JAMAIS. Óscar Domínguez & Pablo Picasso

In the months of January and February 1938, on occasion of the well-known International Exposition of Surrealism held at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris, Óscar Domínguez’s gramophone Jamais (Never) caused as much of a stir as Salvador Dalí’s Taxi pluvieux (Rainy Taxi) or the 1,200 sacks of coal suspended from the ceiling in the main hall. Although we were convinced that the Jamais Surrealist object was lost, we’ve just discovered that the Canarian painter made a gift of it to his friend Pablo Picasso around the year 1945. We managed to follow its trail thanks to a 1947 photographic reportage made by Nick de Morgoli in the Parisian atelier of the painter of Guernica. The Surrealist Óscar Domínguez transformed a Pathé box gramophone into an object at once erotic and hypnotic, enigmatical and disturbing. It was if he’d sculpted and dismembered a female body in order to place the breasts on the phonograph’s turntable, move the pick-up arm with one hand and, most importantly, make the box swallow the woman’s body so that all that was visible were her legs, or rather her feet clad in high-heeled shoes. Jamais reappears in July 2020 at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona as a genuine treasure.