Salvador Dali was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, along with a self-publicist and showman, the Spanish master was a fine and irresistible formula for success. Carrying an upright mustache with arrogance upturned on his face, Dali became a familiar figure to the entire art history due to his perfection in surrealistic art from his later years and his excellent sense of humor. His admirers and detractors sometimes merely regarded him as a master of the playfulness of art or one who carried his fantasy to the point of outrage, but Dali always took his art seriously. The significant temper and subject matter of the artist’s paintings is similar to those of Hieronymus Bosch and Jacques Callot. However, the mesmeric power behind his artwork was because of the psychological journeys in paint, which brought enormous financial success and critical acclaim to Salvador Dali. Besides, his good looks were also profiled in 1939 in The Herald while praising his impeccable craftsmanship: ‘In his drawing and his painting he has acquired the meticulous skill of the eighteenth century miniature painters, along with their love, derived from the Flemish primitive and the medieval illuminators of manuscripts, for gaudy and jeweled colors. Frequently overshadowed by the very peculiarity of his Surrealist pictures, his execution is of a quality that is not to be matched in the whole range of modernism.’ Acknowledging this perfection and psychological emphasis of Salvador Dali in his artworks, today, in this article, I am explaining 27 of the important Salvador Dali paintings.
About the Artist: Who is Salvador Dalí?
Salvador Dalí was a Spaniard, who was born in Figueres, a small town near Barcelona, on 11 May 1904, spending most of his life in the Empordà, surrounded by a little fishing village. The majority of Salvador Dali paintings revolved around this little fishing village, even when the foreground changes with the crucifixions or civil wars. Dali was raised in a middle-class family, despite his childhood neuroses and sexual fixations. His childhood was characterized by extreme violence, filled with fits of hysteria and rage towards his family and friends. As a child, he flung himself down a stone staircase in the schoolyard numerous times to savor the frightened attention of his classmates. The megalomania that he developed here, in the future, would be considered one of his primary creative assets, as evident in his youth.
Besides, the family’s wealthy and cultivated friends encouraged Dali and kept him unusually well-informed about art developments. When Dali studied painting in Madrid, he was already well-equipped artistically, but the period he spent there was more significant because of his friendship with the poet Lorca and acclaimed director Luis Buñuel, with whom Dali made a celebrated film, Un Chien Andalou (1929).
After 1927, the artist became fascinated by Surrealism, a movement influenced by the new psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud. Through dreams, automatic writing, and other procedures, he created works dictated by his unconscious mind, freeing himself from rationality’s tyranny. In 1929-39, he used a ‘paranoiac-critical method’ he devised for his most famous and best works. In this experiment, various forms of irrational associations were used, including images that changed depending on the viewer’s perception, so that an image of fighting soldiers could suddenly be interpreted as the face of a woman.
One of the distinctive features of Salvador Dalí paintings was through bizarre imagery, he always used impeccable academic techniques to give them photographic accuracy. Well, there’s a lot to learn about the life of Salvador Dali, which you can read in Secret Life of Dalí, for now, let’s look at the famous paintings by the artist.
27 Salvador Dali Paintings to Savor.
1. Port of Cadaqués at Night.
| Year Painted | 1918 |
| Genre | Landscape Painting |
| Period | Modernism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 18.7 x 24.2 cm |
| Where is it housed? | St Petersburg, Florida |
Dalí used thick and formless daubs of paint, which he intentionally splashed over the canvas in the guise of distant buildings and their reflections upon the waters. The art historian Dawn Ades notes, ‘black prowl of the large ship seems to pierce the church on the hill,’ and this pictorial stab might give the meaning of anti-clericalism.
Being one of the early Salvador Dalí paintings, it shows Cadaqués, a place located about 25 kilometers to the east of Figueres, Dali’s birthplace. During his early years, his family would spend each summer just outside Cadaqués, renting a home from their friends, Pichot’s family. One of the members of this clan was the painter, Ramon Pichot, whose influence can be seen in Dali’s works, including this painting. In fact, Pichot’s paintings were the first real paintings that Dali ever saw. Hence, his first paintings had an essence of French impressionism. The Port of Cadaqués at Night has colors like deep ultramarine blues, teal, and aqua, contrasting well with dabs of white and brilliant yellows with the Impasto technique.
2. Portrait of the Cellist Richardo.
| Year Painted | 1920 |
| Genre | Portraiture |
| Period | Modernism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 61.5 x 49 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Private Collection, Cadaques |
When Salvador Dali painted this portrait, he used three mirrors, which is why there are light tones to the background of the painting as if it was bathed in the reflected sunlight. Richardo was another member of the Pichot family who studied cello at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was awarded a prize at the mere age of seventeen. In Secret Life, the artist remembers him, saying,
“This family (Pitchot’s family) has played an important role in my life and has had a great influence on it; my parents before me had already undergone the influence of the personality of the Pichot family. All of them were artists and possessed great gifts and an unerring taste. Ramon Pitchot was a painter, Ricardo a cellist, Luis a violinist, Maria a contalto who sang in opera.”
In this Salvador Dali painting, the head is far too large for the rest of the body, but Dali aimed to capture the concentration and movement of the figure, showcasing mental intensity and dynamics of physical movement in the image.
3. Self-Portrait With Raphaelesque Neck.
| Year Painted | 1921 |
| Genre | Self Portraiture |
| Period | Modernism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 40.5 x 53 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Fundació Gala – Salvador Dalí, Figueres. Dalí bequest |
The painting was composed when Dali lost his mother, which was one of the most traumatic experiences he faced, and when he left home for the first time to enroll as a student at the San Fernando Academy in Madrid. It might have the misleading air of machismo, probably intended to conceal the artist’s timidity, similar to his later and better-known self-portrait as a mustachioed dandy and prankster. It still shows the effect of Impressionism and the influence of Pointillism.
In the image, Dali painted his face somewhat older and uncharacteristically rugged with the background of the Costa Brava coastline and the little fishing village of Cadaqués.
4. Portrait of Luis Bunuel.
| Year Painted | 1924 |
| Genre | Portraiture |
| Period | Modernism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 70 x 60 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid |
When Dali moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes or University Hall of residence, while studying in Madrid, he formed close friendships with two fellow students- Federico García Lorca (who would later become a renowned poet) and Luis Buñuel (who would go on to become a distinguished film-maker).
The Buñuel portrait was painted by the artist just after Dali returned to Madrid in September 1924, following one-year suspension from the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Art Special School of Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving, as well as his subsequent brief imprisonment in Figueres and Gerona. The image style is eclectic, for it draws upon Italian Renaissance Portraitist.
5. Woman at the Window in Figueres.
| Year Painted | 1926 |
| Genre | Urban Landscape |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 21 x 21.5 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Dalí Theatre Museum, Figueres |
The charming Salvador Dali painting shows a woman in a sitting posture overlooking the town square from her balcony while she sews with lace. Dali shows her equipment and architectural structures with impeccable detail as if the image can be interpreted as a Dali counterpart to The Lacemaker by the Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer.
The girl portrayed in this image has modishly short and glossily highlighted hair as if Dali gives a reminiscence of a magazine illustration in the art Deco style. The background shows the buildings of Figueres. Dali was born and raised in Figueras, where he first exhibited his work at the town’s municipal theatre, which he later converted into a Dali museum, and where he was interred beneath the dome.
6. Study for ‘Honey is Sweeter than Blood.’
| Year Painted | 1927 |
| Genre | Landscape Painting |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on wood |
| Dimensions | 36 x 45.4 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Private Collection, Paris |
The artwork was purchased from a Madrid exhibition in 1929, and it came on auction with Salvator Mundi in 2011, London, and has never been seen since, but its photograph survives, which is why we know what it looks like. Compositionally, the painting is more complex than the preparatory work. Dali used the phrase, ‘Honey is sweeter than blood’ as he was inspired by the widow of a Cadaqués fisherman, Lidia Noguer Saba. In his Secret Life, he tells us about it,
“She possessed the most marvelously paranoic brain aside from my own that I have ever known. She was capable of establishing completely coherent relations between any subject whatsoever and her obsession of the moment, with sublime disregard for everything else, and with a choice of detail and a play of wit so subtle and so calculatingly resourceful that it was often difficult not to agree with her on questions which one knew to be utterly absurd.”
He also says that Lidia dismembered a live chicken over his table with an expensive art book, and while doing so, she placated the artist’s fears that the tome might get covered in the blood by assuring him,
“Blood does not spot… Blood is sweeter than honey.”
The painting shows a distanced denuded landscape with two large upright structures, one of which resembles the gadget in the Apparatus and Hand. Nearby is the mutilated female torso, which reclines a head that Dali identifies as of Lorca, and on the left is a procession of needles, with nails and tacks strewn in the patterns along the adjacent horizon.
7. The Lugubrious Game.
| Year Painted | 1929 |
| Genre | Landscape Art |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil and collage on canvas |
| Dimensions | 44.4 x 30.3 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Private Collection |
By the late 1920s, Salvador Dali embraced Surrealism, sooner developing the paranoiac-critical method in which he plundered his psyche for images and more associations. Among these Salvador Dalí paintings is The Lugbrious Game which was composed in the summer of 1929 at Cadaqués when Dali was preparing for his first one-man exhibition in Paris. During this same time, he painted many subjects, including masturbation, made overt by the statue’s huge hand and Dali’s sexual fears and fixations.
In this painting, he included objects in a spiraling column on the right, with an image of himself, his mouth covered by a grasshopper, a creature that he extensively feared. This painting was one of the most successful centerpieces of Dali’s Parisian exhibition at the Goemans Gallery in November 1929. However, the painting further features two clutching figures, which refers to the castration anxiety of the artist. In addition, this troubling and obvious reference to masturbation caused a stir of controversy among fellow artists with the inclusion of ‘disgusting dirt on the underpants.’ To this controversial statement, Dali replied,
“I swear to you I am not ‘coprophagic.’ I consciously loathe that type of aberration as much as you can possibly loathe it. But I consider scatology as a terrorizing element just as I do blood.”
8. The First Days of Spring.
| Year Painted | 1929 |
| Genre | Landscape Painting |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil and collage on panel |
| Dimensions | 50.2 x 65 cm |
| Where is it housed? | The Dalí (Salvador Dalí Museum), Florida |
Since this work was one of the first Salvador Dali paintings in which the artist discovered his true voice, it becomes vitally important to learn to understand the artist’s creativity. In March 1929, he took it with him to Paris, where it created a very favorable impression.
The painting shows two deeply shadowed channels at the distant horizon, while a man sits on the left, staring into space without casting a shadow. In front of us, a woman and a man kneel and sit before a collaged-framed image depicting games on deck aboard a luxury liner. Gagged, the man’s hands flow into a bucket pointed at by a phallic finger. There are two balls and a hole beneath the finger, suggesting an obvious sexual pun. Besides the female sexual cleft between her breasts that doubles as the pattern on her necktie, the woman has an opening for a face that attracts flies.
On the ledge between the two channels is the small photo of Dali himself as a child, and in the front of his picture, a curious form stands, which is in the form of part fish, part grain stack, part jug-handle, and part body tubes, complete with numbers. From this form, an arm stretches whose jagged shape looks like Max Ernst. Grasping a locust’s mouth, its hand grazes a head. It is safe to assume that Dali’s head represents himself since very similar heads often appear in his work around this time and later. A little girl’s printed image probably covers the area in which his brain would be, and he might be dreaming of her. Further, an image resembling a thought bubble and a large stone hangs above his head.
There are collaged images of a deer, a pencil, a man with a walking stick, and a bird within this section that may represent elements of another dream within the picture as a whole. The image signifies the Freudian theories, which have psychoanalytical meanings.
9. Portrait of Paul Éluard.
| Year Painted | 1929 |
| Genre | Portraiture |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on cardboard |
| Dimensions | 34.9 x 25 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Private Collection |
Paul Éluard, born Eugene Grindel in Saint-Denis, Paris, in 1895, was a poet and married Gala (who would divorce him to marry Dali two years later). Between 1924 and 1938, Éluard was active in the Surrealist movement, and his The Capital of Pain of 1926 is one of the finest collections of Surrealist poetry.
Dali painted this portraiture while he was having an affair with his wife, Gala, and the work was his way of portraying his guilt over this relationship. An arm with long bony fingers covers Éluard’s forehead while another reaches around his neck and pokes a finger into the stomach of a locust. This legless and armless creature fixes upon a form we shall encounter soon as a representation of Dali asleep with his eyes closed, nose pointing downwards, and blood trickling from his nostril with no mouth. Fixed to this area where the mouth must be placed, an egg is devoured by the ants. Ingeniously Dali’s head doubles as a fish seen in profile as he faces to the left. In this alternative reading, the head of the locust acts as the pupil and iris of the eye of the fish. On the other side of Éluard’s torso, there is the head of a lion, which morphs into a classic-looking head, the top of which joins to the earlobe of Éluard. On the right side of this Salvador Dali painting, a lion leaps forth in the projection of sexual aggression and untrammeled libido. A jug head of leering woman faces this lion.
At the base of Éluard’s torso, there is a clasped hand that rests on a bed of hair, which falls downwards, eventually changing into rock. Further, indentations, pebbles, shells, and tree stud the jacket of Éluard.
10. The Great Masturbator.
| Year Painted | 1929 |
| Genre | Autobiographical Work |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 110 x 150 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Gift of Dali to the Spanish state, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid |
As the title of the painting, The Great Masturbator, shows the explicit subject of The Lugubrious Game, where Dali described it as an expression of heterosexual anxiety. Dali painted this painting when his relationship began with Gala. Inspired by the 19th-century picture of a woman who smells an arum lily, Dali replaced this lily with the well-endowed male figure.
In his book The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, published in 1976, he wrote while creating this picture,
“I masturbated frequently, but with great control over my penis, mentally leading myself on to orgasm but disciplinary my actions so as the better to savor my ecstasy. masturbation at the time was the core of my eroticism and the axis of my paranoia-critical method. The prick I was hooked on, so to speak. There was me and my organism- and then the rest of the world… The Great masturbator… is the expression of my heterosexual anxiety- with its mouth-less character incarnated by locusts while the ants eat its belly.”
11. Accommodations of Desire.
| Year Painted | 1929 |
| Genre | Autobiographical Work |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil and chromolithograph collaged onto the panel |
| Dimensions | 21.9 x 34.9 cm |
| Where is it housed? | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jacques and Natash Gelman Collection |
The painting deals with Dalí’s sexual anxieties over a love affair with Gala. In the lower right side, Dali assembles ants to assault a vulva-like crack in a boulder. Opposite to this boulder, on the right, Dali shows an outline of the woman’s lower torso and upper legs. Upon her rounded belly is her navel with an image of a lion placed within an open maw, showing the exact spot of her sexual organs, further portraying that a woman’s sexual opening is a threatening and aggressive aperture, a beast ready to pounce. Elsewhere on the boulder, a hand’s middle finger touches an obvious hairy place, exemplifying the sexual drama. On the left-hand side, there is a shadow in the form of a hand forming a sexual shape, as do the two deep cavities surrounded by hair.
Note that the explanation describes a single boulder, one near the top right corner.
12. Paranoiac Woman-Horse (Invisible Sleeping Woman, Lion, Horse).
| Year Painted | 1930 |
| Genre | |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 50.2 x 65.2 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Musee National d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris |
The painting is an early example of a triple image, based on the paranoiac-critical method. At the center of the image is a reclining female nude, but the maned head to her right transforms the image into a lion, while as you shift your focus to the left, the image will bring a horse with its head formed by the woman’s left arm and hand. Being one of the biggest landmarks in Salvador Dali paintings, this work is no less than an invention. Before the base of this gigantic column, stands a large boat with two figures on the left straining at its prow. Beyond these images, there is a stretched flat plain and in the foreground, two large balls create an obvious sexual allusion.
The reason why this different object stands simultaneously is that the inherent resemblances of things would prove central to the mature Dali, and after this work, he moved more towards this realization.
13. The Persistence of the Memory.
| Year Painted | 1931 |
| Genre | Autobiographical Work |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 24.1 x 33 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Museum of Modern Art, New York |
The Persistence of the Memory is one of the most famous paintings of Salvador Dali. The hanging and slithering watches are a brilliant concept and much more effective than other sensational distortions in undermining the natural order of things. Dali said that the idea for the painting came to him while he was meditating upon the nature of Camembert cheese. The background of the painting was already painted, and so it took him only a couple of hours to complete this painting. When Gala saw this image, she predicted that no one who had seen this painting would ever forget it, which is true in all cases.
Dali had a conflict with his father as he disapproved of the marriage of the artist to an older and married Gala, which led his imagination to engulf him in the early years of his formal involvement with the Parisian Surrealists. This led him to an iconic series of Salvador Dalí paintings, which included The Old Age of William Tell, The Birth of Liquid Desires, and The Persistence of Memory. In his Secret Life, he wrote about the painting,
“A few days later a bird flown from America bought my picture of “soft watches” which I had baptized The Persistence of Memory. This bird had large black wings like those of El Greco’s angels, which one did not see, and was dressed in a white duck suit and a Panama hat which were quite visible…. It was nevertheless sold and resold until finally it was hung on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art.”
14. The Birth of Liquid Desires.
| Year Painted | 1932 |
| Genre | Autobiographical Work |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 94.9 x 112 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, Venice |
Being one of the most hallucinatory Salvador Dali paintings, this artwork has a gigantic form in the center, approximating the type of rock formations. The rock is thin at its center, but to the right side, it becomes adjacently deep enough to accommodate a nude man who is ready to step into it. There is no rational explanation for this spatial contradiction. To the right side, a partially obscured woman with a greyish hand hides her face, pouring a liquid into a bowl, thereby implicitly washing the foot of a man with female breasts. This man is embraced by a woman who also has a head of flower petals, resting his other leg upon a plinth. In this plint, Dali collages a chromolithographic reproduction of a gemstone showcasing a flaying Marsuas on the orders of Apollo.
This Salvador Dali portrait demonstrates that the artist painted without any real imagination, making the results look very flaccid instead of achieving pictorial flattery.
15. The Enigma of William Tell.
| Year Painted | 1933 |
| Genre | |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 146 x 201.6 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
As Dali showed sexual dominance and emasculation in the 1930 painting William Tell, and loss of sexual virility in the 1931 painting The Old Age of William Tell, here in this painting, he debunked the authority of a father figure by making William Tell look like Vladimir Lenin (a father figure to the Russian revolution). He demonstrated an irrationality of surrealism, while equally fulfilling its revolutionary aim with the representation of William Tell as a hideously distorted Lenin to enrage Breton. Due to this reason, when this picture went on display at the 1934 Salon des Independants and Breton saw the work, he attempted to ruin or destroy it, but he failed as it was hung too high on the wall to be reached.
The painting portrays the peak of the hat of Tell. Lenin and one of his buttocks extend enormously outwards, with the peak of the fat resembling an extended tongue and the buttock looking like a huge phallus. On this extended buttock, there is a piece of raw meat, which also resembles a lump of excreta, showing advanced animalism and the linkage of sexuality with excreation.
16. Soft Construction With Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War.
| Year Painted | 1936 |
| Genre | |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 100 x 99 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania |
This painting was inspired by Francisco Goya’s painting The Colossus (Panic) from Asensio Julia (formerly attributed to Goya), which depicts a vast landscape filled with panic-stricken people and animals running in all directions beneath a giant male nude standing with raised arms, towering the landscape. Since it was in the Prado Museum in Madrid when Dali was a student, he must have known the work that belonged to Goya.
Due to the fact that civil strife rarely occurs in Spain, especially in the twentieth century, Dali’s assertion that he foresaw the outbreak of hostilities when he painted this painting six months prior was not as prescient as it would seem. It is still one of the most stunning images of this time, thanks to Dali’s low viewpoint, which enabled the hideously distorted, hag-like creature to tower over us, granting him a dominance that enabled him to paint one of the greatest skyscapes of all time.
As Dali uses transformation in this picture, the squeezed teat on the left is grasped by a hand that emanates from an arm that is joined to another arm that becomes a thigh, and then another arm that becomes a foot, which ultimately becomes an arm; Dali’s long study of similarities paid off handsomely here, as he was able to effect effortless transitions between the two bodies.
17. Autumnal Cannibalism.
| Year Painted | 1936 |
| Genre | |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 65 x 62.5 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Tate Modern, London |
Like Francisco Goya inspired the painting, Soft Construction With Boiled Beans, he also played a significant part in the formulation of this image through his masterpiece, Saturn Devouring His Son. In this painting, a hand kneads a breast on the left, a female figure, and the right-hand side is male as he had an apple balanced on his head. In these terms, the figures may denote Salvador and Gala mutually devouring one another as they stand for Iberian beings doing so. These cannibals instead of enjoying any red-blooded human fleshiness enjoy fruit on the inside, which can be determined from the hole with the peeling skin surrounded by ants on the head of the leftmost figure. It further had a culinary association, garnished by various nuts, pieces of bread, slices of chorizo or Spanish sausages, and chops. With its intense detailing and vague forms, the cloud formations further emphasize the unreality of the scene, while long shadows, which may be cast by a setting sun, signify that it is the end of something. Considering that the title tells us we are looking at an autumnal scene, such timing is rightly fitting.
18. Sleep.
| Year Painted | 1937 |
| Genre | Landscape Portraiture |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 51.1 x 78.1 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam |
A large soft head with a virtually non-existent body, which featured so often in Salvador Dali paintings around 1929, is the central figure of this image. Unlike others, the painting is not a self-portrait. The artist shows sleep and dreams as the realm of the unconscious mind, while consequently emphasizing the psychoanalysts and Surrealists. Here, Dali’s sleeper is appropriately troubled, and a large number of crutches are needed to support the head and precisely position each feature. The artist always used crutches as a symbol of the fragility of the supports, which maintain reality.
19. Metamorphosis of Narcissus.
| Year Painted | 1937 |
| Genre | Mythological Painting |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 511 × 781 mm |
| Where is it housed? | Tate Museum, London |
When Salvador Dalí returned to Paris after a great success in America, he painted this picture with a poem accompanying it. In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a beautiful young man who saw his reflection in a fountain and fell in love with it. As he leaned forward to embrace his image, he toppled into water and drowned. Eventually, the Gods transformed him into the narcissus flower, so Dali depicted Narcissus sitting in a pool, while a decaying stone figure appears to correspond to him but is interpreted differently- as the hand holding up the bulb or egg from which the narcissus grows. The background is dominated by a group of naked figures attitudinizing, with a narcissus-like figure on the horizon.
20. The Enigma of Hitler.
| Year Painted | 1938 |
| Genre | Historical Painting |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 61.1 x 79.3 mm |
| Where is it housed? | Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid |
This Salvador Dalí painting was made after September 1938 when the Munich conference was held between Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy, heading off the European war by permitting Nazi Germany to seize the Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. In The Secret Life, the artist wrote of this picture,
“a very difficult painting to interpret, (a work) whose meaning still eludes me. It constituted a condensed reportage of a series of dreams obviously occasioned by the events of Munich. This picture appeared to me to be charged with a prophetic value, as announcing the medieval period which was going to spread its shadow over Europe. Chamberlain’s umbrella appeared in this painting in a sinister aspect, identified with the bat, and affected me as very anguishing at the very time I was painting it…”
21. Visage of War.
| Year Painted | 1940 |
| Genre | Self Portraiture |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 64.1 x 79 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Museum Boijmas Van Beuningen, Rotterdam |
Dali showed eyes in this skull as stuffed with infinite death. Though the image is undeniably effective, it demonstrates a certain obviousness that entered Salvador Dalí paintings by 1940. Although Dali is capable of imbuing irrational-looking imagery with intense feeling, that is where his weakness lies, for while he could imbue irrational imagery with intense feeling; however, when it comes to rational meanings and symbolism, which are very rational processes, involving the matching of image and meaning- his touch may have easily deserted him, as we are just one step away from a propaganda poster, of the type that was becoming common by 1940. Dali used a usual elliptical approach to reality. The pliant, brown form shows a witty self-portrait that may be considered an excreta, while the bacon strip lying next to it certainly enhances the connection to the culinary and guts.
The artwork was painted when Dali was in America and reached the pinnacle of his worldly fame and success.
22. The Apotheosis of Homer.
| Year Painted | 1944-45 |
| Genre | Landscape Painting |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 64.1 x 118.4 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Staatsgalerie Moderner kunst, Munich |
This painting is one of the last Salvador Dali paintings in which the maniac artist still used his old imaginative intensity. The painting portrays Gala stretched out on the right, and despite portraying someone else’s dream, the painting does possess all the authentic disconnection of a dream- it can’t be related in any rational way to the objects and activities depicted.
Dali painted a preliminary drawing of this picture in 1943. This painting resembles a Nicolas Poussin work in its straightforward distribution of light and shade, along with its figures and landscape. Although the drawing was calm and classical, the oil is more surreal and nightmarish in its mood.
23. The Temptation of St Anthony.
| Year Painted | 1946 |
| Genre | Religious Painting |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 89.5 x 119.3 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Musee Royaux des Beaux-Arts de belgique Brussels |
During the competition for Albert Lewin’s film Maupassant’s Bel Ami, Dali painted this picture; in which Max Ernst won. The painting portrays someone else’s mind rather than the projection of a state of mind in itself. The phantasms ranged before St Anthony through his eyes as we looked over his shoulder. In transmitting the saint’s mystical experience, Dali merely used his vivid imagination. Due to the subservience of the imagery to the extra-visual program, this projection brings the picture very close to illustration. Dali painted this composition at the height of the Cold War by which Dali became violently anti-Communist, and since Picasso joined this party in 1944, Dali turned against him too.
24. Leda Atomica.
| Year Painted | 1949 |
| Genre | Mythological Painting |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 61.1 x 45.3 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Theatre-Museum, Figueres |
Leda, a nymph in classical mythology, was once spotted bathing by Zeus. When God wanted to approach her, he transformed himself into a swan and pampered her. As a result of their union, Castor and Pollux were born, as well as Helen of Troy. Since Gala’s actual first name was Helen, Dali naturally associated her with the equally-named outstanding beauty of antiquity. Likewise, Dali regarded Gala as the indirect heir of his mother, Leda, because Helen of Troy came from her.
In this scene, Gala plays the role of Leda, who is about to be taken by Zeus in his avian form. Additionally, Dali’s interest in atomic physics and the fact that atomic particles never touch each other, this painting explains Gala’s absence of contact with any approaching object. The artist writes a study for his present work saying,
“As far as I know- and I believe I do know- in Leda Atomica, the sea is for the first time represented as not touching the shore; that is, one could easily put one’s arm between the sea and the shore without getting wet. therein resides, I believe the imaginative quality which has determined the treatment of one of the most mysterious and eternal of those myths in which the ‘human and the divine’ have crystallized through animality.
Instead of the confusion of feathers and flesh to which we have been accustomed by the traditional iconography on this subject, with its insistence on the entanglement of the swan’s neck and the arms of Leda, Dali shows us the hierarchized libidinous emotion, suspended and as though hanging in mid-air, in accordance with the modern ‘nothing touches’ theory of intra-atomic physics.
Leda does not touch the swan; Leda does not touch the pedestal; the pedestal does not touch the base; the base does not touch the sea; the sea does not touch the shore. herein resides, I believe, the separation of the elements earth and water, which is at the root of the creative mystery of animality.”
25. Exploding Raphaelsque Head.
| Year Painted | 1951 |
| Genre | Religious Painting |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 43 x 33 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK |
In addition to studying nuclear physics, Dali adopted ‘nuclear painting’ and ‘nuclear mysticism’ because of his deep interest in those discoveries that led to the development of the atomic bomb. These notions led to Dali creating works of art that were very much original, regardless of their theoretical merits. It is reminiscent of one of Raphael’s Madonnas, classically pure and serene; at the same time, it encompasses the interior of the Pantheon dome, which is illuminated by daylight. Although the structure has been completely blown apart, the two images remain perfectly clear even after the explosion, which appears to have exaggerated Dali’s fascination with rhinoceros horns. Salvador Dali paintings have long been associated with erotic symbols, such as the wheelbarrow in the bottom left corner.
26. The Disintegration of Persistence of Memory.
| Year Painted | 1954 |
| Genre | Landscape Painting |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 25.4 x 33 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Salvador Dali Museum, St Petersburg, Florida |
The famous Persistence of Memory was reworked by Salvador Dali after he became interested in nuclear physics and metaphysics in his later years, which led him to the concept of ‘nuclear mysticism.’ Persistence seems to contradict disintegration, but that does not hold true in Salvador Dali’s paranoid-critical universe. Watches are quietly falling apart, but the world around them appears to be fragmenting into geometric blocks with the precision of a production line; rhinoceros’ straightened horns hint at their mathematical wonders. There is a great deal of the scenes underwater, which Dali paints like a kind of skin. Sometimes he exposes the seabed by lifting it like a sheet and beneath the fish, there is a transparent, near-extinct self-portrait head that appears in so many works created in the late 1920s and early 1930s by the artist.
27. Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity.
| Year Painted | 1954 |
| Genre | Symbolism |
| Period | Surrealism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 40.6 x 30.4 cm |
| Where is it housed? | Hugh Hefner Collection, Playboy Enterprises, Los Angeles, California |
Salvador Dali had a strange revelation on 5th July 1952 in which rhinoceros horns constituted the basis of his imagery. Then he went on to see all kinds of physical and metaphysical connections with this object. After this, because of this association of the rhinoceros with the unicorns, and later linked with a chaste young maiden in medieval folklore, the painter tried putting this (rhino horns with a young maiden) in his painting but he ignored the obvious phallic symbolism and sexual associations and instead referred the rhino horns as the symbols of chastity.
The figure leans on the rail of a sunlit balcony as she gazes at an infinite expanse of ocean, dreaming of throwing off the shackles of virginity by being penetrated from behind. Two large rhino horns intersect to meet at her body to constitute her buttocks and upper thighs. The one on the left looks extremely phallic and the two horns below hover.
Final Words.
Salvador Dali courted fame and scandal with equal bravura. From managing to expel himself from the art school to create a provocative short film, Un Chien Andalou to creating masterpieces with symbolic narratives referencing Sigmund Freud’s investigations of psychoanalysis and adding meta-physics to his later artwork, Dali was an extremely talented artist from the 20th century. While the twenty-first century may be equipped to appreciate the later Dali, he was always a genius. His legacy can never be died as he continues to be one of the most significant contemporary artists. Dali is with us to stay through his artworks and powerful notions in the artistic world!
I have tried to give a small outlook of Salvador Dali paintings through this article but there are many more artworks, that have terrific details and meaning. To learn more about it, you can always refer to the attached resources.
Resources.
- Salvador Dalí: Paintings, Drawings, Prints by James Thrall Soby.
- The Life and Works of Dalí by Nathaniel Harris.
- Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire by Ted Gott, Montse Aguer Teixidor, Joan Kropf, Laurie Benson, and Sophie Matthiesson.
- The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí by Salvador Dalí.
- The Life and Masterpieces of Salvador Dalí by Eric Shanes.
- Featured Image: Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus by Salvador Dali | Source: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2007 USA: © Salvador Dalí Museum Inc., St. Petersburg, FL, 2007.
Frequently Asked Questions.
Among many masterpieces like The Great Masturbator, The Disintegration of Persistence of Memory, and more, the most famous and celebrated piece of Salvador Dali is Persistence of Memory, which he painted in 1931. Being an autobiographical painting, the image portrays hanging and slithering watches giving a sensational distortion to undermine the natural order of things.
The last painting of Salvador Dali was The Swallor’s Tail- Series of Catastrophes which was completed in 1983 as the final part of a series based on Rene Thom’s mathematics catastrophe theory.
Salvador Dali paintings often relate the conscious mind to dream psychology as he admired Sigmund Freud’s theory very well but in his later years, it showcased the use of metaphysics and theories of mathematics in his artwork, which makes his paintings one of a kind.
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