Salvador Dali - The father threatening castration
Salvador Dali - Guillaume Tell, detail father [1930]
Paris, Centre Pompidou
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Guillaume Tell (here representing the father of Salvador Dali) stands on the edge of a village fountain, a pair of scissors in his left hand, his penis hanging out of his trousers. With his right leg, he kneels on a pedestal decorated with a relief of a seductive woman (Gala Éluard) and a phallic symbol.
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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.
Salvador Dali - The father threatening castration
Salvador Dali - Guillaume Tell, detail father [1930]
Paris, Centre Pompidou
***********************************************************************************
Guillaume Tell (here representing the father of Salvador Dali) stands on the edge of a village fountain, a pair of scissors in his left hand, his penis hanging out of his trousers. With his right leg, he kneels on a pedestal decorated with a relief of a seductive woman (Gala Éluard) and a phallic symbol.
***********************************************************************************
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.