Gala reportedly replied, “I want you to kill me.” Dali’s attraction to her was immediate.īy all accounts Gala was a cougar with an insatiable sexual appetite that bordered on nymphomania. When Dalí met Gala, he asked her what she wanted from him. Opinions are likewise divided on whether Dali was a virgin when he met his future wife and muse, Helena Deluvina Diakonoff - better known as “Gala.” Gala was a married woman 10 years Dalí’s senior, notorious for her long list of lovers. He had a close friendship with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a relationship that may have been homosexual (though this has never been confirmed). The painting shows a seductive woman rising out of a downward-facing head, which is suspended over a lotus swarming with ants (another popular motif in Dalí’s work). The positioning of the woman’smouth next to a thinly clad male crotch suggests fellatio, while the trickle of blood on the male figure’s thigh may represent castration.ĭalí’s sexuality is still a matter of debate. He also developed a fascination with buttocks (both male and female) and a pathological fear of castration. These obsessions - along with Dalí’s well-known terror of locusts - would find expression in many of his most famous paintings.ĭalí’s “The Great Masturbator” - considered his first significant work - highlights all three of these themes. He began to associate sex with putrefaction and decay.ĭalí soon became addicted to masturbation, reportedly the primary – if not the only – sexual activity in which he engaged throughout his life. These photos of grotesquely diseased genitalia fascinated and horrified Dalí. On reading a pornographic novel in which the protagonist said that he enjoyed “making women creak like a watermelon,” Dali worried he would never be able to do that himself.ĭuring Dalí’s youth, his father attempted to “educate” him with a book showing explicit photos of people suffering from advanced untreated venereal diseases . Explicit sexual themes, in particular, recur with a regularity seldom seen in mainstream art.Īs a schoolchild, Dalí compared his penis to those of his schoolmates and found it “small, pitiful and soft.” For a long time, he believed himself impotent. Salvador Dalí’s fears and obsessions inspired some of his most famous works. It was transported to and exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2009, along with many other Dalí paintings in the Liquid Desire exhibition.Salvador Dalí, The Great Masturbator (1929) ĭalí wished for this painting to be displayed on an easel, which had been owned by French painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, in a suite of three rooms called the Palace of the Winds (named for the tramontana) in the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres. His friend, painter Antoni Pitxot, recalled that Dalí held in high regard the depth of perspective in the painting and the spheres he had painted. This painting was also symbolic of his attempt to reconcile his renewed faith in Catholicism with nuclear physics. Recognising that matter was made up of atoms which did not touch each other, he sought to replicate this in his art at the time, with items suspended and not contacting each other, such as in The Madonna of Port Lligat. Dalí's motivation ĭalí had been greatly interested in nuclear physics since the first atomic bomb explosions of August 1945, and described the atom as his "favourite food for thought". It represents a synthesis of Renaissance art and atomic theory and illustrates the ultimate discontinuity of matter, the spheres themselves representing atomic particles. Measuring 65.0 x 54.0 cm, the painting depicts the bust of Gala composed of a matrix of spheres seemingly suspended in space. The name Galatea refers to a sea nymph of Classical mythology renowned for her virtue, and may also refer to the statue beloved by its creator, Pygmalion. It depicts Gala Dalí, Salvador Dalí's wife and muse, as pieced together through a series of spheres arranged in a continuous array. Galatea of the Spheres is a painting by Salvador Dalí made in 1952. Painting by Salvador Dalí Galatea of the Spheres
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