Salvador Dali - The son tries to protect himself against his father's aggression
Salvador Dali - Guillaume Tell, detail son [1930]
Paris, Centre Pompidou
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The horrified son hides his face with his left hand. He raises his right hand accusingly against his cruel father. His sex is protectively covered by a leaf. The branch with the leaf leads directly to a bird's nest with several eggs. (A reference to fertility, to a family with offspring).
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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 son tries to protect himself against his father's aggression
Salvador Dali - Guillaume Tell, detail son [1930]
Paris, Centre Pompidou
***********************************************************************************
The horrified son hides his face with his left hand. He raises his right hand accusingly against his cruel father. His sex is protectively covered by a leaf. The branch with the leaf leads directly to a bird's nest with several eggs. (A reference to fertility, to a family with offspring).
***********************************************************************************
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.