‘Swans Reflecting Elephants’ Exudes Dali’s ‘Soft, Sinewy’ Technique

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Many of Salvador Dali’s painting titles are convoluted, confusing and seemingly designed for consternation. But not “Swans Reflecting Elephants.” This one tells us exactly what we’re seeing.

Salvador Dali simply loved double-imagery, hidden imagery, and other forms of optical illusion. That was probably because he had a special affinity for the phenomenon of paranoia, in which those afflicted with the disorder often times believe they see things that aren’t there. Indeed, Dali invented and applied his famous “Paranoiac-Critical Method,” a method of interpreting delirium and harnessing it in order to take paranoid-like images and present them (“critically”) to the rest of the world via his paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture, etc.

In the 1937 “Swans Reflecting Elephants,” Dali depicts swans on a tranquil, iridescent lake, whose reflections look simultaneously like their form and that of elephants. And elephants as we’ve come to know them in the real world, as opposed to the ones we’ve come to expect – usually – in Dali’s world: on impossibly tall stork-like legs.

More typical elephants in Dali’s uniquely surreal world.

While there seems to be relative calm and simplicity in this double-image canvas, there nevertheless are several elements that remind us we’re dealing with the kingpin of surrealism.

Perhaps most notable is the man standing casually in the left background, oblivious to anything else in the scene. Some say it’s meant to be Edward F.W. James, the English writer and a key Dali patron. Some say it’s Marcel Duchamp. One British friend of mine, who’s an ardent Dali aficionado and collector, claims that, whomever the man is, he’s “taking a pee!” (I don’t see it that way, but then I’m not British.)

To his right, merged with the first sinewy tree trunk we come to, appears to be a female figure, while to the extreme right, there are fires burning in the hills. Why? What was Dali thinking and conveying? Perhaps it’s no coincidence that “Dali” rhymes with “mystery.”

Speaking of which, what is that curious figure in the left foreground? Is it a squid? Octopus? Some other tentacled sea creature?

One thing we can say with certainty about “Swans Reflecting Elephants” is that its painting style is quintessential Dali: precise and exacting, with a kind of soft feeling to it, as if he were using butter instead of paint. The smooth, silky texture and overall soft sense of the work reminds us of how masterful a painter Salvador Dali was.

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I’ve spoken many times in my blogging about the notion of “Dalinian Continuity,” where Dali carries over certain elements from one painting to the next, in an effort to sort of link them within a common thread. One could certainly make that case here, since elephants have appeared in numerous Dali paintings and works in other mediums, as well as the swan – appearing most notably in Dali’s “Leda and the Swan” and “Bacchanal.”

‘Birth of Liquid Desires’ a Mirror to Dali’s Inner Desires & Fears

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

One painting that truly captures the essence of Surrealism in general and Salvador Dali’s unique brand of it in particular is the great 1932 canvas, “The Birth of Liquid Desires,” which reportedly Gala Dali sold directly to the iconic collector, Peggy Guggenheim.

Here we have a textbook example of how Dali expressed his psychological conflicts and obsessions in a manner almost as if he could gain some semblance of control over them by picturing them for others to see. It therefore must have been cathartic for the artist, only 28 at the time he painted “The Birth of Liquid Desires,” to pour out the mental concerns he was dealing with onto a canvas like this one.

His conflict with his father, heightened especially when he met and fell in love with Gala, a woman 10 years his senior, had been represented in several paintings, in which he likened the legend of William Tell to his own battle with paternal authority and rejection. In the present case, we might see the apple on the head of the would-be victim in the William Tell allegory supplanted by a loaf of bread on the head of the figure with ambiguous sexual identity.

Arising out of the bread loaf is a cloud-like image populated by cypress trees that surely derive from a painting whose dark, foreboding nature had long obsessed Dali: Arnold Bocklin’s “Isle of the Dead.” The chest of drawers with various bits of clothing and such dangling out of it is directly Freudian in its symbolism, suggesting inner fears and secrets often repressed and yet susceptible to shameful unmasking.

The large gold-colored backdrop has variously been construed as an inspiration borne of the undulating and fantastic rock formations with which Dali’s native Spanish countryside is, and was, blessed, though some have suggested it’s an artist’s palette, or even a contorted violin.

Dali drew enormous and continuous inspiration from these rocky formations, while the more undulating and “softer” parts of the image here may owe to the influence of the Barcelona architect Gaudi, whom Dali greatly admired, and whose distinctive style Dali portrayed in various surrealist works.

Freudian analysis would surely suggest that the various recessed spaces in the structure are symbolic of the female sexual organs, while the bread and various other elongated forms might invite phallic interpretations.

What about the “liquid desires” in Dali’s title? Water flows in the cloud vision at the top, while in the lower right a shamed figure pours white liquid into a receptacle – all not a very difficult leap to the notion of ejaculation.

What we see, then, in “The Birth of Liquid Desires,” is Salvador Dali’s active, sexually oriented, partly conflicted inner self exposed in the form of a meticulously painted work of art that becomes, like so many of his works, a mirror held up to Dali himself, from the inside out! The work is in the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy.

Dali’s ‘Marsupial Centaurs’ is Both Surrealistic and Classical

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Salvador Dali’s “Family of Marsupial Centaurs” has always been oddly provocative and even a bit confounding to me. In one respect, it fits the description of pure surrealism. In another, it exudes a classical sense, as if it might have been painted decades or even centuries before the 36-year-old Dali painted it in 1940.

The year of the picture’s creation is important to consider, because this was a turning point for Dali. He was on the cusp of shedding the cloak of surrealism in order to try on an entirely new outfit: his Nuclear-Mysticism that would soon develop as a result of the impending atomic era.

Dali loved Greek mythology and studied it like a scholar. So the appearance of centaurs here – creatures whose head and torso were human while their lower body was that of a horse – makes perfect sense.

The marsupial motif plays directly into Dali’s long-standing fascination with intrauterine wombs with a view (sorry, couldn’t resist!). He claimed he had vivid memories of this prenatal existence, and some of the images in his surrealist paintings derive from these memories.

In “Family of Marsupial Centaurs,” then, we see robust babies emerging from these gaping holes or marsupial-like pouches, cavorting playfully with the two female images as well as the male in the upper left of this rigorously composed canvas. Indeed, Dali quite purposely divided the canvas into four distinct triangles. Picture an “X” running from all four corners of the painting and you’ll clearly see the disciplined planning of this work, giving the composition a very formal and precise structure, a kind of neo-classicism, if you will. This, in my view, adds to the sense of this painting being more dated than its actual year of execution. (You can literally see an “X” running through the painting, can’t you!).

Two elements in the upper left of this Dali painting bear some discussion. First, one female creature holds a bunch of grapes, known to symbolize revelry if not a full-on bacchanal.

Perhaps more significant, and I’m the only Dali historian I know to have made this observation, the male in this work – head hairless and with no other discernible facial features – is, along with his body, decidedly consistent with the figure in another oddly perplexing and little known Dali painting: “Book Transforming Itself into a Nude Woman” of the exact same year “Marsupial Centaurs” was painted. You read it here first.

Compare this figure’s appearance to the man in “Marsupial Centaurs.”

Of course, the rocky cliffs at right and below the centaurs’ frolicking, as well as the horizon and sky, surely owe to the constant inspiration Salvador Dali derived from his beautiful native countryside and coastline of Port Lligat and Cadaques on Spain’s Costa Brava.

Of the many and widely diverse Dali paintings, Dali drawings, watercolors, sculptures and other works by the master of surrealism, “Family of Marsupial Centaurs” is both typical of his unique way of seeing the world – real and imagined – and a notable departure that makes it distinctively different and inescapably Dalinian.

Dali Let it All Hang Out in His ‘Lugubrious Game’ of ’29

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Salvador Dali poured his deepest thoughts, obsessions, fantasies and fears out in what is widely considered his first surrealist painting, “The Lugubrious Game” of 1929. At age 25, Dali already proved he wasn’t afraid to let it all hang out. And then some.

It would be hard to find a painting more emblematic of the spirit of surrealism than “The Lugubrious Game,” sometimes known as “The Dismal Sport.”

This 18 inch by 12 inch oil, which incorporates some collage, is chockablock with the artist’s sexual obsessions, neuroses, and disquieting memories. For Dali, painting wasn’t so much about what he “saw” (for the most part), but what he felt, what consumed his thoughts. In “Lugubrious Game,” it was as if he were conquering his demons by painting them.

This quintessentially surrealist picture was a mirror to Dali’s soul and mind.

Let’s take a closer look…

In the middle of the painting is that sleeping head we would begin to see in many Dali paintings, inspired by a large rock formation at Cap de Creus in Spain, which Dali saw and contemplated for much of his career. The rock looks like a person’s head, with its long nose pressed to the ground. Dali imagined it obsessively as his own face, invariably shown in an anguished state – most notably in “The Great Masturbator.”

Out of the back of this closed-eye head arises a swirl of erotic and symbolic images, as if plucked from a chapter of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams.” The fedoras are absolutely Freudian, their concave creases symbolizing female genitalia. Look closely and a buttocks-like form and female sexual parts are being approached by a finger. A bearded man’s mouth seems to have been supplanted by a vagina. Blood splatter invites castration fears.

Another vaginal-like form appears near where his ear would be on the man with closed eye, where we also see a sort of double-image of a bird-and-rabbit head. A mysterious hand reaches out onto the man’s neck, while a grasshopper – which Dali literally feared – clings menacingly to the man’s mouth.

To the left of the central male figure is a statue of a man covering his face in shame, while his right arm presents a grossly enlarged hand that clearly implies male masturbation. The lion at the base of the statue has long been a symbol of power as well as the terror that Dali associated with paternal authority.

Finally, we come to the two anguished – some might say disgusting – figures in the lower right. One features a head that opens like a vulva, as his finger is inserted into that space; we do not see his (or her) face. The bearded man – said by some to be Dali’s father – holds a piece of raw meat in his hand, while he appears in boxer shorts covered in feces!

This last detail – the feces-stained pants – was too much for the Surrealist brass and contributed to Dali’s ultimate expulsion from the group. But to many others, especially today, it proves the authenticity of Dali’s mission: to paint his dreams, his nightmares and his everyday thoughts without constraints or censorship or really any filter at all. It was this truth and spontaneity, this honesty and candor, that helped make Salvador Dali the greatest of all the surrealists.

‘Giant Flying Mocha Cup…’ as Enigmatic as Dali Himself!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Today’s Salvador Dali painting is one of his most enigmatic: “Giant Flying Mocha Cup with an Inexplicable Five Metre Appendage.” It’s pure surrealism and quintessential Dali – punctuated with Freudian symbolism and nodding to the Swiss Symbolist, Arnold Bocklin (who died three years before Dali was born).

For reasons that shall forever reside with Dali himself, this 1946 canvas bears a striking resemblance to one he painted in 1932, titled, “The True Painting of the Island of the Dead by Arnold Bocklin at the Hour of The Angelus”

The “Mocha Cup” canvas is aptly named, in that the strange and ultra-long appendage curiously emanating from the cup seems “inexplicable,” although it’s undoubtedly intended to be a phallic reference. Correspondingly, Sigmund Freud’s seminal book, “Interpretation of Dreams” – which Dali read religiously – makes it clear that receptacles (the cup, in this case) were symbolic of the female genitalia. That Dali was reflecting his preoccupation with matters sexual comes as no surprise. The levitating cup (levitation was another theme with which the artist was preoccupied) hovers above a stone block that features marble inlaid circles, in the center of which is the head of a Medussa.

Also suspended in space – a reflection of Dali’s consuming interest at this period with intra-atomic physics – is a pomegranate – a symbol of resurrection and fertility.

While sex was a recurring interest for the Catalan master, his preoccupation with death was no less prominent. That’s where Bocklin’s “Isle of the Dead” painting comes in. A desolate, rocky islet tucked within a dense grove of cypress trees, which two enigmatic figures are approaching by boat, struck a lifelong chord in Dali. Its dark, melancholic nature inspired a number of Dali works, including the distant, cliff-like island formation in Giant Flying Mocha Cup….”  Cypress trees have long been associated with cemeteries and mourning.

Dali was inspired by Bocklin’s “Island of the Dead”

The enigmatic figure approaching the horizon line, swathed in a manner as to make its gender ambiguous, may be a nod to the similarly cloaked figures in the Bocklin picture.

Finally, we can be certain Dali was taking a surrealistic approach to demonstrating his interest in mathematics and, in particular, the Golden Section or Golden Ratio (see diagram). That phenomenon can be discerned in the circle on the block of stone in Dali’s painting here, as our eye follows the curve upward and counter-clockwise through the “inexplicable five metre appendage.”

Ironically, one of the reasons some detractors disliked Dali was because he was too complex for them. His work often demanded deep study and the awareness and understanding of a multitude of concepts and references. For me and many others, however, that is precisely what we so admire about Dali. His work makes us wonder…think…look beyond the obvious….and discover.

Dali’s ‘Mountain Lake’ Presages the Imminence of War

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

I’ve always been impressed by Salvador Dali’s “Mountain Lake” of 1938, even if, for much of my decades-long study of Dali’s life and work, I never quite knew why.

Surrealism is a fascinating arena in which to navigate. Strange imagery can speak to you, even if you have little or no clue as to what it might mean. After all, surrealism was very much about exploring and transcribing one’s dreams onto canvas. And are dreams ever orderly? Ever neat and tidy? Do they ever quite make sense? Aren’t they always a convolution of space and time?

That said, we also know that Salvador Dali invariably connected his surrealist visions to real-world events, if not personal thoughts and experiences, including his many preoccupations with sex, death, decay, and other phenomena. And although Dali considered himself largely apolitical, he didn’t shy away from making pictorial references to seismic world events, such as war and impending war.

The telephone receiver in “Mountain Lake” always riveted my attention, in part because of its old-fashioned design (obviously state of the art in 1938, however); its incongruity in a scene showing a lake and mountains; its elevated position, thanks to the tall supportive Dalinian crutch; and the snail slithering on the crutch just below the phone.

Who but Salvador Dali would disturb a perfectly placid, normal-looking landscape painting by interjecting a most unlikely element like a telephone teetering in the bifurcation of a crutch!

But it is widely acknowledged, in several paintings around this same time period – such as “The Enigma of Hitler” (1937) – that the telephones in these Dali paintings symbolized the important and fateful communications between Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister; and Adolf Hitler, as ill-fated attempts were made, telephonically, to avert war.

“Enigma of Hitler” also features a telephone & anticipates WWII.

Dali seemed to be keenly aware of the war’s imminence and, in the broken telephone cable draped over a second crutch, we can deduce that Dali was representing the breakdown in communication between the two powers and the waning of hope for the avoidance of hostilities.

The snail might be interpreted as the slow-moving efforts to stave off the inevitable, while the overall color palette in this picture paints a rather disquieting sense of eeriness, even though there is nothing in itself here that one would consider sinister.

Dali seemed to have been almost unable to help himself when it came to his penchant for double-imagery. Little wonder, then, that the lake itself is also an enormous fish, with ripples in the water serving as the fish’s gills, while a rock’s shadow cast on the fish makes up an additional detail of its exterior anatomy.

Little Known Salvador Dali Work Inspired by German Scientist

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Certain Salvador Dali paintings tenaciously glom onto my consciousness like a soft watch inextricably draped over a barren tree branch. One such work that persistently intrigues me is the very little known gouache and collage, “Celestial Coronation,” shown here in black & white because I know of no color reproduction of the privately owned work.

Thanks to Dali specialist Elliott King, Ph.D., an art professor, author and friend, I recently learned that the central spiked form in “Celestial Coronation” is quoted directly from an illustration by Ernst Haeckel, whose seemingly endless resume includes biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist.

Ernst Haeckel illustration that inspired Dali’s work.

The German-born Haeckel produced numerous illustrations of animals and sea creatures, and dealt as well with intricate mineral skeletons produced by protozoa. These labyrinthian forms fascinated Salvador Dali, and he clearly and directly acknowledged Haeckel’s work in his c. 1951 Nuclear-Mystical painting.

There are unmistakable parallels between “Celestial Coronation” and the large masterwork Dali painted the following year: “Assumpta Corpuscularia Lapislazulina.” The main figures in each work – an ascending Madonna (whose face is that of Gala Dali) in “Assumpta,” and an ascending Madonna-like figure in “Celestial Coronation” – rise from an atom-like sphere or globe.

In “Assumpta,” the elongated, El Greco-inspired figure of Gala as the Madonna is flanked by convulsive swirls of massive rhinoceros horns, representing Dali’s interest in the logarithmic curve, of which rhino horns are a naturally occurring example. In “Celestial Coronation,” the central figure is flanked by a steely protective armor, whose points look sharp and dangerous, yet may have been inspired by sea urchins, another fixture in Dali’s native Port Lligat, Spain, and a favorite culinary treat of the Catalan master.

Clear parallels between this Dali painting & “Celestial Coronation.”

The Madonna and child motif in the present work features the Christ child in the principal figure’s right hand, while in her left hand is a Bible. A halo hovers above both figures’ heads. Two kneeling angels posed in adoration appear at bottom left and right, one clutching a crucifix, the other holding a chalice and host. A third crucifix-clutching angel is seen at middle right.

The central Madonna figure, as well as the angel in the lower left, are dematerialized into atomic-like particles – a principal tenet of Dali’s Nuclear-Mysticism, nodding to the discoveries in particle physics that modern science was revealing at the time. Ultimately, Dali felt that science was bringing us closer to a realization that the most enduring and universal truths spring from something far greater than our temporal presence.

What strikes me, and perhaps you, too, about “Celestial Coronation, is the kind of other-worldly spirituality and mystery inherent in the work. It melds the softness and purity of an angelic aura with almost menacing and formidable spike-like structures – leaving us a little off-balance in understanding just what it is we’re viewing in this rarely seen work.

In short, it is Salvador Dali doing what he did best: paint great works that leave us not quite sure where we’ve landed ourselves, yet glad we’re here!

Dali’s ‘Lenin’ Painting Gives Us a Look Inside the Artist’s Thoughts

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

At age 27, a young Salvador Dali was smack-dab in the throes of Surrealism, and one of the best examples of his thoughts and visions transferred to oil on canvas is the important 1931 painting, “Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Piano.”

Unlike many confounding titles assigned to Dali paintings, Dali drawings and other works, this picture’s title tells us precisely what we’re seeing – but the question is, “Why?”

Dali has here trivialized Russian leader Vladimir Lenin, taking a sardonic and antithetical turn against the Surrealists, who favored the Communist Party. In an extraordinary statement, Dali was quoted, “Marxism was no more important than a fart, except that a fart relieves me and inspires me.”

So the great and powerful Lenin is, thanks to Dali, reduced to little glowing heads – six of them – neatly spaced along the keys of a piano. They really do capture the sense of an apparition! Ironically, for me anyway, they actually lend a kind of charm to the work, despite Dali’s intention to trivialize the Russian figure.

“At sunset,” Dali had explained, “I saw the bluish shiny keyboard of a piano where the perspective exposed to my view a series in miniature of little yellow phosphorescent halos surrounding Lenin’s visage.” It’s always a treat to read Dali’s own explanations of such things.

Much of Dali’s dream-like imagery during the heyday of his surrealism of the 1930s owes as much to what he actually observed in his surroundings and experiences as it did to his dreams. The piano, for instance, appears frequently in various Dali pictures, usually in bizarre fashion, such as the present case, or in pictures like the provocatively titled canvas, “Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano.”

But the instrument actually did figure into young Dali’s daily life, since the Dali family was friends with the Pixtos, a musical family where al fresco concerts in Cadaques, featuring piano playing, were common. Moreover – and on a less cheery note – there was a piano in the home when Dali was growing up, upon which Dali’s father kept a dubious book picturing the horrible ravages caused by sexually transmitted diseases. This unfortunate fixture in Dali’s upbringing is said to account for his fear of sex, or at least his ambiguity about it.

In “Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Piano,” Dali supplants notes on the music sheet with his oft-seen swarming ants, a symbol of decay and death – sensibilities never far from Dali’s mind all his life.

Meanwhile, when Dali was a young boy, he had a tiny space set up outside the family home, and had painted cherries on a chair that family and friends had remarked looked very precocious for the young Salvador. That memory recurs for him in the “Lenin” painting – cloaked in a distinct darkness, disrupted only slightly by a sliver of daylight seen through a distant door.

If surrealism was in part about painting one’s dreams, this work captures that notion in a quintessential manner, for so much of the dream world involves dark, mysterious, disquieting and perplexing spaces.

Dali’s ‘Battle of Tetuan’ Seldom Seen but Makes Gigantic Impression!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Perhaps the most seldom seen Salvador Dali painting – of the approximately 20 large-scale masterworks the Catalan genius created – is his monumental 1962 oil on canvas, “The Battle of Tetuan.” Its relative obscurity, tucked away in a museum in the city of Fukushima, Japan, is rather a shame. Because this massive canvas is one of Dali’s best and most intriguing works, while also one of the more complex and confounding.

I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time in, 1990, as I recall (or was it ’92?) when I attended a Christie’s auction in New York City the night “Battle of Tetuan” went on the block; it would sell for $2 million before the night was through.

The enormous picture was hung in a room one had to pass through to get to the main auction floor. Unfortunately the room was cordoned off such that you had to stay very, very close to the wall on which “Battle of Tetuan” was hanging. As a result, you had no choice but to look up at the work, as if the galloping horses were trampling you!

I wish I’d stayed back and gazed upon it far longer.  I remember how monumental and powerful it was, with earthy shades of brown and a palpable dynamism.

The subject deals with a battle of the 1859-1860 Spanish-Moroccan War, fought near Tetouan, Morocco, between a Spanish army sent to North Africa and the non-professional troops that made up the Moroccan army.

Dali was heavily inspired to paint this large work after admiring the gigantic painting of the same name, painted by Mario Fortuny, a leading Catalan painter of his time, and on permanent exhibition in Barcelona. But Dali’s work departs from that of Fortuny in several key ways.

Never completely disconnected from his surrealist roots, Dali injected a dramatic touch to the picture with the glistening sabre at right and the “flying” horse at left – the latter element lending an unusual sense of depth and height. Emerging from behind the horse is a Dalinian reference that recalls two other important paintings: “The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft, Which Can Be Used as a Table,” and “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans; Premonition of Civil War.”

Astute viewers will notice a series of numbers interwoven throughout the battle scene, whose meaning I confess is unclear to me. It could relate to numerology, or perhaps to science, as Dali had displayed reproductions of the work with the structure of the DNA molecule superimposed over it.

Gala appears twice in the painting – at the center top and astride a horse to the left of the artist’s self-portrait; he too is riding a horse.

A very unusual and esoteric detail is found in the middle right and far right distance – the suggestion of galloping warriors formed by the rivers of negative white space surrounding printed text. Dali included it to remind us how remarkable visions can be found in mundane surroundings. Enjoy these interesting photos of “The Battle of Tetuan,” including some rarely seen until now.

Dali’s Triple Double-Image; Did it Symbolize His Fear of Death?

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Here’s another attempt to infiltrate the unparalleled mind of Salvador Dali – a task that’s both daunting and delicious! In the smorgasbord of Dali’s prolific career, there’s something for everyone’s tastes.

Enough of the food metaphor – let’s eat!

Today I’m going to riff about a dandy little oil on canvas of 1940: “Old Age, Adolescence, and Infancy,” which is one of the great canvases in the permanent collection of the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Has Dali reversed the aging process?

This beautifully painted picture is a kind of triple-double image, showcasing Dali’s career-long fascination with optical illusion, hidden imagery and double-imagery. Moving from left to right, we see “old age” expressed by a woman with her head bowed, while her head doubles as the eye of an old man whose head is the space cut through the curved brick wall. Features of the woman’s garments form the man’s lips, mustache and chin.

To the right of the old man is “adolescence,” the more youthful face formed by Dali’s seated nurse – her head and back forming the face’s nose and lips, respectively. Distant houses amidst the grassy background hills become the eyes. Dali once again depicts himself as a youth in his popular sailor suit, just as he was dressed in images of himself in “Specter of Sex Appeal” and “The Hallucinogenic Toreador.”

Finally, at right, “infancy,” formed by negative space and a seated woman whose head and waist serve simultaneously as the baby’s nose and mouth, respectively.

But there’s more to “Old Age, Adolescence, and Infancy” than impressive double-imagery. The work was painted at a time when Dali was essentially departing the surrealism of which he was the kingpin to embrace a more classical orientation in his art. Vestiges of surrealist/Freudian sensibility remain in the present work, including a key in the “old age” part of the painting; a man holding his head in either anguish or deep thought; and a piece of bread in the foreground. At the same time, the overall tableau seems to foretell a more classical style that was soon to be emblematic of a new period in Dali’s art.

However, it’s my theory that what Salvador Dali was perhaps representing in this painting was his denial of his own mortality. How so? Well, the logical sequence would be to show the stages of life left to right: infancy, adolescence, and eventual old age.

Instead – in typical Dali fashion – he does a 180, as if to say that he would prefer to move toward increasing youth instead of increasing age! We know Dali felt that death was one of life’s “tragedies,” as he put it, with which mankind had to deal. And I know from personal experience that Dali liked to surround himself with younger people because it made him feel younger.

In the catalog of the many Dali paintings that feature his penchant for and prowess in double-imagery, “Old Age, Adolescence, and Infancy” is among the very best – and a very popular work among Dali Museum visitors.