The Great Masturbator

The summer it was painted

Dalí painted this at the end of the summer of 1929. That August, Paul Éluard had come to Cadaqués with his wife Gala and their daughter, along with René Magritte and the dealer Camille Goemans. Éluard went back to Paris alone. Gala stayed.

Nothing else in Dalí's life changed as fast. He was twenty-five, had just been expelled from the Madrid academy, had premiered Un Chien Andalou in June, and had joined the Surrealists that year. The picture belongs to the weeks immediately after the woman he lived with for the next fifty-three years decided not to go home.

The head is Dalí

The museum's reading, following the Catalan critic Rafael Santos Torroella, is that the painting is eminently autobiographical and that the great head is one of the artist's personifications of himself, appearing in several simultaneous scenes at once. The transformation the scenes describe is the emotional and erotic one that Gala's arrival had just produced.

It was not a new face. By Dalí's own account in The Secret Life, he painted it first in The First Days of Spring, earlier in 1929, and it appears the same year in The Lugubrious Game, The Enigma of Desire, Illuminated Pleasures and the Portrait of Paul Éluard — the husband of the woman who had just stayed. In none of those does it fill the canvas, and in none of them does it get the name. Here Dalí gave the face the leading role and told everyone what it was called.

The soft profile — nose down, eye shut, no jaw — kept turning up in his paintings for the next several years, and it lies on the ground again in the middle of The Persistence of Memory two years later.

The rock behind the face

Dalí insisted for the rest of his life that the face began as geology. The model, he said, was a promontory of Cap de Creus, the headland of wind-cut rock beyond Cadaqués, and in Confessions inconfessables he put it grandly: when he painted that rock and titled it The Great Masturbator, he was rendering homage to one of the promontories of his kingdom, and the painting was a hymn to one of the jewels of his crown.

So the anguished head is also a landscape portrait: a rock that becomes a face that contains a fantasy. The composition around it, the Fundació's essay notes, keeps other company — the low horizon, empty terrain and long hard shadows recall Giorgio de Chirico, the shallow floating space is the kind Joan Miró was building in the same years, and recent scholarship relates the whole crowded dream-field to Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, which Dalí had studied first-hand at the Prado as a student in Madrid.

The insect where the mouth should be

The museum identifies the insect fastened where the mouth should be as a grasshopper, describes it as sucking at the body of the metamorphosed figure and, citing the art historian Dawn Ades, records that grasshoppers had terrified Dalí in a specific and lifelong way, from childhood onwards.

Dalí himself said lobster. His description in The Secret Life runs: a large head, yellow like wax, with very red cheeks, long eyelashes and an imposing nose compressed against the ground; no mouth, and in its place "an enormous lobster was hooked", its belly decomposing and full of ants, some of them scurrying across the space where the mouth should have been. The discrepancy is worth keeping: the painter's memory and the museum's entomology disagree about what is attached to his own face.

The ants, at least, are constant. They swarm in The Lugubrious Game the same year, fill a hand in Un Chien Andalou that June, and cover a watch in The Persistence of Memory two years later — Dalí's shorthand, across paint and film at once, for desire and putrefaction arriving together.

This is the useful thing about the picture as evidence. Its imagery is not a general inventory of Surrealist symbols; several parts of it are things Dalí was personally afraid of or preoccupied by, painted at close to life size and given a title that names the subject without any evasion at all.

The title, and what Dalí later said about it

The museum catalogues the work under its French title, Visage du Grand Masturbateur, with the Spanish Rostro del Gran Masturbador beside it; in English it is generally The Great Masturbator. Dalí signed and dated it in the lower left corner.

He wrote about the painting himself in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, published in 1942. That book is reliable evidence of what Dalí wanted said about his work in 1942 and unreliable evidence of what happened in 1929, and the distinction is worth holding on to for a painter who spent sixty years editing his own story.

The title also outgrew the canvas. In the summer of 1930, at Portlligat, Dalí wrote a poem called The Great Masturbator and published it that year in La femme visible — The Visible Woman — alongside the essays Love, The Sanitary Goat and The Rotting Donkey. The book was dedicated to Gala. Within a year of the painting, the great masturbator had become a Dalí concept moving between paint and print.

From Cadaqués to the Galerie Goemans

The painting reached Paris within weeks. Dalí's first one-man exhibition in the city ran at Camille Goemans's gallery from 20 November to 5 December 1929, and Visage du grand masturbateur was catalogue number 6. The sequence of that year could hardly be tighter: Un Chien Andalou in June, Gala in August, the painting at the end of the summer, and its public debut in Paris as Dalí formally entered the Surrealist group.

It kept appearing at the movement's set pieces afterwards — the Exposition Minotaure at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1934 as number 33, and the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1938 as number 43.

What it never did was sell. The Fundació's catalogue raisonné lists the provenance in two words: artist's collection. Dalí kept the painting for sixty years, from the easel at Cadaqués to the 1990 bequest that carried it into the Reina Sofía. Whatever else the picture was, it was not for sale.

Where it is

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, register number AS11140, entered in 1990 under the Salvador Dalí bequest. At the last check of the museum's record it was on display in room 205.13.

More by Salvador Dalí

Painting · Nuclear mysticismChrist of Saint John of the Cross1951Painting · Nuclear mysticismCrucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)1954Painting · Return to classicismGalarina1945Painting · Nuclear mysticismGalatea in Creationc. 1954Painting · Nuclear mysticismGalatea of the Spheres1952Painting · Nuclear mysticismLeda Atomica1947–49Sculpture · SurrealismLobster Telephone1938Painting · SurrealismPortrait of Gala with Two Chops Balanced on Her Shoulderc. 1934Painting · Nuclear mysticismThe Ecumenical Councilc. 1960Painting · Nuclear mysticismThe Madonna of Portlligat1950Painting · Nuclear mysticismThe Meditative Rose1958Painting · SurrealismThe Persistence of Memory1931Painting · Nuclear mysticismThe Sacrament of the Last Supper1955FilmUn Chien Andalou1929Painting · SurrealismMetamorphosis of Narcissus1937Painting · SurrealismSwans Reflecting Elephants1937Painting · SurrealismThe Burning Giraffec. 1937Painting · Nuclear mysticismThe Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory1952–1954Painting · Late double-image paintingThe Hallucinogenic Toreador1969–1970