In 1974 Salvador Dali created a portfolio entitled “After 50 Years of Surrealism”.  This portfolio serves as a documentation of important moments and events in the artist’s life, and can furthermore be seen as homage to Andre Bretón’s Surrealist Manifesto, written 50 years earlier in 1924.  Bretón’s manifesto proposed a radical and systematic revision of received values, and a revaluation of the unconscious as a source of all artistic inspiration.  In 1924, Dali had already dedicated his attention to Italian artists Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carra’s Metaphysical School, which rejected Futurism and Cubism and proposed a return to the world of dreams and inner life.  Thus, embracement of Bretón’s manifesto was a natural extension of ideas that Dali had already begun to explore.  The 12 hand-colored etchings that compose “After 50 Years of Surrealism” display personal events in Dali’s own life, and at the same time acknowledge his reverence for the ideals made popular by Bretón, and are appropriately illustrated in the surrealist style that Dali’s work so famously exemplifies.