Art Work
The Persistence of Memory (1931)
“Many
of Dali's paintings were influenced and inspired by the landscapes of his
youth. Several in particular were painted on the slopes of Mount Pani, which
was covered in beautiful umbrella pines at the time. Many of the strange and
foreboding shadows in the foreground of many Dali paintings is a direct
reference to and result of Dali's love of this mountain near his home. Even
long after he had grown up, Dali continued to paint details of the landscape of
Catalonia into his works, as evidenced by such works as The Persistence of
Memory, completed in 1931.
Note
the craggy rocks of Cape Creus in the background to the right. One of Dali's
most memorable Surrealist works, indeed the one with which he is most often
associated is The Persistence of Memory. It shows a typical Dalinian landscape,
with the rocks of his beloved Cape Creus jutting up in the background. In the
foreground, a sort of amorphous self portrait of Dali seems to melt. Three
Separate Melting Watch images even out the foreground of the work. The melting
watches are one symbol that is commonly associated with Salvador Dali's
Surrealism. They are literally meant to show the irrelevance of time.
When
Dali was alone with Gala and his paintings in Cape Creus, he felt that time had
little, perhaps no significance for him. His days were spent eating, painting,
making love, and anything else he wanted to do. The warm, summery days seemed
to fly by without any real indication of having passed.
One
hot August afternoon, in 1931, as Dali sat at his work bench nibbling at his
lunch, he came upon one of his most stunning paranoiac-critical hallucinations.
Upon taking a pencil, and sliding it under a bit of Camembert cheese, which had
become softer and runnier than usual in the summer heat, Dali was inspired with
the idea for the melting watches. They appear often throughout Dali's works,
and are the subject of much interest. In short, this particular work, is an
important referral back to Dali's Catalan Heritage, that was so very important
to him” (“Salvador Dali”).
The Great Masturbator (1929)
“Dali's
head has the shape of a rock formation near his home and is seen in this form
in several paintings dating from 1929. The painting deals with Dali's fear and
loathing of sex. He blamed his negative feelings toward sex as partly a result
of reading his father's, extremely graphic book on venereal diseases as a young
boy.
The
head is painted "soft", as if malleable to the touch; it looks fatigued,
sexually spent: the eyes are closed, the cheeks flushed. Under the nose a
grasshopper clings, its abdomen covered with ants that crawl onto the face
where a mouth should be. From early childhood, Dali had a phobia of
grasshoppers and the appearance of one here suggests his feelings of hysterical
fear and a loss of voice or control.
Emerging
from the right of the head, a woman moves her mouth toward a man's crotch. The
man's legs are cut and bleeding, implying a fear of castration. The woman's
face is cracked, as though the image that Dali's head produces will soon
disintegrate. To reiterate the sexual theme, the stamen of a lily and tongue of
a lion appear underneath the couple” (“Salvador Dali”).
Invisible
Sleeping Woman (1930)
“This
analytical work is one of the first painted in the new house in Port Lligat
during the summer Of 1930. In his numerous written works Dali has given us much
information about this picture. "A month after my return from Paris,"
he writes, "I signed a contract with George Keller and Pierre Colle.
Shortly after in the latter's gallery I exhibited my Invisible Sleeping Woman,
Horse, Lion, fruit of my contemplation at Cape Creus." The Viscount of
Noailles bought this oil. Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion must be
considered the most important painting after The Invisible Man among Dali's
early experiments with double images. The permanent theme which predominates
over all the others is that of the persistence of desires.
Speaking
of this picture, Dali has given a definition: "The double image (the
example of which may be that of the image of the horse alone which is at the
same time the image of a woman) can be prolonged, continuing the paranoiac
process, the existence of another obsessive idea being then sufficient to make
a third image appear (the image of a lion, for example) and so forth, until the
concurrence of a number of images, limited only by the degree of the capacity
for paranoiac thought." The violently erotic character of the group of fellateurs
metamorphosed into the forelegs and the head of the horse is veiled by the
immutable aspect of the ensemble, obtained with the help of an absence of dense
shadows and violent colors, as well as by the geological character of the
forms. Dali said of these models: "They are always boats which seem to be
drawn by exhausted fishermen, by fossil fishermen."
Dali
painted three pictures of the same subject with different titles. One of the
three was destroyed during the demonstrations which broke out when the film
L'Age dor was being shown at Studio 28 in Paris on December 3, 1930” (“Salvador
Dali”).
Eggs on the Plate Without the Plate
(1932)
“Dali tells us that this work was inspired by
an intra-uterine memory. He says that one day, after vigorously rubbing his
eyes, he became fascinated with the brilliant yellow, orange, and ochre colors
he saw. As a result, he says, he had a flashback to his mother's womb, and
created this paranoiac-critical explanation of the experience.
Suspended on a string, in the center of the
work is a single egg yolk, which Dali said represented himself in the womb.
Below that, the two eggs on the plate (curious, that plate, look at the title
again) were painted with a shimmering yolk. These represented the piercing gaze
of Gala Dali, whom Dali had met in 1929. At the time, she had been the darling
of the Surrealist movement, not to mention the wife of Paul Eluard, the French
poet. It was said that her gaze could pierce through walls, and Dali is paying
her homage here.
A large, cubist building
dominates the scene, while other objects are attached to the wall facing the
eggs. First is a small, dripping watch, a continuation of the theme of the
melting watches done inThe Persistence of Memory. Above that is a
phallic ear of corn, representing male sexuality. Just to the left of the ear
of corn is a window in the building, and standing in it, looking out through
another window, are the father and son figures that were originally painted in The
First Days of Spring, some three years ago. Off in the distance are the
rocks of Dali's homeland” (“Salvador Dali”).
