In the cultural history of the 1920s in our country there is an episode that has been repeated ad nauseam and it is related to the provocative insulting letter that two young people wanting to make noise sent to one of the reference names of the lyrics of That moment. It is the one that Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí referred to Juan Ramón Jiménez, stating, among other things, that Platero was “the least stupid donkey” they had encountered, in addition to sending “merde” to the poet from Moguer. Evidently Juan Ramón felt offended and it was said that he spent several days in bed in response to such a letter from the two surrealists.
Before all this happened, Juan Ramón trusted Dalí, probably thinking of him as an illustrator for one of his exquisite magazines, in addition to being attentive to the creations that the young man from Figueres made in his room at the Student Residence. A few days ago it appeared at the Juanramonian Studies Center, in Moguer, where a part of the legacy of the Nobel Prize is preserved, a work by Salvador Dalí until now unknown. This is an engraving, probably a proof, whose protagonist is one of the most important characters in Dalí’s youth, Josep Puig Pujades, the Catalan leader whose book “L’oncle Vicents” was illustrated.
The engraving has a pencil annotation, by Dalí, in which the sitter is identified. Most likely it is a pair of another engraving test that he made in those days of 1924, in this case a portrait of the artist’s father that is preserved in the collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
It is not the only Dalí piece that Juan Ramón Jiménez preserved. Some time ago, another engraving featuring, in this case, a couple of sailors, a very recurring theme in Dalí’s work, came to light, also in the same institution dedicated to the study of the life and work of the author of “Platero and I.” mid twenties and that we can find in the oil paintings «Venus and a sailor (Homage to Salvat-Papasseit)» or «Depart. “Tribute to Fox News”, from 1925 and 1926, respectively.
Is it likely that these were attempts by Dalí to seek collaboration in one of the very select publications that the poet produced at that time? It could be, just as it is not an exaggeration to think that Juan Ramón Jiménez had seen some of the works of that young student from the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.
In 1927, Juan Ramón was one of the promoters of the Meeting of Free Artists with the idea of showing “the purest and most profound manifestations of our current artistic Spain.” In the list of proposed names, among Picasso, Darío de Regoyos or Vázquez Díaz, the poet added Dalí. Then everything was ruined forever.
