DALÍ Salvador The Twelve Tribes of Israel.

In 1973, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, art publisher Alex Rosenberg commissioned Salvador Dalí to create a portfolio of etchings titled The Twelve Tribes of Israel. The project grew out of the long-standing and prolific collaboration between Rosenberg’s company, Transworld Art, and Dalí, which had already produced more than 150 of the artist’s editions. The portfolio was designed as a unique artistic tribute to a pivotal moment in contemporary Jewish history.

Its association with Israel was underscored by the inclusion of a foreword by Abba Eban, then serving as Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and by its issue in both English and Hebrew editions. That same year, Rosenberg presented a copy of the portfolio to President Ephraim Katzir for the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Rosenberg was closely engaged with Israeli cultural institutions more broadly, including through his position on the board of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

This collection comprises the original proof copies, each entirely hand-painted, together with the original copper plates used to print the edition. Also included is a complete signed set of the cancelled proofs. This exceptionally significant group remained in the personal collection of Alex Rosenberg until his death in 2022.

Created in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the State of Israel, Salvador Dalí’s The Twelve Tribes of Israel (1973) presents a strikingly surreal interpretation of biblical prophecy, fusing religious symbolism with the dream logic of the unconscious. Salvador Dalí, known for his bizarre surrealist style inspired by Freudian theories of the subconscious, reimagines scriptural emblems using the same techniques and aesthetics that appear in his wide and complex oeuvre. In The Twelve Tribes of Israel, Dalí draws on Jacob’s predictions for his sons and leaders of each tribe in Genesis, and Moses’ blessings in Deuteronomy. The interaction of the tribes’ symbols with the landscape lends the piece its eccentric qualities, creating a sense of dissonance and irregularity. Each tribe is depicted through vivid, unnatural colour, exaggerated scale, and dynamic form, crafting symbolic scenes in which the literal and the metaphoric converge.

Working with the intertwined themes of exile and return, icons and faith, Dalí created a suite of images that commemorate the biblical tribes and their ancestral regions. The compositions convey a sense of movement and pilgrimage: transient figures traverse luminous, expanding landscapes framed by mountains and monuments that evoke the geography and character of each tribe. Beneath the bright, celebratory colour lies a quiet tension, an awareness of impermanence and displacement. Erratic, sketch-like monochrome figures animate the scenes with restlessness and energy. The incongruent style of the unstable figures and the softly coloured, simplified backgrounds resonates with the historical moment in which the works emerged, one that witnessed the return of dispersed communities to a reimagined national landscape.

Provenance: Freedman Gallery, Albright College; The Alex and Carole Rosenberg Collection.