Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Well the Surrealist movement can broadly be
divided into two types of paintings.
One, the very realistic kind of painting, which Dali practiced,
Magritte practiced and they had imaginings in their head;
and there’s the other kind of painting which is the automatic painting,
practiced by Miro, Masson… Ernst, to some extent
where their subconscious was, in theory,
supposed to spill out onto the canvas.
But Dali was very much in favour of the first kind,
he was very committed to old-fashioned
old-master technique.
His paintings are incredibly detailed,
exquisitely detailed.
He was interested in old-master painting
which many of the Surrealists weren’t interested in
and didn’t think was relevant to what they were doing
in the 1930s, but Dali always had that interest
and I think you can see that,
particularly in ‘Exploding Raphaelesque Head’ where he’s used
deliberately referencing Raphael
So this is Dali’s ‘Raphael Head Exploding’
‘Tete Raphaelesque eclatee’ 1951.
And we can see here, obviously it’s a painting of a woman
and it’s done in the style of Raphael,
the great Renaissance Old-Master painter.
A *** looking down, possibly, at her child.
And at the same time we’ve got this image here
of the roof of the Pantheon building in Rome,
which has an open top to it to let the light in.
You can see that Dali’s painted rather tenderly
this light coming in to the ***’s head.
He was at that time really interested in
advances in nuclear physics,
so in atomic explosion and that sort of thing
and in the painting you can see that it's
sort of split up into these atomic particles
which form the head and this was of course painted after World War Two
and the advances that had happened
in nuclear physics at that time.
And he liked these double-images, he called them,
these optical effects where it rather depended on
what the person’s interests were which way they saw it.
Whether they were mainly seeing this as a
painting of the Pantheon in Rome or
if they were mainly seeing it as a painting by Raphael.
That it showed something of their paranoia, as he called it.
He did a lot of this double-imagery, triple-imagery,
some of them we read in seven or eight different ways.
So this is a fairly simple one for him.
And in the corner of the picture, you’ve got a peculiar little detail of a wheelbarrow.
It’s after a painting by Millet called ‘L’angelus’
which was a picture that fascinated him.
It was a fairly standard late 19th century sort of social realist picture,
which I thank many others, in the Surrealist movement in particular,
wouldn’t have given a second thought to.
But he saw this as imbued with all sorts of *** interest,
particularly the wheelbarrow, with the sort of forks that you pick it up by,
and there’s a man and a woman standing over it.
This appealed to him greatly.
I don’t think that anyone else really saw it in quite the same light.
But you see this wheelbarrow,
this sort of emblem of rustic sexuality,
popping up in quite a number of his pictures
and you see it just here, in this painting.