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| The Great Masturbator,1929, oil on canvas, Salvador Dalí |
Certainly this composition allows us vivid insight into Dalí's sexual fantasies, which were often violent, and his fear of the dangers of carnal love, which is symbolized mainly by the grasshopper. In contrast, the lion's head inscribed in the masturbator's face-at the point where it merges into the female body- with its lolling tongue and wildly rolling eyes stands for the impossibility of controlling erotic lust. Dalí's fear of sexually transmitted diseases is manifest in the fellatio that does not take place between the naked woman and the male torso in front of her face, whose penis appears to be strangely "abstract". Dalí took great care to point out that the contours of the face with its elongated nose were inspired rock formations at Cap de Creus. This painting came into being while the artist was under the influence of his first passionate encounter with Gala, and it mirrors Dalí's yearning for and at the same time deep-seated fear of a union with this fascinating woman. After all, at that point in time Dalí professed to have only masturbated and never performed coitus.
All of that is evident in The Great Masturbator. But the painting itself, as smooth and fine as alabaster, is much more than a subjective avowal-just as for Dalí sexuality always meant more than purely individual,psychological libido. To him, eroticism, beyond all conventional morality and also beyond physical satisfaction, was a protective wall against the certainty of death, making it a life principle par excellence. Like other means for attaining "enlightenment of the soul", sexual passion served as a hallucinogenic medium, with the help of which transcendent experiences could flow into the painting. It is for good reason that in Dalí's later thinking eroticism became the "royal path to the soul of God" because as he put it, it is inherent in all molecular structures.
The translation of erotic sexual fantasies into pictorial compositions and suggestive visualizations- more often than not with obsessive zeal- therefore become a highly effective method of laying a foundation for "shared dreaming". What could be better suited to creating common ground between the artist and the observer than their common existential experience of eros!
Source: Salvador Dalí, Norbert Wolf
