![]() When Dalí met Gala, he asked her what she wanted from him. Opinions are likewise divided on whether Dali was a virgin when he met his future wife and muse, Helena Deluvina Diakonoff - better known as “Gala.” Gala was a married woman 10 years Dalí’s senior, notorious for her long list of lovers. He had a close friendship with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a relationship that may have been homosexual (though this has never been confirmed). The painting shows a seductive woman rising out of a downward-facing head, which is suspended over a lotus swarming with ants (another popular motif in Dalí’s work). The positioning of the woman’smouth next to a thinly clad male crotch suggests fellatio, while the trickle of blood on the male figure’s thigh may represent castration.ĭalí’s sexuality is still a matter of debate. He also developed a fascination with buttocks (both male and female) and a pathological fear of castration. These obsessions - along with Dalí’s well-known terror of locusts - would find expression in many of his most famous paintings.ĭalí’s “The Great Masturbator” - considered his first significant work - highlights all three of these themes. He began to associate sex with putrefaction and decay.ĭalí soon became addicted to masturbation, reportedly the primary – if not the only – sexual activity in which he engaged throughout his life. These photos of grotesquely diseased genitalia fascinated and horrified Dalí. On reading a pornographic novel in which the protagonist said that he enjoyed “making women creak like a watermelon,” Dali worried he would never be able to do that himself.ĭuring Dalí’s youth, his father attempted to “educate” him with a book showing explicit photos of people suffering from advanced untreated venereal diseases . Explicit sexual themes, in particular, recur with a regularity seldom seen in mainstream art.Īs a schoolchild, Dalí compared his penis to those of his schoolmates and found it “small, pitiful and soft.” For a long time, he believed himself impotent. ![]() Salvador Dalí’s fears and obsessions inspired some of his most famous works. There will be surprises.Salvador Dalí, The Great Masturbator (1929) We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. It is as well to put this the other way round. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does dome tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend. ![]() When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. “The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease.
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