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Larger Image |
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Title |
Imperial Monument to the Child-Woman. |
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Creator |
Dali, Salvador (Spanish painter and printmaker, 1904-1989) |
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Date |
1930 |
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Cultural Context |
Spanish
European
Western European |
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Style/Period |
Surrealist
Modern (styles and periods)
Modernist |
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Subject |
Fantasy
Symbols
Allusions
Sex
Lust
Relations between the sexes
Love
Worry
Fear
Disgrace
Anxiety
Distress
Women
Men
Couples
Spouses
Fathers
Families
Faces
Heads (Anatomy)
Body parts
Animals
Lions
Wild cats
Ants
Insects
Pitchers
Keys (Hardware)
Monuments
Automobiles |
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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) |
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People Pictured |
Dalí, Gala
Dalí, Salvador, 1904-1989
Dalí, Ana María
Mona Lisa, b. 1479
Del Giocondo, Lisa, b. 1479
Gherardini, Lisa, b. 1479 |
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Material |
Oil on canvas
Oil paint (pigmented coating)
Canvas |
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Measurements |
140 x 80 cm |
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Technique |
Oil painting (technique)
Painting (image-making) |
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Work Type |
Oil paintings
Paintings |
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Source |
Gibson, Ian. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. New York; London: W.W. Norton, 1998. (Color plate XIX) |
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Rights |
Photograph reproduced in Gibson courtesy: Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. |
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Digital Publisher |
University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center |
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Format |
image/jpeg |
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Digital File Name |
VRC 2447-12.jpg |
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Rating |
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