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[ D ] Salvador Dalí – Portrait de Paul Éluard (1929)

Image by Cea.
"Painted in 1929, the present work is a masterpiece of Surrealism and arguably one of the finest Surrealist portraits. Reaching deeply into the psychology of portraiture, it displays many of the most important elements that were key to Dalí’s rich visual vocabulary.

It unites two of the movement’s pivotal figures –Salvador Dalí and Paul Eluard –and reflects the untamed imagination and technical virtuosity of Dalí’s first
mature Surrealist paintings. Dalí and the French Surrealist poet Eluard met in 1929, around the time when the artist was staying in Paris where he assisted Luis Buñuel with the filming of Un Chien Andalou. During his stay in the capital, Dalí came in contact with the Surrealists and invited them to visit him in Cadaqués in the summer. Among those
who spent the summer with Dalí were Paul Eluard with his wife Gala and their daughter Cécile, as well as Buñuel and René Magritte with his wife. This visit would soon prove to be a major turning point for the young painter, and was to change both his private and artistic life.

"Depicted with minutely executed details, the iconography of the present work combines all the major motifs of Dalí’s early –and the most innovative –stage of Surrealism. Whilst Eluard formally sat for this portrait during his stay on the Spanish coast, the imagery
that surrounds him is a complex web of Freudian symbols reflecting Dalí’s own
personal universe. Writing about the present work, Ian Gibson observed: ‘It is
impossible to resist the temptation to look for allusions to Gala. Perhaps relevant is the fact that the locust has lost its arms and legs and that the former are pushing up through the fingers of the delicate female hand on Eluard’s forehead, which presumably are crushing the dreaded insect along with the moth. Might the suggestion be that Dalí senses that Gala could help to allay his sexual fears? One notes, also, the two hands clasping each other, affectionately it would seem, at the bottom of the portrait, linked by a mane of flowing tresses to the rocks of Cape Creus. Beside them a mop of hair
suggests a maidenhead. An allusion, perhaps, to Dalí’s seaside walks with Gala, to their growing intimacy, to his hopes for sexual potency and liberation’

"Beside the bust of Eluard, who looms large over a desolate landscape and looks directly at the viewer, is another head, coupled with a grasshopper or praying mantis. The animal had a highly personal reference for Dalí, who had a youthful fantasy of being a ‘grasshopper child’, while the praying mantis was a favourite symbol for the Surrealists due to their ritual of the male being devoured by the female immediately after the sexual act. Eluard himself kept a large collection of praying mantises, and Dalí
was able to observe their behaviour.

The sleeping head, which here appears to be metamorphosing into a toothed fish, has often been interpreted as the portrait of the artist himself. It features as the main protagonist of Dalí’s masterpiece Le Grand masturbateur, as well as in several other paintings of 1929, and ultimately in Persistance de la mémoire of 1931, as part of a complex assemblage with underlying themes of desire and erotic tension. The head is always depicted with its eyes closed; as Dalí wrote in The Visible
Woman, ‘sleeping is a form of dying’: the sleeping head, coupled with the praying
mantis, becomes another symbol of the indestructible bond between love and death.

The most explicit appearance of this head as a self-portrait is perhaps in L’Enigme du désir, where the rest of the amorphic body is filled with the inscriptions ‘ma mere’ (‘my mother’), a direct reference to the Oedipal complex.

"The head of a lion, a Freudian symbol of passion and violence, also appears in severalpaintings of 1929. Here it is seen in the upper right of the composition, confronted by a jug in the shape of a woman’s face, a common Freudian symbol of woman as a receptacle. This confrontation of the male and female symbols has been interpreted as the artist’s neurotic apprehension of his relationship with Gala. Furthermore, the image of a detached arm with fingers is in several places superimposed over the figure of Eluard. These fragmented body parts can be seen as phallic symbols, alluding to Freud’s castration complex. In the distance behind the apparition of Eluard, minute figures of a man and a child possibly refer to Dalí’s fear of the impending break with his
father. This rich and complex symbolic imagery, along with its technical mastery and its importance as a document of this pivotal moment in the history of the Surrealist movement, set this painting apart as a true masterpiece of Modern art."

Source: Sothbey’s Catalogue

The painting was sold at the auction in Jan 2011 for about 13,5 mln GBP.