From as early as 1926, Dalí painted book illustrations. The Sea of Tears is an illustration from a 1969 edition of Alice in Wonderland. With the emergence of psychedelia in the late Sixties, the tale of Alice in Wonderland found a new audience. Dalí also found a new popularity in the Sixties; his Surrealist mentality and hallucinogenic aspirations greatly appealed to a new drug-taking generation. Dalí's home became a Mecca, like Kathmandu, which many hippies would visit to see the great Master.
    The Sea of Tears illustrates the story of Alice crying and, having grown to the size of a giant, her tears becoming a sea. Dalí uses just black ink for Alice who appears in miniature in the bottom foreground.
    The tears have been given an appearance of solidity and reflection, to give the illusion of liquid. Dalí achieved this by painting them in dark colors graduating to light on the inside, leaving one small spot clear in the middle as if it were water reflecting light. This technique contrasts with the trompe l'oeil effect used for the drop of water in The Rose (1958), where the color of the rose can still be seen through the drop of water.

    Le Char d'Or - the golden chariot - was painted in 1971, using oil, pen and ink on paper. Dalí frequently painted horses as they were a form that intrigued him. In the Thirties he found a similarity of configuration between horses and women, when seen at a certain angle, which he exploited in the double image used in the background of his painting The Invention of Monsters (1937). The horse in Le Char d'Or is drawn simply, with the shape of the horse formed by several bold lines in oil. Underneath these bold lines can be seen the pen sketch of the horse.
    Le Char d'Or shares a technique that Dalí called "bullitisme" (also called "tachisme") with The Angel of Alchemy (1974) where the paint is allowed to hit the canvas in an unplanned, unconscious way. In Le Char d'Or, this technique has been used in a way that harks back to Dalí's paranoia-critical method of the Thirties. The ink spatterings have been applied to the paper and after contemplation of the forms that they suggest, the outline of a horse, a chariot wheel, and a driver were added in primary colored oils, to contrast with the fine ink spatters.

    Research into the third dimension, completely controlled by the rigorous laws of perspective, plays a dominant role in the work of Salvador Dalí. The painter has always been interested in methods of depicting spatial dimensions, the offshoot of optics and photography, stereoscopy, holography, stereo-video. "In the pictorial domain," he has written, "my sole ambitions were directed toward optical truth, even before arriving in Paris. I have always praised color photography." The extreme precision with which he paints his subjects, copied according to his needs just as expertly from photographs as from nature - his talent allows this - makes him define painting in this way. "Photography in three dimensions and in color of the superfine images of concrete irrationality, entirely made by hand." Since 1961, when Dalí was studying stereoscopy, I [Robert Descharnes] have been able to collaborate directly with him in all his research work. In 1971 he came upon the work of the Dutch painter Gerard Dou, and he noticed that several paintings by this pupil of Rembrandt, done in two versions, exhibited undeniable stereoscopic characteristics. He then decided to return to the experiments of Dou: starting with stereoscopic documents, he painted two canvases, one for the left eye, the other for the right eye. These appeared to be in three dimensions, with the help of a system of mirrors focused by Roger de Montebello. The first images were disappointing, the major disadvantage being the weight of the glass, its fragility, and the impossibility of getting rid of the reflected double image caused by the thickness of the glass mirrors. I was able to solve this problem, to Dalí's greatest satisfaction, by using tightly stretched plastic film with a higher power of refraction than glass. Thanks to these new methods, stereoscopy ceased being a secret and became monumental. Going further, going beyond painting, in December 1973 I suggested that Dalí apply our discovery to television, creating a stereo-video in which experimentation continues.
    This colorplate shows the painting for the right eye faithfully copied by Dalí from the stereoscopic photograph in black and white. All the painter's work turned toward the study of the variations of colors, values, and the rendering of the lights and shadows from the canvas to the other in order to achieve a three-dimensional effect and to offer a new stereoscopic, binocular vision, thanks to the optical superimposing of his two paintings.