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The Old Age of William Tell.

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Larger Image	Larger image may be viewed by UofL faculty, staff, and students only (log-in required using ULink username/password) at: http://echo.louisville.edu/login?url=http://vrc-web.louisville.edu/Jpegs/2440/2447-15.jpg
Title	The Old Age of William Tell.
Creator	Dali, Salvador (Spanish painter and printmaker, 1904-1989)
Date	1931
Cultural Context	Spanish European Western European
Style/Period	Surrealist Modern (styles and periods) Modernist
Theme	Paintings (visual works) Oil paintings (visual works) Avant-garde Fantasy Allusion Imagery Symbolism (artistic concept) Symbols Sex Sexuality Phallic Eroticism Fear Anxiety Figurative art Figures (representations) Back views Front views Profiles (figures) Nudes (representations) Nudity Men (male humans) Women Old age Elderly Animals Wild animals Wildlife Lions Shadows Sheets (bed coverings) Eye-level views
Subject	Paintings Oil paintings Fantasy Allusions Symbols Sex Relations between the sexes Fear Anxiety Lust Nudes Men Women Couples Older people Beards Breasts Backs (Anatomy) Animals Wild cats Lions Shadows Bedsheets
Description	"Action behind the sheet, in the presence of the ubiquitous lion. Dali said the painting referred to his and Gala's repudiation by his father. There are allusions to Gala's operation, which Dali feared might be fatal." (Caption); "During his stay, [René] Crevel worked on Dali or Anti-Obscurantism, an essay published the following November […], frolicked with Gala in the garden, marveled with Dali at the mica-schist metamorphoses of Cape Creus and participated in the trick photography sessions with a sheet that Dali quoted in The Old Age of William Tell. André Thirion was deeply struck by this and other paintings done at the time, which he reads as a passionate homage to the Gala whom Dali had feared might not survive her operation. It seems that the painter explained later that The Old Age of William Tell expressed his and Gala's repudiation by Dali Cusí. But this is only part of the story. Behind the sheet, 'unmentionable things', as one of Dali's biographers has put it, are being done to Tell by two females (presumably involving masturbation or fellatio or both), while the couple representing Dali and Gala walk away in shame or disgust. Tell is wearing breasts as in Memory of the Child-Woman. One of the females is looking at his genitals with ravenous lust. The scene is watched by the ubiquitous lion, whose threatening shadow falls across the sheet. Against the column on the left leans a figure reminiscent of the vulnerable Gala who appears in Imperial Monument to the Child-Woman, while in the right background a naked couple are embracing, breasts with grotesquely erect nipples, droplets of blood and the same red blooms that adorned the Muse in The Invisible Man and The Bleeding Roses, making this look like another expression of Dali's anxiety about his father's sexual interest in Gala." (Excerpt, pp.341-342)
People Pictured	Tell, William
Material	Oil on canvas Oil paint (pigmented coating) Paint Canvas
Measurements	98 x 140 cm
Technique	Oil painting (technique) Painting (image-making)
Work Type	Oil paintings Paintings
Repository	Private collection
Source	Gibson, Ian. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. New York; London: W.W. Norton, 1998. (Color plate XXII)
Rights	Photograph reproduced in Gibson courtesy: Private collection.
Digital Publisher	University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center
Format	image/jpeg
Digital File Name	VRC 2447-15.jpg
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