Ballerina in the head of death

Salvador Dali became famous as one of the greatest interpreters of reality. "Ballerina in the Head of Death" ("Ballerina in the Skull") Is one of the most famous examples of the "paranoid-critical method" that the artist developed in the early 1930s. The aspect of paranoia that interested Dali is the ability of the brain to combine things that are not rationally connected.

He described his idea as "a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge, based on the critical and systematic objectivity of associations and interpretation of delusional phenomena." When creating a work of art, this technique "uses active processes of the mind to visualize images and incorporate them into the final creation." One of the results of such work is double or multiple images, the ambiguity of which can be interpreted in different ways. Dali developed this method in the hope of impressing his idol Sigmund Freud.

In Ballerina in the Head of Death, Dali used a monochromatic color scheme. The skull and the girl are painted in gray and pale yellow flowers on a black background with black elements. The only accent is a red flower on the heroine's head. There are no sharp edges or geometric shapes in the picture, all lines and shapes are organic.

The skull occupies the main space - from the very top and, as it were, going beyond the frame at the bottom. The ballerina is in front of him, but it seems as if both figures have merged into a single object. The dancer's tutu takes the form of teeth, the arms are brought together above the head, and the empty space between them looks like eye sockets. Two large cracks on the girl's chest look like the nose of the skull. The viewer's gaze focuses on the bright red flower and from there moves down the body lines.

The painting from the Merz collection is dated 1932 (with a question mark). However, it is known for certain that the artist wrote it in 1939. He returned to the theme of the skull two years later - in the scene"Face of War".