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"The First Days of Spring inaugurated a series of works in which, determined to be more Surrealist than the Surrealists themselves, Dali elaborated a symbolic language for delineating, with microscopic precision, his erotic obsessions. It deserves, therefore, careful scrutiny. One of the clues to the picture comes on the right, where a soberly dressed old man with a white beard is rejecting the offer of what appears to be a purse from a little girl in a smock (although the shadow of his hand on the beach looks surprisingly like an erection). It has generally been accepted that this personage is Freud, and that his presence justifies a psychoanalytic interpretation of the painting. A further hint that this is Dali's intention comes in the collaged photograph of himself as a child, which he has placed strategically on the steps in the centre of the picture. Steps, stairs and ladders, as Dali must have known, are constantly classified by Freud as symbols of sexual intercourse. The child's gaze is intent, alert, and he looks suitably bemused - which is presumably why Dali selected the snapshot. […] To the right of the photograph we find the first appearance of an icon soon to proliferate in Dali's work: a waxy-complexioned head with closed eyes, long eyelashes, prominent nose and a giant locust glued to the spot where there should be a mouth. The shape of the head, which represents Dali as compulsive masturbator, was inspired by a rock in the inlet of Cullaró at Cape Creus and was soon to find its maximum expression in The Great Masturbator, begun in the summer of 1929. As regards the locust, we already know that Dali was terrified of these creatures. Their obsessive presence in the paintings of this period perhaps alludes to the painter's fear of sexual contact and impotence, while the closed eyes indicate that the masturbator, oblivious to external reality, is only concerned with the erotic fantasies being played out in the theatre of his mind. One of these fantasies probably concerns the chubby-cheeked child of oriental aspect whose face peers out at us from within the masturbator's skull. A flashback to the reveries occasioned by Esteban Trayter's stereoscope, in which Dali had seen a little Russian girl on a sleigh? Perhaps. And has the face been painted or is it a collage? Even at close range it is impossible to be sure (and even less so in a reproduction). The confusion, of course, is deliberate. […] The infantile nature of the masturbator's fantasies is indicated by the images contained within a sort of balloon that issues from his head. The deer refers to the transfers which delighted Dali as a child. So, too, may the bird motif repeated below, while the pencil can be related to the schoolroom flash-back in Un Chien andalou. And the debonair man casting the stark shadow? Perhaps he is the confident male the masturbator dreams of becoming. […] To the right of the masturbator's head, gripping the latter's skin by its teeth, we find the first appearance of another image soon to become a celebrated Dalinian icon: the painter's head in the guise of a jug, Freudian symbol, by dint of its receptibility, of female sexuality. Its proliferation in the paintings Dali did at this time perhaps indicates that the artist, obsessed by impotence, feared increasingly that he might be homosexual. The jug motif is repeated less explicitly in the centre-foreground, linked to the red fish-head which appeared in earlier paintings and, if [Alan] Moorhouse is right, symbolizes for Dali the female genitalia. […] The most blatantly erotic imagery in the painting comes in the left-of-centre foreground where, against a collaged scene of (springtime?) high jinks on board a pleasure cruiser, Dali has set the activity of a grotesque couple. Flies emerge from a vortex, suggestive of genitalia, at the centre of the female's red face. The man leaning abjectly on her shoulder is gagged and apparently having an emission into a bucket from which emerges a phallic finger. The latter (in case we should miss the point) is located above a hole and a pair of balls, and is about to enter a double-image vagina fashioned between the personage's hands and echoing that painted on the female's tie. […] Two men with a sledge-like wheeled conveyance are to the right of the steps, one of whom is practically astride the other's back. The homosexuality implied in the posture seems obvious enough. Coming towards them from the far distance are a father and child (another motif about to become obsessive in Dali's painting) while, on the other side of the steps, a lone seated figure looks towards the horizon with his back to the springtime activities we have been contemplating, as if he had opted out. He is the only figure in the picture who does not cast a shadow. Is he collaged or painted, or both? It is impossible to tell. Once again, as in the head of the little girl, Dali is deliberately confusing our perceptions. [��] It is not surprising that Robert Desnos admired this intensely disquieting variation on the theme of spring as aphrodisiac. It was now clear to Dali that by combining Freudian and personal symbols he had hit on an original formula, at once subjective and objective, for the expression of his deepest anxieties and longings. The discovery led directly to one of the most fruitful periods in his career." (Excerpts, pp.256-258) |
