log in
Enter site
Login to use Arthive functionality to the maximum
Sleep
Salvador Dali • Painting, 1937, 51×78 cm
Description of the artwork «Sleep»
Sleep for Salvador Dali was a sacred source of delirium, guarded and cherished. In the warm season, during a siesta, he arranged to sleep on a deck chair, anticipating a stream of inspiring visions, and always kept a pencil and paper nearby. Waking up, he immediately sketched everything he saw in a dream.
The dream for Salvador Dali was the most compelling argument in favor of any scandalous decision, image, plot. When the leader of the surrealist association Andre Breton solemnly drove Dali out of the ranks at an official meeting, the accused staged a whole performance. And in his own defense he stated thatwrote by Lenin with an ugly stretched buttock only because he dreamed so. And if tonight she sees in a dream how she makes love to Breton himself, then he will write this scene right in the morning, without neglecting the smallest details.
The dream was for Salvador Dali a direct portal to the unconscious. During the only meeting of their meeting in London, Freud said to Dali: “In your paintings I’m looking not for the unconscious, but for the conscious, while the most interesting thing for the old masters is the search for the unconscious and mysterious hidden in their paintings”.
A huge heavy head, devoid of body, here embodies the dream itself and its relationship with reality. Reality - these are eleven crutches on which the head dangerously rests on an alarmingly. They seem too fragile, ready to break and drop their heaviness, flatten it into a shapeless mass. But at the same time, their ingenious arrangement seems to be perfectly designed by a competent engineer. Or a set of useless props for complacency.
Sleep is also a monster, ready to fall on a person and hang over with a suffocating volume. Scraps of reality are thinning and cringing to a tiny building on the horizon, a receding human figure, a tiny dog, which is also already sleeping, resting its face on a crutch. The space around is deprived of earthly signs and is capable of anything: to become a firmament (crutches cast clear shadows), to become water (the building looks like an island in the middle of a water surface), to become a sky over which another sky stretches.
And crutches are generally one of the main images of the mythmaker Dali. In his Secret Life, he tells a whole story (real or imagined - it’s not known exactly) about how an accidentally found crutch that fell into the binding of his childhood tricks forever became for him a symbol of love and death, power and desire at the same time.
What happens if a monster dream opens its eyes? Reality will collapse - and it will take over the world, brush away fragile buildings into oblivion together with a dog and a human figure with one wave of eyelashes? Or will it dissolve itself, deflate like a balloon, giving way to a chaise lounge, from which the hand of Salvador Dali, who had been crumbled from a siesta, is already reaching for paper and a pencil?
Author: Anna Sidelnikova
The dream for Salvador Dali was the most compelling argument in favor of any scandalous decision, image, plot. When the leader of the surrealist association Andre Breton solemnly drove Dali out of the ranks at an official meeting, the accused staged a whole performance. And in his own defense he stated thatwrote by Lenin with an ugly stretched buttock only because he dreamed so. And if tonight she sees in a dream how she makes love to Breton himself, then he will write this scene right in the morning, without neglecting the smallest details.
The dream was for Salvador Dali a direct portal to the unconscious. During the only meeting of their meeting in London, Freud said to Dali: “In your paintings I’m looking not for the unconscious, but for the conscious, while the most interesting thing for the old masters is the search for the unconscious and mysterious hidden in their paintings”.
A huge heavy head, devoid of body, here embodies the dream itself and its relationship with reality. Reality - these are eleven crutches on which the head dangerously rests on an alarmingly. They seem too fragile, ready to break and drop their heaviness, flatten it into a shapeless mass. But at the same time, their ingenious arrangement seems to be perfectly designed by a competent engineer. Or a set of useless props for complacency.
Sleep is also a monster, ready to fall on a person and hang over with a suffocating volume. Scraps of reality are thinning and cringing to a tiny building on the horizon, a receding human figure, a tiny dog, which is also already sleeping, resting its face on a crutch. The space around is deprived of earthly signs and is capable of anything: to become a firmament (crutches cast clear shadows), to become water (the building looks like an island in the middle of a water surface), to become a sky over which another sky stretches.
And crutches are generally one of the main images of the mythmaker Dali. In his Secret Life, he tells a whole story (real or imagined - it’s not known exactly) about how an accidentally found crutch that fell into the binding of his childhood tricks forever became for him a symbol of love and death, power and desire at the same time.
What happens if a monster dream opens its eyes? Reality will collapse - and it will take over the world, brush away fragile buildings into oblivion together with a dog and a human figure with one wave of eyelashes? Or will it dissolve itself, deflate like a balloon, giving way to a chaise lounge, from which the hand of Salvador Dali, who had been crumbled from a siesta, is already reaching for paper and a pencil?
Author: Anna Sidelnikova
