The Great Masturbator
Salvador Dalí, 1929
Image not available: work still under copyright
The Great Masturbator is a 1929 oil on canvas in which Salvador Dalí fully embraced surrealism. The composition centres on a large, distorted head in profile, yellowish in tone, whose shape recalls a rock formation on the coast near Cadaqués, in Catalonia. The same profile would reappear shortly afterwards in The Persistence of Memory, suggesting that Dalí treated it as a recurring image. From the top of the head rises a nude woman, probably modelled on Gala, and her face approaches a male crotch clad in tight underwear, so the picture hints at a sexual act without showing one explicitly. Nearby, a lily beside the female figure stands for purity, and its pistil, given its shape, works as another phallic reference.
At the mouth of the head sits an oversized grasshopper, an insect Dalí wrote about several times and which frightened him from childhood. Ants gather on it and on the face, a motif that in his work usually signals sexual anxiety and decay. The lower landscape holds further figures and an egg, and at the back of the head two rocks balance impossibly on a dry potted plant, an image usually read as a longing to escape reality.
The most common interpretation sees the painting as an expression of Dalí's conflicted attitude towards sex. According to a well-known account, his father left him a book of photographs of advanced venereal disease, images that both fascinated and repelled the boy and may have linked sex with decay for the rest of his life. Some scholars also connect the insects crawling over the figure with the sensations of delusional parasitosis Dalí described in his autobiography, though this reading remains speculative.
The work is sometimes compared with details from the left panel of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, for its mix of rocks, creatures and fantastical figures. Dalí kept the painting in his own collection and displayed it at the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres until his death, when he bequeathed it to the Spanish state. It is now shown at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
- Painter
- Salvador Dalí
- Date
- 1929
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 110 × 150 cm
- Museum
- Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
- Movement
- surrealism
- Depicts
- tree, ant, undergarment, woman, flower, penis, human sexual behavior, eye