrappa’s designers to devise a pen worthy of Dalí’s vision. It was the first of a number of works to contain the noble presence of an elephant – an animal that would become a recurring image in Dalí's work, as they featured in ‘The Temptation of St Anthony’ from 1946 and the 1961 sculpture, ‘The Space Elephant’. Elephants are also present in the garden of the Gala Dalí Castle, in Púbol, where the elephants ‘advance threateningly towards the castle’, as Dalí stated. Montegrappa’s designers have transformed these noble beasts, portrayed ‘with long, multi-jointed, almost invisible legs of desire along with obelisks on their backs’ into miniature manifestations of Dalí’s art. On the Dalí pen, the elephant embraces a barrel of Mediterranean blue celluloid for the silver edition, or inmalachite green for the solid gold version. When the pen is opened, a quote from the autobiography, ‘The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí’, is inscribed on the sterling silver inner barrel. Montegrappa will issue only 1000 sterling silver fountain pens and 989 rollerball pens, denoting 1989 – the year that Dalí died. 19 solid gold rollerball pens and 61 fountain pens will represent the year he created ‘The Space Elephant’. The pens are packaged, appropriately, in an egg-shaped container, in recognition of another Dalíesque image, as the egg symbolised hope and love for Dalí. The project to devise this unique pen was supervised and licensed by the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, the cultural institution created by Salvador Dalí himself in 1983. 2 9 3 S I M P LY A B U DH A B I