Leaf Hands

Disembodied green hands with gently pointed magenta fingernails and dark brown veins float across a fractured white ground in Salvador Dalí’s Leaf Hands design for Schiffer Prints. In the mid-twentieth century, Schiffer, a division of Mil-Art Company, Inc., commissioned artists, such as Dalí, Edward Wormley, and Ray Eames, to produce designs for fabrics, expecting to market them to clients interested in a modernist aesthetic for their homes. Dalí found this design process fruitful and went on to use the leaf hands motif for brooches, which were cast in eighteen-carat gold and feature red enamel fingernails.