![Sunday Dalí: The Sign of Anguish, 1932-36. Oil on panel, 8¾ x 6½ inches. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
This post begins a series that will continue for the next three weeks on Dalí’s melancholic landscapes that have come to define his style in the 1930s. These canvases often feature a single cyprus tree which relates to Dalí’s fascination with Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. The characteristic long shadows from low-level light evoke a similar melancholy to de Chirico’s paintings. This particular painting is clearly related to de Chirico’s The Anguish of Departure in its title and also in the shape of the windows on the buildings in each painting.
Dawn Ades proposes that the branch extending across the nude’s exaggerated breast may be related to a memory from Dalí’s childhood fantasy of touching the breasts of a young woman with his crutch or it may be related to the myth of Daphne, who avoided Apollo by being turned into a bush.1
There is structural tension in the painting. The horizontal planes of the building and the landscape behind it are incompatible causing the nude, who obscures the vertical edge of the building, to be impossible to locate in relation to either the landscape or the building.
Ades points out the nude’s exaggerated breasts, back, and buttocks:
[These elements] recall Dalí’s ideas about opposing female sexualities, divided between “phantom” and “specter”, which he describes in Les nouvelles couleurs du sex-appeal, published in Minotaure where the painting was reproduced. The “virtual” volume of phantoms and the shrouds enveloping them are analogous to fat and flesh, what he calls “anthropomorphic anguish”. The terrifying fleshly fat “envelops, hides, protects transfigures, incites, tempts, gives a deceptive idea of volume”.2
Far be it for me to differ with Ms. Ades; however, I see it differently. There is certainly a duality of sexualities in the nude’s features; but, in the context of Freud’s studies of female sexuality, in which the female embodies many of the sexual aspects of the male. Freud published his works on this topic from 1923-1931, which means that Dalí, who was a fanatic of Freud’s writings, would have read it.
The exaggerated back and the position of the shoulder and arms, which on the female side are slightly more forward then normal, and the distended abdomen can also be seen as the chest, shoulder/arm, and buttocks of a man facing the opposite direction of the female. By un-focusing the eyes and examining the image one can see that the lighter, greenish parts of the figure make up a man facing to the right with his left-leg bent as if walking. In that reading, the bit of cloth impossibly hanging over the branch covers the man’s genitals conveying shame and impotence. The woman’s body can be seen as consuming the man’s, as she does in intercourse, which Dalí often refers to as a type of cannibalism.
Dawn Ades and Michael R. Taylor, Dalí, (Venice: Rizzoli, 2004), 202. ↩
Ibid. ↩](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lslsv0Yk7W1qzse0lo1_1280.jpg)
Sunday Dalí: The Sign of Anguish, 1932-36. Oil on panel, 8¾ x 6½ inches. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
This post begins a series that will continue for the next three weeks on Dalí’s melancholic landscapes that have come to define his style in the 1930s. These canvases often feature a single cyprus tree which relates to Dalí’s fascination with Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. The characteristic long shadows from low-level light evoke a similar melancholy to de Chirico’s paintings. This particular painting is clearly related to de Chirico’s The Anguish of Departure in its title and also in the shape of the windows on the buildings in each painting.
Dawn Ades proposes that the branch extending across the nude’s exaggerated breast may be related to a memory from Dalí’s childhood fantasy of touching the breasts of a young woman with his crutch or it may be related to the myth of Daphne, who avoided Apollo by being turned into a bush.1
There is structural tension in the painting. The horizontal planes of the building and the landscape behind it are incompatible causing the nude, who obscures the vertical edge of the building, to be impossible to locate in relation to either the landscape or the building.
Ades points out the nude’s exaggerated breasts, back, and buttocks:
[These elements] recall Dalí’s ideas about opposing female sexualities, divided between “phantom” and “specter”, which he describes in Les nouvelles couleurs du sex-appeal, published in Minotaure where the painting was reproduced. The “virtual” volume of phantoms and the shrouds enveloping them are analogous to fat and flesh, what he calls “anthropomorphic anguish”. The terrifying fleshly fat “envelops, hides, protects transfigures, incites, tempts, gives a deceptive idea of volume”.2
Far be it for me to differ with Ms. Ades; however, I see it differently. There is certainly a duality of sexualities in the nude’s features; but, in the context of Freud’s studies of female sexuality, in which the female embodies many of the sexual aspects of the male. Freud published his works on this topic from 1923-1931, which means that Dalí, who was a fanatic of Freud’s writings, would have read it.
The exaggerated back and the position of the shoulder and arms, which on the female side are slightly more forward then normal, and the distended abdomen can also be seen as the chest, shoulder/arm, and buttocks of a man facing the opposite direction of the female. By un-focusing the eyes and examining the image one can see that the lighter, greenish parts of the figure make up a man facing to the right with his left-leg bent as if walking. In that reading, the bit of cloth impossibly hanging over the branch covers the man’s genitals conveying shame and impotence. The woman’s body can be seen as consuming the man’s, as she does in intercourse, which Dalí often refers to as a type of cannibalism.
