Salvador Dali - The father cannot prevent the development of his son's sexuality

Salvador Dali - Guillaume Tell, detail father, ass & stallion [1930]

Paris, Centre Pompidou

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Once again the father, sitting on a three-legged swivel chair at the piano and playing. In front of the father's face appears the

threatening head of a lion. A dead donkey with empty eye sockets lies on the lid of the piano. A white stallion leaps over the piano, symbolising an animalistic sexual instinct.

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Psychoanalytical kaleidoscope

The Catalan surrealist Salvador Dalí (* 11.5.1904, †23.1.1989) had already immersed himself in Sigmund Freud's writings during his studies and developed his own method of translating images of the unconscious into hyperrealistic painting. He interpreted the freedom hero William Tell as an authoritarian perpetrator figure who threatens his son. In this dream image, Dalí equates him with his father, whom he must defeat in his Oedipal fantasy in order to attain freedom. He depicts the father as a raging man with his sex exposed, pursuing the son with a pair of scissors. The latter turns away in his fear of castration. The relief of a woman, on whom the father is leaning his knee in a possessive posture, shows the married Gala Éluard, with whom Dalí lived together, much to his father's indignation: this is an attempt to expel her from paradise. At the top left, the father is playing on a grand piano on which lies a donkey carcass - a symbol from the film "An Andalusian Dog", which Dalí made with Louis Buñuel in 1929. The white stallion can be imagined as the unconscious force with which the escape from the father's power is achieved.

 

 

 

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