Chiaroscuro

I’m not gonna lie: when it came to writing about Salvador Dalí for the first time on this site I had to fight back the urge to write about The Persistence Of Memory. (For those of you who may not recognize the title, The Persistence Of Memory is the painting that has a few melted watches gracing it.) Persistence is so synonymous with Dalí that I ultimately decided to go into a different direction because, well, what more could I offer about his most famous painting that hadn’t been written before?

So I decided to write about Raphaelesque Head Exploding instead, a painting that, much like his take on the Last Supper and the crucifixion of Jesus, is an adaptation of an original piece (in this case, a painting by Raphael of Madonna).

What makes Salvador Dalí so important not only within the world of art but within society in general is that he visually unlocked what Sigmund Freud tried to capture in words with The Interpretation Of Dreams. In mainstream culture, Freud has become (to a degree) a crazy Austrian who thought that you always want to subconsciously have sex with your mother. Of course, this is an extremely broad view of the man, but you get the picture. The term “Freudian slip” could have never come into our mainstream lexicon if we all didn’t agree that the guy was prone to some round-peg-in-square-hole type thinking. The Interpretation Of Dreams, though, has its moments of profound clarity: in particular, the idea that dreams are essentially the product of your subconscious collecting things throughout the day, only to expunge them at night in random intervals. This idea is pretty much taken as a given nowadays but in the 19th century this was extraordinarily groundbreaking. Freud (at the time) brought a clarity to something that was previously unclear (or in some cases, completely not thought of).

The same goes for Salvador Dalí. There were plenty of painters before him who painted obscured, abstract, or nonsensical things that would become the precursors to Surrealism, but Dalí brought a clarity and exactness to the method that was groundbreaking. The detail that Dalí was capable of painting on canvases is astonishing, made all the more so because his landscapes and abstractions seem so real.

Which brings me back to the painting in question. This looks like something that could appear in one of your dreams. The front and top of the face is made up of many small geometric, molecular, and watery shapes, whereas the inside back of the head is a cathedral ceiling complete with an opening at the top of the dome/head. The background is a nice color that somewhat resembles an old map. Now, reading this description only it could be easy to think of this image as being absurd. What point is an exploding head trying to make? Is there something deeper going on in the background with the presence of the cathedral wall and light? What does it all mean?

The background story behind this painting is that Dalí believed that the makeup of certain people contained otherworldly elements. He once said about this, “there are residues of substances; it is for this reason that certain beings appear to me so close to angels such as Raphael and Saint John of the Cross. Raphael’s temperature is like that almost chilly air of spring, which in turn is exactly that of the Virgin and of the rose. I need an ideal of hyper-aesthetic purity. More and more I am preoccupied by a idea of chastity. For me, it is an essential condition of the spiritual life.”

What you see in this picture may be different than the source inspiration, but you cannot deny that the attention to detail here is very dreamlike which, in turn, makes it seem familiar. And just like our own dreams, we may not always know what they intrinsically mean, yet they somehow make sense to us in some capacity more often than not (i.e.–typically, the strangest dreams you will have will be because of stress, and not because you are genuinely afraid that a fedora-wearing llama that smells like ginger is going to press a button and cause you to be hunted down by men who look like post-Wrestler Mickey Rourke).

And so this exploding head of Madonna, burnished with warm colors and accented with a bright orange-yellow slant of light that brings the nose and mouth into focus, it may not make sense on the surface but underneath there are plenty of things to dissect and find an intangible connection with.

And I’m sure Freud would have been intrigued that Dalí chose Mary as the source image of a piece that involves explosion.

by Salvador Dalí
Oil on canvas
1951