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Women: D Ifs View GALLERY GUIDE Women: D Ifs View This document is posted publicly for non-profit educational uses, excluding printed publication. JUNE - SEPTEMBER^jpOS SALVADOR DALI MUSEUM • St PETERSBURG Gallery Layout Raymond James Community Room 1 Introduction 2 Folklore 3 Angelus, Gradiva, Sphinx Lower Gallery 4 Exhibition continues 5 Landscape, Beatrice 6 Lower Gallery: Large "Masterworks" 7 Madonna/Saints/Angels, Venus de Milo 8 Gala photographs (1910-1945) 9 Gala, a film by Silvia Munt, 4-1/2 min. loop 10 Raymond James Community Room: Works on paper = film Gallery Entrance Introduction to "Women: Dali's View" The images of women dominate the history of art. Women, as an artistic obsession, mirrors the changing images and identities of females in our society. Among the sculptures of the earliest human beings are voluptuous figurines which emphasize the breasts and hips of sustenance and reproduction. In Western antiquity, sculptures of women expressed a modest and idealized grace. The Greek Goddess of Beauty, Aphrodite, and the Roman, Venus, with serene and commanding facial features, were often represented partially clothed, presenting a composite of sensua and intellectual beauty. In the European Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary and the female saints engaged the attention of artists and are depicted as fine featured, fragile, and long suffering. In short, women in art are as diverse as women in life, no representation being consummate but always an expression of their variability and the attitudes toward them on the part of artists, most of whom have been men. A range of approaches as diverse as all these historical approaches is found in Dali's view of women. Dali's first image of a woman can be found in childhood sketches (1916) which included nudes and depictions of witches from Catalan legends. During these early years, Ana Maria, Dali's younger sister, frequently modeled for portraits, often seated, such as Portrait of my Sister (1923). Dali admired the artist Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, and emulated Ingres' approach to the female figure in Study of a Nude (1925), seen from behind. Girl with Curls (1926) presents a clothed and standing woman situated in a Dali with Museum Founders Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, Knoedler Gallery, New York, April 13, 1943. Photographer unknown. Copyright © Salvador Dali. Fundacio Gala- landscape which recalls a 15th-century Florentine painting. The Salvador Dali, Spain (Artist Rights Society) 2008. Salvador Dali Museum Archives. girl is turned away from us and slightly lifts one foot, and the resulting tension in her hips suggests erotic desire. This figure Folklore may be related to Dali's reported attraction for a little girl named Dullita, as recounted in his fictionalized autobiography, The Secret Life (1942). Girl's Back (1926) depicts the head, shoulders Dalf drew sketches of witches when he was young. In Catalan and hair of Dalf's sister as viewed from behind. Her shoulders popular culture, there are numerous legends about witches are illuminated by a warm light, and she is set against (Catalan bruixes). According to popular Catalan usage, a witch a dark ground, features which recall the naturalism of Jan is a woman who has acquired supernatural powers by making a Vermeer. Dali's Bather paintings (1928) attack the conventional pact with the devil. Dalf's ancestors on his father's side were ideas of Beauty, that of the reclining nude, through disturbing agricultural laborers from the small Catalan town of Llers. Llers transformations and fragmentations of the female body. As well was once reputed to be infested with witches. In 1920, Dalf explicitly erotic themes appear frequently in Dali's drawings of painted a watercolor titled La Sardana de las Brujas, depicting four the female body. nude witches dancing in a circle in the sky over Cadaques the In Dali's paintings from the surrealist period, he continually Sardana, the traditional national dance of Catalonia. mythologizes his wife Gala so that Gala the woman and Gala the Catalan folklore has been strongly influenced by Roman mythological figure merge into one. He paints and repaints her Catholicism. Saints and visions of the Virgin Mary play a until she becomes a familiar feature of his iconography. He prominent role in legends, tales, and customs. painted her as the Sphinx, Gradiva, and Leda, infusing in her his interest in the feminine myths of mothers, daughters, muses, and predators. For Da If, Gala was "my intimate truth, my double, my one," and he developed with her a twinned public persona, sometimes signing his paintings Gala Salvador Da//'. In Enchanted Beach with Three Fluid Graces (1938), Dalf returned to an imaginative interpretation of the Fates of Greek mythology. In Dali's later period he unites the image of Gala with the traditional subject of the Virgin Mary. In Study for Head of the Madonna of Port Lligat (1950) Gala is the model for the Madonna. Yet he heaps upon her even more qualities as she stands as witness and regent to his exploration of his changing artistic engagements with classical painting, Catholicism, and atomic science. The Angelus Gradiva Dalfwas obsessed with Jean-Francois Millet's The Angelus (1858-59 In 1903, the German author Wilhelm Jensen wrote a short story The Louvre). In 1932, he recorded his ideas in The Tragic Myth of called 'Gradiva: A Pompeian Phantasy.' It was this obscure and Millet's Angelus, an essay containing one of the most brilliant examples mysterious tale that inspired the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud of Dali's paranoiac-critical method. to discuss Gradiva extensively in his 1909 work, Delusions and Millet was a member of the Barbizon school, a group of French Desires in Jensen's Gradiva. On reading Freud's analysis of the artists who left Paris to join a commune and paint outdoors. story, Dali became inspired to make new work based on the Considered a realist painter, Millet's primary subjects were the peasant figure of Gradiva. Of course, Gala appears as Gradiva. farmers. The Angelus, which celebrates the deep spirituality of a The Jensen story concerns Norbert Hanold, a young peasant couple giving thanks to God for their harvest at the end of the archaeologist who becomes fixated with a girl represented on a day, became one of his most popular works of the turn of the century. Roman relief. He calls the girl Gradiva, the name referring to her During the early 1930s, Da If began to have waking hallucinations sprightly walk, and believes she is real. After dreaming that she of the painting, and it became a source of obsession. He proposed was buried in the eruption of Vesuvius, he sets off to Pompeii in that there must be some latent meaning in the work—something search of her. Once there, he encounters a childhood friend, Zoe undetected and sexual—to explain its universal popularity. He decided Bertgang, whom he mistakes for the girl in the relief. She cures to analyze it using his paranoiac-critical method. He eventually him of his delusion by pointing out her true identity and frees proposed that The Angelus painting's female protagonist was a sexual him to live a normal life with her. In his analysis of the story, predator and the male was her victim. Thus sexual repression was the Freud concluded that Hanold had in fact been obsessed with latent theme of the work. Between 1932 and 1934, Da If painted Zoe all along, pointing out that in German 'Bertgang' also endless variations of The Angelus, and his comments on the painting describes a way of walking. The surrealists were enchanted by are indicative of his concerns in the early 1930s. For example, he the redemptive power of love suggested in the story and writes that the female figure's posture is ". .. symbolic of the adopted Gradiva as an archetypal muse. For Dali, Gradiva was exhibitionistic eroticism of a virgin in waiting, the position before the Gala, and he frequently called her Gala-Gradiva. act of aggression such as that of a praying mantis prior to her cruel coupling with the male that will end with his death." The female Angelus figure is presented as an evil seductress, the archetypal 19th-century femme fatale with the implication that she will kill her partner after sex. The Sphinx Landscape The Sphinx in Greek mythology is a demon of unique destruction Dali's homeland in Catalonia in the northeast of Spain was a constant and bad luck. The Sphinx often is represented as a winged lion source of inspiration. In Dali's early landscapes and seascapes, the with a woman's head; or a woman with the claws of a lion, a town of Cadaques inspired the artist to experiment with the changing serpent's tail and eagle's wings. She is said to have guarded the effects of light. As the impressionists, Dali used luminous colors boldly entrance to the Greek city of Thebes. To enter the city the Sphinx applied. Dali especially loved the rocky areas just beyond Port Lligat. required that her riddle be answered correctly. The famous riddle This area supports some of the most dramatic geography of this region was: "Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon where the Pyrenees meet the sea. The jagged cliffs carved from the on two, and in the evening upon three?" Anyone unable to wind and seas invite the imagination to invent human forms among answer her riddle was strangled and devoured. Only Oedipus the curved and sweeping reach of the rocks. guessed the answer correctly: Man—who crawls on all fours as a Dali used his paranoiac-critical method to visualize a couple in baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and walks with a cane Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's "Angelas" (1933-35), as two in old age.
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