I went to the Dali Museum for like an hour and a half and here is a small part of my half-baked analysis on Salvador Dali and his work because he fascinated me. The information I’m using comes from the Dali Museum and cursory google searches.
If you disagree with it, I don’t care
First, a bit of history on the melty clock guy and why he might be like this. Before he was born, he had an older brother who was also named Salvador Dali who perished as an infant. This is incredibly important to a lot of his work. Another thing that is important to his work is Millet’s painting known as “The Angelus”, a painting seen below that he would find himself obsessed with.
In fact he was so fascinated with the painting, he requested that the Louvre investigate it, and according to X-Rays, they had found that under the bread basket between them, there was originally painted “an oblong shape” that Dali believed to be the coffin of an infant that was changed in order to sell more paintings. I feel like while this is a possible theory, it’s also absolutely PACKED with projection, with the trauma of being named after his dead brother and being later criticized by his peers in the Surrealist Movement for becoming a sellout.
Another thing fascinating about this is that the plaque at the museum said it represented sexual anxiety, which definitely made me double-take. According to Dali, he believed this since he believed the woman to be taller than the man, and posed similarly to that of a praying mantis about to feast on her partner. Then again, this is likely also projection, since I would later learn that Dali was terrified of sex.
Said sexual axiety can be reflected in his own piece that is meant to mirror the painting, “Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus” (below) where he makes the woman visibly taller than the man, and includes a young boy being shown the ruins by his father, as if being taught the way the world works (a symbol used in his other works)
But speaking of projecting your own experiences and thoughts onto someone else’s art, let’s talk about Dali and gender.
The first piece of art shown in the exhibit was “Daddy Long Legs of the Evening - Hope”. There’s a lot of symbolism in this piece and many interpretations that can be gleaned from it. But for my purposes, I think what’s most worth mentioning is that the museum stated that the melted figure was a self-portrait, which I find interesting, seeing how it has visible breasts and longer, more feminine eyelashes.
This makes “Portrait of My Dead Brother” a little bit more interesting.
As a painting, it’s quite fascinating, but his comments on the painting are what truly make me believe it to be related to gender in some way.
So, like, a lot of this can easily be chalked up to his trauma of being named after his dead older brother. And I think that’s a valid interpretation. But I also believe that it may act as a rejection of his older (perhaps more masculine) self. Dali believed in rejecting philosophers like Voltaire and the absolute, which could be seen as a gender assigned at birth and that Dali associates with his brother. And he views his brother as the splitting image of himself rather than as an infant. And perhaps the idea of “killing the image” of your former self, someone with the name your parents gave you because they held an expectation of you in their mind, because your new “divine” self cannot have things in common with him does somewhat resonate with me as I become Jenny.
There’s a LOT about Dali that fascinated me and I’m sure I could talk to wit’s end about the thoughts I had in the 90 minutes I spent in the exhibit of his old works. Perhaps I will in the future.
I love art.