Sunday Dalí: Cenicitas, 1928. Oil on panel, 68 x 48 cm. Museo Nacional, Madrid, Spain.1
During this developmental time in Dalí’s life he write to his friend, Gabriel Garcia Lorca that he was making art that “make me die of happiness; I’m inventing in a way which is purely natural, without a trace of artistic consideration.”2
Cenicitas was originally known as The Birth of Venus* but was first exhibited as Sterile Efforts. This painting is often grouped with Honey is Sweeter than Blood and Apparatus and Hand because they all feature a canvas cluttered with objects and a large, nude, misshapen torso. Dawn Ades sees the torso in the process of transitioning. She includes a Dalí quote from My Girlfriend and the Beach in which he describes a baby that was painted with Ripoli, which he realizes is “the pink breast of my girlfriends being frenetically eaten by the bright metallic thickness of phonograph needles. It wasn’t her breast either but the little pieces of cigarette paper nervously clumped round the magnetic topaz of my fiancée’s ring.”3
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This is a re-post; however, I have a lot of new information to add to the previous post. ↩
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Dalí letter to Lorca, December 1927. ↩
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Dawn Ades and Michael R. Taylor, Dalí, (Venice: Rizzoli, 2004), 100. ↩
