TELL ME IF YOU'VE SEEN THIS ONE BEFORE, Part 1
"Diurnal Illusion: The Shadow of a Grand Piano Approaching" and "Shades of Night Descending, both from 1931, share both the ominous spreading shadow of an unseen piano and a figure, shrouded in the latter, from which emerge the shapes of a glass and a shoe.
"It was a question," Dali wrote, "of all the fetishes and slippers of my childhood fossilised underneath the membranes of my anguish, all mimetised at Cap Creus."
Besides bathers, still-lifes, festivals, studio nudes, pianos, Cape Creus and the Ampordan plain, Dali repeatedly painted many other events, objects and places over and over again, returning often to his own psychological encyclopaedia.
There is the bust of a woman with eyes closed, as seen in "The Dream", shrouded figures and other things hidden behind sheets, and of course ants, grasshoppers and/or locusts.
There are figures "hiding" against walls and cliffs with their backs turned, and William Tell, "average" civil servants, misshapen skulls, dresser drawers jutting from torsos, lobsters, horses leaping out of the strangest places, a loitering Dalmatian, siphon bottles, telephones, seashells and walls, mountains and other solid edifices with convenient holes so you can see through them.
Dali Planet is strewn with these recurring images. Discussed at length in other posts are the bust of Voltaire, elephants on spindly legs, soft watches, Gala and Dali's sister Ana's backs, bread, crutches, towers, the seated nurse, cypresses and the Angelus, Vermeer's ghost, the medicine cabinet, burning giraffes, rhinoceros horns and eggs on a plate, even if there's no plate.
This post will look at some other recycled images, but it is still by no means exhaustive.
"Illumined Pleasures" from 1929 is less than 35 centimetres wide — about 14 inches — and yet it teems with provocative allusions. Click the picture for a much larger image.
Here we find a Chirico courtyard, the insane lion's head, a broken egg, the figure cowering at a wall, men on bicycles wearing what are supposedly sugared almonds, and of course the locust and the almost de rigueur self-portrait turned on its nose, most famously seen in "The Great Masturbator".
Here is the head in details, morphing from "Bather" at top left in 1928 into the progressively more ornate faces of 1929's "The Enigma of Desire; My Mother", "The Great Masturbator" and "Lugubrious Game", and reproducing in "Profanation of the Host".
Dali's 1930 version of "The Great Masturbator" was much more subtly defined, but the sleeping head (or sexually exhausted) was prominent and keeping time in "The Persistence of Memory" in 1931 and sported a spider in 1940's "Daddy Longlegs of the Evening... Hope!" The lower painting is "Butterfly Landscape (The Great Masturbator in a Surrealist Landscape with DNA)", from 1957-58.
"Great Tapeworm Masturbator, Appears Behind Arcades", 1981
"Seated Figure Contemplating a 'Great Tapeworm Masturbator'", 1981
More heads/faces, combined with variations on the seated nurse as seen from behind, an image of which Dali never seemed to tire: "Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach", the main picture, "Invisible Afghan with the Apparition on the Beach of the Face of Garcia Lorca in the Form of a Fruit Dish with Three Figs", top left, and "The Endless Enigma", all from 1938.At left is a detail from "Actress Betty Stockfeld Is Metamorphosed into a Nurse", painted the following year, and below, the maestro with "The Endless Enigma" still on the easel.
Here are glimpses of the watchful nurse in Dali's 1934 "Surrealist Poster, "Morphological Echo" from 1936 and "Le Spectre et le Fantome" from 1931, and, at the lower left, not a maid this time, but enjoying the pose, "Mediumnistic-Paranoiac Image" of 1935.
Dali usually, but not always, accompanied his nurse in his paintings, in the form a little boy in a sailor suit, and at other times the lad wandered off on his own.
Below are details from 1934's "The Specter of Sex Appeal" (main picture) and "Enigmatic Elements in the Landscape", "The Hallucinogenic Toreador" from 1968, "South (Noon), 1936, "Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages)", 1940, and "Mysterious Mouth Appearing in the Back of My Nurse", 1941.
In a sketch Dali made late in life, the little boy with the hoop joins his father instead.
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