.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Composition surréaliste dates from the height of Dalí's artistic invention in the 1930s. Executed in 1933, this work features a role call of some of Dalí's most recognizable motifs, providing a thrilling insight into the link between his art and his subconscious obsessions. Shaping a sort of symbolic map, Dalí presented these subjects through a melted grid, a swirling vortex-like landscape that invokes the diagrammatic language of science and mathematics, only to emphasize its unhinged character.
The masturbating hand on top of the green head, as well as the chalice of the Holy Host, are quotations from Dalí's scandalous painting The Lugubrious Game (1929), a work which even André Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, had difficulties to accept due to its coprophilia. The melted skull and the interlacing phallic shapes would develop further respectively in paintings such as Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano (1934) and Ampurdanese Yang and Yin (1936). The sleeping head with long eyelashes on the left presents Dalí's symbolic self-portrait, which also appears in several paintings such as the The Great Masturbator (1929). Composition surréaliste showcases the neurotic, evocative and surprising vocabulary of Dalí's 1930s art at the moment when his egocentric universe found itself closest to orthodox Surrealism.
In the 1930s Dalí provided Surrealism with new impetus and energy, by professing a new way to plunge into the subconscious to Breton and his followers. According to Dalí's paranoiac-critical method, the artist actively sought the disguised symbols of his obsessions in the visual world around him, in a series of self-induced hallucinations. Merging one vision into the other, and blurring the line between representation and delirium, Composition surréaliste presents an outstanding example of Dalí's surreal vision. While in his paintings Dalí reinforced the hallucinatory nature of these symbols through a highly mimetic, realistic pictorial technique, in this work he resorted to a purely graphic device, creating this beautifully inventive, disconcertingly abstract three-dimensional grid to convey a sense of mental space.
The masturbating hand on top of the green head, as well as the chalice of the Holy Host, are quotations from Dalí's scandalous painting The Lugubrious Game (1929), a work which even André Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, had difficulties to accept due to its coprophilia. The melted skull and the interlacing phallic shapes would develop further respectively in paintings such as Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano (1934) and Ampurdanese Yang and Yin (1936). The sleeping head with long eyelashes on the left presents Dalí's symbolic self-portrait, which also appears in several paintings such as the The Great Masturbator (1929). Composition surréaliste showcases the neurotic, evocative and surprising vocabulary of Dalí's 1930s art at the moment when his egocentric universe found itself closest to orthodox Surrealism.
In the 1930s Dalí provided Surrealism with new impetus and energy, by professing a new way to plunge into the subconscious to Breton and his followers. According to Dalí's paranoiac-critical method, the artist actively sought the disguised symbols of his obsessions in the visual world around him, in a series of self-induced hallucinations. Merging one vision into the other, and blurring the line between representation and delirium, Composition surréaliste presents an outstanding example of Dalí's surreal vision. While in his paintings Dalí reinforced the hallucinatory nature of these symbols through a highly mimetic, realistic pictorial technique, in this work he resorted to a purely graphic device, creating this beautifully inventive, disconcertingly abstract three-dimensional grid to convey a sense of mental space.