Sunday Dalí: William Tell, 1930. Oil and collage on canvas. 113 x 87 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

William Tell was a recurring character for Dalí in the 1930s. For Dalí, Tell represented the conflict between father and son. Here Tell is pictured with a cartoonish face with his right hand stretching out towards his son’s accusatory finger - a clear play on Michelangelo’s iconic imagery between God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Tell’s other hand is holding bloody scissors indicating that Tell has mutilated his son.

In 1929 Dalí was expelled from his house by his father. The imagery in this painting and the subsequent William Tell paintings has nothing specific to do with the legend of William Tell itself. Dalí was following Freud’s belief that legendary figures like Tell are omnipresent in the human imagination because they are, as Freud says “embodiments of primeval dream material with a latent content underlying the surface narrative.” This work is Dalí’s attempt to make a tangible item that represented the obsessive ideas which were tormenting him during this period of his life.