Salvador Dalí’s Memories of Surrealism suite was published by Transworld Art. The total edition is 500, including sets in English and in French.
Each of the prints is a photo-lithograph (photolith) of an original mixed media artwork created using gouache and collage on paper.
Salvador Dalí created the Memories of Surrealism suite in 1971 in express reflections based upon his career to date.
Pierre Restany, a French art critic, interviewed Salvador Dalí about each of the Memories of Surrealism prints. The text appears out of order on printed introductory pages to accompany the photo-lithographs.
About Crazy, Crazy, Crazy Minerva, Restany recounts his interview with Dalí as follows. “Minerva is the opposite of a grass-hopper, and my enemy, my phobia is the hopper. For hoppers, “cavalettti”, are like the “cavali”, the wild boars that are hunted, and in respect of which Nietsche recommended that they be killed so that Dionysios can be changed into Apollo: thus by killing the grass-hopper or the boar you can reach the Goddess of intelligence. The Emperor Trajan was a great hunter of wild boars; he killed them with a lance as you can see on the medals in Rome, and so did Philip IV of Spain. The same sort of hunting was practiced in the time of Velasquez, as he proved when he painted “Tela Real”, the Royal Canvass which is in the National Gallery in London (and on which one can write several immortal pages of surrealistic literature).”