The Great Masturbator by Salvador Dalí A.I. #023 NFT

An iconic work by Salvador Dalí and among the first paintings we may consider as belonging to the painter’s surrealist period. The painting may represent Dalí's severely conflicted attitudes towards sexual intercourse. In Dalí's youth, his father had left out a book with explicit photos of people suffering advanced untreated venereal diseases to 'educate' the boy. We may therefore consider The Great Masturbator as a work of this period, since Dalí officially joined the movement in 1929, the year of execution of the painting. Created in the summer of 1929, it was exhibited at the painter’s first 2 personal exhibition in Paris at the Goemans gallery, though then under the title Visage du gran masturbateur. Both in this oil painting and in others from that period the various elements are placed around a horizon that divides the space into two unequal halves, in a layout reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico’s canvases. In the upper part, a sharp blue sky, and in the lower part an arid terrain that in places becomes a beach. We find the face that lends the painting its name at the central part of the canvas. Dalí explains it to us thus: “It represented a large head, yellow like wax, with very red cheeks, long eyelashes and an imposing nose compressed against the ground. This face had no mouth, and in place of the mouth an enormous lobster was hooked. The lobster’s belly was decomposing and full of ants. Some of these ants were scurrying through the space that would have been occupied by the non-existent mouth of the great anguished face, whose head ended in 1900-style architecture and ornamentation. The title of the painting was The Great Masturbator.