Salvador Dali Paints a Charming, Largely Unknown Work

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Dali was a master at so many things – not the least of which was his genius at surprising us, at keeping us just a little off-balance.

In 1968, for example – when Dali was mining the psychedelic ethos with extraordinary paintings like “Tuna Fishing” and “The Mountains of Cape Creus on the March (LSD Trip)” — along comes the charming, almost completely unknown canvas, “Fisherman of Port Lligat, Mending His Net” (private collection).

The approximately 12 inch by 17 inch canvas emerges from Dali’s easel amidst a creative period when such considerable works as “Cosmic Athlete” and “Hallucinogenic Toreador” were either completed or in a nascent stage of development.

There’s virtually nothing surrealistic, certainly nothing psychedelic, about this surprising little picture, with perhaps the exception of the skeletal remains of a sailing boat grounded on terra firma, in front of which a dreamer strolls, toting a butterfly net.

The faint image of a town appears in the distant right, and a typical rocky outcropping at left fairly well mirrors what Dali saw every day when he was at his villa at Port Lligat, Spain, gaining continuous inspiration from a landscape he believed to be the most beautiful in the world.

Of course, our eye is most significantly drawn to the fisherman himself – a delightful portrait of the bespectacled, cap-wearing fellow whose nub of a cigarette between his lips shares a white highlight with that on his glasses lens and his left forehead.

The fisherman’s feet project out toward the viewer, adding depth to the composition, which features a sandy colored sky that blends seamlessly with the beach on which the main character repairs his fishing net. No conjecture here about foot fetishes. But the prominence of the man’s feet may remind aficionados of several other Dali paintings in which the human foot is prominent, including “Santiago El Grande,” “The Ascension of Christ,” the stereoscopic work, “Gala’s Foot,” and Dali’s own self-portrait in part of his ceiling panels at the Teatro-Museo Dali in Figueres, Spain.

How fascinating – at least to me – that Salvador Dali, in 1968 – dazzled and inspired by op and pop art and other influences – would return to an unpretentious work like this, directly linked to the mundane day-to-day life that quietly unfolded in the tiny hamlet where Dali and Gala lived all their lives. It’s hard not to be reminded of works created far earlier in Dali’s career, perhaps most notably “The Weaning of Furniture Nutrition” of 1934 (Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida).

The portrait of the fisherman is a surprise in itself. It seems clearly to capture the specifically distinctive look of whomever the sitter was here. And just who was he? No doubt another Dalinian mystery destined never to be solved.

Dali’s Wife Gala Probably Most Enduring Theme in His Long Career

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

It was only very recently that your humble Dali historian/blogger for The Salvador Dali Society, Inc. considered the parallel between “The Angelus of Gala,” painted in 1935, and “Dali from Behind Painting Gala from Behind Immortalized by Six Virtual Corneas Momentarily Reflected in Six Real Mirrors,” c. 1972-’73.

Although there’s no mirror in the earlier work, it’s pretty obvious how the two depictions of Gala share a similarity, notwithstanding their being created nearly 40 years apart.

Dali’s apotheosis of his wife is perhaps the most consistent and enduring theme throughout his long career. She was not only the leading inspiration and motivator for Dali, but of course also played a starring role in so many of his paintings, drawings, and watercolors.

Never has such a private woman been so famous.

One of Gala’s favorite jackets is meticulously portrayed in “The Angelus of Gala.” Dali painted a host of works in which his wife and muse was seen wearing the same decorative top. The “Angelus” refers of course to Jean-Francois Millet’s “The Angelus,” an extremely popular, ubiquitous image in its time and one with which Dali was truly obsessed. Thus, Gala is seen in this portrait seated on a wheelbarrow in the mirror image that faces us, while the foreground rear-view image sort of underscores, well, the rear view!

What I’m referring to here is not just the perspective of Gala from behind – but also to her behind itself! The reason is that some have suggested that the folds in Gala’s skirt simultaneously appear to be a large human hand. And the many images Dali painted of women from behind, with sometimes exaggeratedly curvaceous buttocks, suggests he very much favored that part of the female anatomy (as for breasts, he humorously proposed that the bosoms should best be found on the back of a woman – thus becoming like the wings of an angel!).

The variation on Millet’s “The Angelus” painting in the picture hanging on the wall of “The Angelus of Gala” completes this intriguing painting that exudes a calm, almost classical feeling – while at the same time citing the Millet work that was actually the basis of a very controversial obsession throughout most of Dali’s career.

Dali believed that Millet original painted not a basket lying on the ground beneath the praying couple’s canvas – but a small casket holding the couple’s deceased child. What’s more, Dali equated the look of the praying woman with that of a praying mantis, opening up all manner of disquieting implications, since the female praying mantis actually devours its mate after copulation.

What’s so extraordinary, then, about so many of Dali’s surrealist paintings is how they lay open the pages of his evolving life story, sharing with us various clues as to what this man thought, felt, obsessed over, cared about, was inspired by, and was driven to create for the ages.

Dali’s Portrait of His Sister One of the Artist’s Most Tranquil Works

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Salvador Dali, at the milestone age of 21, painted “Girl Standing at a Window” – a work destined to be one of his most popular pictures, reproduced countless times in books, catalogs, and articles about the celebrated master of Surrealism.

The irony here may be that the subject of this canvas – Dali’s only sibling, his younger sister Ana Maria – would come to be a controversial figure in Dali’s endlessly eventful life.

On the surface – and what probably matters more to most connoisseurs of Salvador Dali’s intriguing oeuvre – is a beautiful scene, beautifully painted. We see Ana Maria Dali leisurely poised at a window, looking out at the bay of Cadaques in Spain. It was at this Spanish seaside town where the Dali family spent summers, and where Dali collected many memories that would later be depicted on canvas.

Cadaques figured prominently in countless Dali paintings, Dali prints, drawings and watercolors. The Spanish terrain with which Dali grew up was a major influence and inspiration in his work. The depiction of the bay and background landscape is extremely placid and orderly – not an especially common portrayal of things in a Dali painting, albeit this work came a few years before Dali’s visions would be decidedly more provocative and bizarre.

Yet provocation lay just under the patina of “Girl Standing at a Window.”

Dali and Ana Maria’s relationship seems always to have been a little unusual. She was his only female model before Gala came on the scene; some wondered just how close brother and sister were at the time. Indeed, the untimely death of Dali’s mother when he was just 16 years old thrust Ana Maria into a more maternal and domestic role, which doubtlessly changed Salvador’s view of the brother/sister dynamic.

The pivotal event between them, however, came when Ana Maria penned an autobiography in 1953, “Salvador Dali: View by His Sister.” It was unflattering to the artist, and this sense of disloyalty created an irreparable falling out between brother and sister. Allegedly as a kind of pictorial revenge, Dali – the very next year – finished his remarkable and super-naughty “Young Virgin Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.” It shows a curly haired naked woman leaning out a window, gazing at the same Cadaques seascape – her backside provocatively composed of phallic rhinoceros horns.

Dali’s revenge?

It would have been fascinating to learn what Ana Maria thought of the erotic redux!

That said, “Figure Standing at a Window” – with its predominantly light blues and lavenders – exudes an overall peaceful, gentle presence and demonstrates early on that Salvador Dali possessed formidable technical skills as an easel painter destined for immortality.

Dali Cleverly Mixes Media in Portrait of King Juan Carlos

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Salvador Dali was a great synthesizer.

He truly loved to mix his media, trying out new things. Experimenting. Exploring new ways to express his inexhaustible creativity. Discovering new ways to see, new ways to shake things up.

One genre that Dali mined with a wide range of styles, and a unique passion, was portraiture. Most of his portrait paintings depicted their subject realistically – some so stunning they almost defy us to distinguish them from photographs. Many featured wonderfully surrealistic background dreamscapes. Some were outlandish or humorous. A few were surprisingly tranquil, devoid of the usual Daliesque shenanigans.

Several Salvador Dali portraits pressed the charm of collage into service. “Portrait of Mae West, Which Can Be Used as an Apartment” is an example. His sardonic portrait of Shirley Temple another. And so was his delightful double-image “Portrait of Katharine Cornell,” which features a cut-out butterfly glued to the canvas (and which I’m fortunate enough to have nearby at my hometown’s State University of New York at Buffalo).

But the only portrait work by Salvador Dali I’m aware of that incorporates a photographic image as a representation of the subject itself is “The Prince of Sleep,” a.k.a., Portrait of King Juan Carlos (I have no idea why Dali titled it “The Prince of Sleep” and encourage readers to contact me if they know), which Dali began in 1973 and didn’t finish until six years later.

His subject was Prince Juan Carlos when Dali began the work, but became king – succeeding Generalissimo Francisco Franco – by the time he completed the unusual and striking piece.

Dressed in his military uniform, the handsome Juan Carlos is set against a serene seascape in which a lone seagull soars. A kingly crown appears in the white border above.

Of course, Dali cranks up the excitement with the door-window cut into Carlos’s figure, over his heart. This is a fine example of tromp l’ oil (fool the eye), as Dali painted a finely grained wooden door that truly jumps off the canvas like a hologram image, giving the illusion of three-dimensionality, while it casts a shadow on the right border.

Inside the opened, sun-lit space is an amber-colored lane leading towards a landscape dotted with small green bushes. Suspended in the sky is a gold panel, held aloft thanks to the efforts of two birds. Author Kristen Bradbury wrote that the panel – positioned over the king’s heart – “(effects) a pun on the phrase, ‘heart of gold.’”

Some may take issue with Salvador Dali painting a member of the Spanish Royal Family, for political reasons. But like his favorite artist, Diego de la Silva Velasquez, Dali fancied himself as something of a court painter, and certainly a lover of monarchy. He was a staunch supporter of the Spanish Royal Family. And, in this unconventional portrait, Dali once again demonstrated that – to borrow from an aforementioned detail – everything he touched turned to gold!

Hitler as a Wet Nurse? Anything’s Possible in a Dali Dream Painting!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

In the 1930s especially, it can confidently be said that Salvador Dali was a painter of dreams. While such a description may at first seem overly obvious, it really bears closer study. Why? Because so much of our understanding of Dali’s paintings, as well as many a Dali drawing, Dali print – indeed, anything this genius created – hinges on an appreciation of the man’s dream world.

A reminder of this fact should also bring us back to the very premise of Surrealism as an art form: its members endeavored to explore the subconscious mind – a phenomenon of the human condition lorded over by Sigmund Freud, and given tangible form in his seminal book, Interpretation of Dreams. That hugely important book became a virtual bible to the Surrealists in general and Salvador Dali in particular.

Dreaming of Hitler?

In the canvas I’m taking a brief look at today, “The Specter and the Phantom” of 1934, two main phenomena prevail. One is what I’ve been talking about here – dreams, and how they held sway over Dali’s thoughts, which then became deftly transferred to canvas.

The most prominent image here is a wet nurse sitting in a puddle, inexplicably situated on an expansive open plain or beach that shows no other signs of water. This image appeared in several other Dali paintings as well, and we know it is suggestive of images Dali painted of – brace yourself – Adolf Hitler!

Such a realization surely seems shocking at first blush. But Dali freely admitted that the intrusive presence of Hitler in the real world also made a tenacious appearance in Dali’s dream world. Keep in mind that, as a true Surrealist, Dali felt obligated to stay loyal to whatever his dreams turned up, without any self-filtering. Dreams were what they were, and no one could change them – nor should they – when endeavoring to faithfully represent them on canvas.

Consequently, several depictions of the Furor appeared in Dali’s paintings. And sometimes, such as in the image of the nurse in “The Specter and the Phantom,” a suggestion of the fleshy back of Hitler was conveyed – in this case even with a small cut taken out of her back, emphasizing the fleshy, perhaps edible nature of Hitler’s back.

Yeah, dreams can be kind of weird.

Again, this all pivots around a major tenet of Surrealism: its denizens were to be free to explore and express their subconscious minds, their dreams, without restraint, censure or judgment. At least that was Salvador Dali’s genuine pledge to the cause.

Meanwhile, the second main phenomenon in “The Specter and the Phantom” resides in the large cloud mass. Admirers of Dali’s art were constantly claiming they saw this or that image in his works – even when he himself never intended such alleged images.

In the present case, do you see a seated person? A face? A skull? Something else? A phantom? A specter?

It’s all ultimately conjecture…interpretation…illusion. Or, put another way, it’s all a dream – painted as only Salvador Dali could do it so convincingly.

‘The Dream Approaches’ Emblematic of Dali’s Surrealism of the ’30s

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

If you could paint your dreams – if you first could remember them, that is – what would it look like? Salvador Dali had the unparalled ability to capture his dreams on canvas (as well as in Dali prints, watercolors, and drawings) for the great pleasure of the rest of us.

“The Dream Approaches” of 1932 is a good example of the purely surrealist, inspired canvases that made Dali’s output of the 1930s his best, according to many, though, as I’ve opined many times in this blog, I believe his post-surrealist works were equally impressive.

There’s a sort of haunting temperament to this painting – an atmosphere that’s dream-like, where time and space are at odds with our normal sense of reality. The luminescent sky – pre-dawn from all appearances – adds to the dream-like mood here, as morning is unfolding and, alas, the dream approaches.

Not surprisingly, Dali’s dream features some grim images and symbolism. Cypress trees – though commonly found in the region where Dali and Gala lived on the Costa Brava in Spain – are a traditional symbol of death, often associated with graveyards. Indeed, the foreground table may actually be a coffin, at which birds pick upon the white material draped over it.

The tower is seen in a good number of Dali’s surrealist paintings. As a child, he was drawn to a mill tower in Figueres; it would become a lifelong memory and a kind of landscape-based fetish fixture. Considered together – the tower and the cypress trees – they recall a haunting painting with which Dali was obsessed, and some of whose details appeared in several other great Salvador Dali paintings: “The Isle of the Dead” by the Swiss symbolist artist Arnold Bocklin.

Bocklin’s “Isle of the Dead” influenced Dali

One of Dali’s paintings that nodded to the Bocklin work is “Cavalier of Death,” seen here, though there were several other Dali pictures, too, that clearly quoted the “Isle of the Dead” image.

Dali’s “Cavalier of Death” nods to Bocklin’s foreboding work

The sexual suggestions in Dali’s paintings cannot be denied, of course. It’s not much of a stretch to consider the phallic nature of the tower and the vaginal nature of the curious cocoon-like form that appears on the left edge of the coffin in “The Dream Approaches.”

Meanwhile, as the often nonsensical nature of dreams would have it, to the left of the coffin is a block or table that at the same time serves as a body of water in which rocks are reflected and in front of which a naked man stands. His pose seems to suggest he’s puzzled by what this approaching dream means – as we generally all are – when we remember our dreams and nightmares, and try to make sense of them.

‘The Chair’ an Example of Dali’s Unprecedented Stereoscopic Work

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Double-Dali! Dali in 3-D! Double the pleasure!

In the 1970s, just when we might have thought Salvador Dali paintings couldn’t blow our minds any further – BAAM! – the Surrealist master and Catalan genius breaks exciting new ground by applying classic stereoscopy to modern sensibilities.

I was extremely excited and impressed when I became aware of Dali’s pushing the creative envelope in the ‘70s in exploring stereoscopic or stereo-optical painting. I had always been intrigued by this phenomenon of optics – how each eye focuses on an object in its own way, and how our brain – discerning nearly identical (but not quite exactly identical) objects simultaneously – produces the effect of great depth or three-dimensionality.

Achieving the holy grail of 3-D painting

Needless to say, Dali was fascinated by optics and optical illusion throughout his entire prodigious career. He also had a career-long admiration for great painters before him. One of them was artist Gerard Dou, in whose work Dali actually saw what looked like an attempt by the Dutch artist to create stereoscopic canvases.

Dali may have even tipped his hand some at the 1971 opening of the original Salvador Dali Museum of Beachwood, Ohio. He was photographed on that occasion holding the sign he created for the museum, which appeared to read simply DALI. On closer examination, however, the same letters – cleverly formed – could also be read as GALA and DOU. Three names in one – presaging his three-dimensional work soon to come.

Three names in one: Dali, Gala, Dou

While most of Dali’s stereoscopic pictures of the 1970s were relatively small in size, he continued the large scale of his most important masterwork of this period – “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” – with his 1975 stereoscopic work, “The Chair,”13 feet tall.

Relatively late in Dali’s career, the 71-year-old artist executed what I find one of the most detailed works in his vast catalog. If you can enjoy a close-up look at Gala’s hair, it’s simply stunning in its virtuosity. Of all the depictions of Gala’s tresses, I find this one in “The Chair” to be the most adroitly painted. And Dali’s hand echoes that painstaking effort, right down to the liver spots.

As our eye moves up from the action of the paint brush applying a detail to Gala, dressed in a school frock, we find pedestals (bathroom sinks?) that help to give the picture the illusion of depth, until we consider the chair itself, positioned against a vast sky and above a mountainous outcropping plucked from the terrain of the Costa Brava, Dali and Gala’s home all their life.

The chair was a favorite object of Dali, appearing in a host of different Dali paintings, Dali prints, drawings and other works. It was found in works as diverse as his surrealist canvas, “Woman with Head of Roses” and a magazine ad for Bryan Hosiery.

The 3-D effect in all this is achieved by viewing the two nearly identical canvases through a special lens. In addition to the illusion of depth – like that produced by the old stereoscopes that were popular in the 1950s – “colors appear that are not achievable on the palette,” according to an explanation given to me at the time by Dali patron A. Reynolds Morse.

Of course, the take-away from all this is that “The Chair” – like other stereoscopic works by Dali – allowed him to actually achieve three-dimensionality from a flat surface – a holy grail of illusion Dali was searching for all his life.

Dali’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Literally Rises from the Ashes!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Tragedy and triumph descended upon perhaps the greatest series of oil paintings ever created by Salvador Dali: his “Seven Lively Arts” series commissioned by American impresario Billy Rose.

Rose bought the Ziefeld Theatre in New York and hired Dali to illustrate the theatre’s opening production. The Seven Lively Arts included opera, ballet, cinema, theatre, radio, art of the concert, and Boogie Woogie.

It has always been fascinating to me to see photos of Dali huddled in a studio loft in the famed theatre, hard at work in creating what turned out to be spellbinding images that surrealistically captured the exuberance, energy and passion of the lively arts.

Imagine what it was like to enter the lobby of the Ziegfeld Theatre and feast your eyes on these stunningly bizarre oil paintings, each one more intriguing than the next. The Dali paintings helped create a huge draw for Rose’s new showcase.

Then tragedy struck.

On April 2, 1956, a fire broke out at Rose’s home in Mount Kisco, New York. I don’t believe I’ve ever read any details of it. All I know is that the priceless Salvador Dali originals were destroyed. Lost to history forever.

The original Boogie Woogie, destroyed in fire.

That is, until Salvador Dali set about doing the nearly impossible: he recreated them, he agreed to paint them again!

Of course, no artist could duplicate exactly something of such a unique nature. But much of the original imagery and ideas reappeared in the new set of canvases. Some opine that the replacement series of Dali paintings were better than the first. Personally, I thought the original set was more imaginative and richer in detail. It is, of course, a matter of opinion.

Because the Boogie Woogie as a dance craze had gone out of vogue, Dali’s redux was titled “Rock ‘n’ Roll – La Danse,” and was simpler than the first version, yet some say even wilder and more interesting. The dancing couple become contortionists of sorts, driven “mad” by the pulsating beat. So wild did Dali view this new generation’s dance-floor gyrations that he has the man virtually choking his partner, while his body is twisted impossibly in a manner that not only seems to split his gut wide open, but that generates four arms!

The man’s elongated leg (not to mention the grossly exaggerated lengths and features on other appendages of both parties) recalls that seen in Dali’s “Ghost of Vermeer of Delft” (Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida) among others of his surrealist paintings.

No other elements are necessary in this painting – no mountains or rocks of Dali’s native Spanish countryside – because he clearly wanted the focus to be solely on this wildly contorted couple in the throes of passionate – if not nearly orgasmic – good time rock ‘n’ roll!

I expect to spotlight others of this remarkable “Seven Lively Arts” series of Salvador Dali paintings in future blog posts. (“Rock ‘n’ Roll – La Danse”, 33 in. x 46 in., is owned by the Morohashi Museum of Art, Fukushima, Japan.)

Dali Painted a ‘Blue Dog’ Decades Before George Rodrigue Did!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

Salvador Dali may have anticipated an unlikely 1990s artistic phenomenon by more than five decades! This potentially astonishing fact reveals itself in his “Inventions of the Monsters” of 1937. I’ll get to the prescient details momentarily.

This 20-1/4 in. x 30-7/8 in. canvas is yet another of Dali’s “war pictures,” in that it was painted in anticipation of World War II.

Dali’s monsters in Chicago

The iconic burning giraffe motif, which appears in a host of Dali drawings, watercolors and prints, as well as Dali paintings, is widely understood to be a symbol of war. Dali himself described it, as it appears in the present picture, as “the masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster.” It’s easy enough to see how such an image became representative of the consuming horrors of war, which often destroys – like the gentle giraffe – innocents as part of what the war lexicon calls “collateral damage.”

“Inventions of the Monsters,” a long-time fixture in the permanent collection of the Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A., includes a number of other monstrous, nightmarish elements: a masked figure that merges with another to form a white cat’s face. A woman whose head morphs into that of a horse. A clutch of centaur-like creatures in the upper left. It all evokes a sort of disquieting, ominous mood.

Seated at a table is an eerie figure (does it have three arms?) holding a butterfly – a symbol of change, transition, and the transitory nature of things – and an hour glass, as time was running out for a world destined for war. Actually, that “extra” arm might belong to a second figure, since, depending on how you discern the face, it’s either a single face or the profile of one face merged with a second. The ambiguity adds to the unsettling vibe here.

Seated beside this double-faced figure are two clearly recognizable characters – those of Gala and Salvador Dali themselves. A broken amphora on the ground in front of the table adds to the dismal mood evoked in this nightmarish and foreboding work.

Here’s what Dali himself had to say, in a telegram he sent to the Chicago Art Institute when he learned they were acquiring it: “…According to Nostradamus, the apparition of monsters is a presage of war. This canvas was painted in the mountains of Semmering a few months before the Anschluss and it has a prophetic character. The women-horses represent the maternal river-monsters…the angel-cat is the divine heterosexual monster, the hour-glass the metaphysical monster. Gala and Dali together the sentimental monster. The little lonely blue dog is not a monster.”

It’s that little dog that forms the prescient nature of “Inventions of the Monsters,” which I alluded to at the beginning of this post. Could this somehow have been a premonition of Dali’s, anticipating the oddly popular, iconic “blue dog” series of the 1990s by artist George Rodrique? The notion may seem preposterous. But Dali’s dog is not only simplistic and sketchy, as was the Rodrique series, but look closely at its faint color…it is, as Dali telegraphed, blue.

‘Maximum Speed of Raphael’s Madonna’ is Maximum Dali!

By Paul Chimera

Salvador Dali Historian

One of the loveliest paintings from Salvador Dali’s vast catalog – combining Surrealism, Nuclear-Mysticism, Renaissance influences, and sheer beauty – is his “The Maximum Speed of Raphael’s Madonna” of 1954.

It strikes me that anyone who sort of wants it all in art is always well-served to enter the house of Dali, where virtually any style awaits you. In “Maximum Speed,” Dali has taken a classic portrait of the Madonna, inspired by the Italian Renaissance master, Raphael – whom Dali deeply admired – and reimagined her gracious figure through the lens of the new atomic age.

Dali’s fascination with revelations in nuclear physics and discoveries about intra-atomic matter moved him from pure surrealism to a new way of viewing and portraying the world around him. The Madonna figure is thus masterfully composed of atoms zipping about, with her main facial features formed by rhinoceros horns. The latter symbolized Dali’s reverence for traditional mathematical principles to which his art held rigorously, including the Golden Section that informed spatial proportion.

In the case of the rhino horn shape, Dali was intrigued – make that obsessed – by how the animal’s appendage is one of the few instances in nature where the perfect logarithmic curve or spiral can be found.

The haloed figure appears to be wearing a turban. Astute Dali aficionados might discern in this atomic portrait a resemblance to another female who played a pretty darn important role in Dali’s life: his Russian wife and muse, Gala. Compare the image in “Maximum Speed” to the turbaned image of Gala on the right side of two great paintings from the 1930s: “The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image” and “The Endless Enigma.”

While we’re doing some comparison, note how the collar area of the Madonna’s garment echoes (though not exactly) the patterns seen in both “Portrait of Gala with Rhinocerotic Symptoms” and “Galatee.” This is another example of what we know as Dalinian Continuity, where the artist intentionally linked his oeuvre by repeating certain elements in his pictures.

Dali did a host of paintings that incorporated atomic-like spheres, often serving to achieve the illusion of great depth. A similar treatment of a woman’s face composed of both rhino horns and colorful spheres is found in “Dali Nude in Contemplation before the Five Regular Bodies Metamorphized into Corpuscles, in which Suddenly Appear the Leda of Leonardo Chromosomatized by the Visage of Gala,” painted the same year as the present work.

Dali’s color palette in “The Maximum Speech of Raphael’s Madonna” is truly stunning, and, like any work by this great colorist, it’s far more breathtaking when viewed in person – an opportunity I got when this mesmerizing canvas was shown in the “Dali: The Late Work” exhibition in 2010-’11 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, curated by my friend and fellow Dali specialist, Dr. Elliott King.