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Imperial Monument to the Child-Woman.

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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/2440/2447-12.jpg
Title	Imperial Monument to the Child-Woman.
Creator	Dali, Salvador (Spanish painter and printmaker, 1904-1989)
Date	1930
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 Symbols Symbolism (artistic concept) Imagery Allusion Sex Sexuality Phallic Eroticism Fear Love Anxiety Figurative art Figures (representations) Front views Three-quarter views Oblique views Women Men (male humans) Wives Fathers Sisters Busts Torsos (animal or human components) Heads (representations) Heads (animal or human components) Faces (animal or human components) Arms (animal or human components) Wrists (animal or human components) Hands (animal or human components) Wild animals Wildlife Animals Lions Jugs (vessels) Vessels (containers) Containers (receptacles) Keys (adjusting equipment) Monuments Automobiles Vehicles (transportation)
Subject	Paintings Oil paintings Fantasy Symbols Allusions Sex Lust Relations between the sexes Love Worry Fear Disgrace Anxiety Distress Women Men Couples Spouses Fathers Families Family Faces Heads (Anatomy) Body parts Buttocks Breasts Hands Arms (Anatomy) Animals Lions Wild cats Ants Insects Pitchers Containers Keys (Hardware) Monuments Automobiles Vehicles
Description	"The Child-Woman is Gala, who appears here for the first time in Dali's work." (Caption); "Meanwhile, Dali had painted the first major work in which he alluded directly to the relationship with Gala that was partially to blame for his estrangement from his father. Imperial Monument to the Child-Woman is habitually assigned to 1929 but was almost certainly executed in Paris in early 1930. The child-woman of the title, Dali explained later, is Gala. The 'monument' is based on the mica-schist phantasmagoria of Cape Creus among which their love affair had begun, and expresses 'all the puerile terrors' of his childhood and adolescence, which he now offered up to her as a sacrifice. 'I wanted this painting to be a daybreak in the style of Claude Lorrain,' he went on (alluding to the Prado's Embarkation of Saint Paula at Ostia), 'with the morphology of the "modern style" corresponding to the height of Barcelona bad taste'. […] While the painting may not express all Dali's 'puerile terrors' (there is no sign of the dreaded locust, for example), it certainly contains a pretty comprehensive anthology of his obsessive motifs at the time. Here again are the roaring lions, the idiotic jug-faces of Dali and his sister Anna Maria (whose shared eye makes it impossible to take them both in together), a tiny head of the Great Masturbator, this time wearing a crown (at bottom left-center), the staring manic eyes of the aggressive father figure, a masturbatory finger and hand holding a cigarette (as in The Lugubrious Game) and, twice, two faces hiding themselves in shame or terror. One of the latter, significantly, crowns the whole edifice. There are some new elements, however. The painting contains the first reference to the couple at prayer in Millet's Angelus, soon to become another Dalinian obsession; Napoleon, Dali's childhood hero, occupies a niche in the monument, along with Mona Lisa; and there is a remarkable cameo in the bottom left corner of the picture of an adult couple being brutally ejected from their bed by a plank pushed by a car whose headlamps bathe the scene in an eerie green light (an attack on conventional marriage?). […] As for Gala, who has inspired the monument and is duly acknowledged by the kneeling figure in the lower right corner, she is suggested both by the shapely female buttocks figuring at the very center of the painting and by the bust at the left. Here the woman, while beautiful, looks exhausted - an allusion, perhaps, to the pleurisy from which Gala was suffering at the time and which was making both Dali and Éluard extremely anxious […]. Clearly what Gala needed was a holiday - but well out of the reach of the atrabilious notary of Figueres. The latter is probably the figure who, holding a child by the hand, stands down below the monument to the right and can be seen pointing to a notably phallic rock bathed in the light of the Claude Lorrain sunrise. The crevices in the rock, as in so many of Dali's paintings of this period, hold a collection of keys and ants, suggestive of fearful sexuality." (Excerpt, pp. 313-314)
People Pictured	Dalí, Gala Dalí, Salvador, 1904-1989 Dalí, Ana María Mona Lisa, b. 1479 Del Giocondo, Lisa, b. 1479 Gherardini, Lisa, b. 1479
Material	Oil on canvas Oil paint (pigmented coating) Canvas
Measurements	140 x 80 cm
Technique	Oil painting (technique) Painting (image-making)
Work Type	Oil paintings Paintings
Source	Gibson, Ian. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. New York; London: W.W. Norton, 1998. (Color plate XIX)
Rights	Photograph reproduced in Gibson courtesy: Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Digital Publisher	University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center
Format	image/jpeg
Digital File Name	VRC 2447-12.jpg
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