2 / Dreams and Visions

Artist / Origin |
Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989)
Region: Europe
|
---|---|
Date |
1944
Period: 1900 CE - 2010 CE
|
Material |
Oil on wood
Medium: Painting
|
Dimensions | H: 20 1/8 in. (51 cm.), W: 16 1/8 in. (41 cm.) |
Location | Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain |
Credit | © 2009 Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy of Art Resource, NY/Photo by Erich Lessing |
expert perspective
Natasha StallerProfessor of the History of Art, Amherst College |
Additional Resources
Ades, Dawn. Dalí. London: Thames & Hudson, 1995.
Ades, Dawn, Antonio Pinchot, Peter C. Sutton, and Eric Zafran. Dalí’s Optical Illusions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Descharnes, Robert. Dalí. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003.
Kachur, Lewis. Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
Museo Thyssen Web site. http://www.museothyssen.org.
Taylor, Michael R. The Dalí Renaissance: New Perspectives on His Life and Art after 1940. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2008.
Dream, Caused by the Flight of a Bee (Around a Pomegranate, a Second Before Waking Up)
» Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989)Salvador Dalí’s distinctive style is evident in the elaborately named Dream, Caused by the Flight of a Bee (Around a Pomegranate, a Second Before Waking Up).
By rendering scenes of dreamlike irrationality with seemingly incongruous precise and naturalistic form, Dalí gives substance to subconscious visions, making his often strange content more palatable to viewers, while at the same time challenging them to consider the relationship between internal and external realities.
Dream purportedly depicts Gala, Dalí’s wife, in the midst of a dream. The bee and pomegranate of the title hover below Gala’s body. The fish, tigers, and rifle all seem poised to attack her, but they clearly stand as symbols of unconscious desires. Dalí’s explicit focus on a dream as the stated content of the painting grounds his chaotic vision firmly in the Surrealist tradition.
Dalí and many other artists in the Surrealist group were extremely interested in psychology and the unconscious mind. They were particularly fascinated by the odd and even nonsensical juxtapositions that occur in the dream state. Many of the Surrealists were adherents to the ideas of Sigmund Freud, whom Dalí met in the late 1930s. Following Freud, these artists understood the imagery of dreams to have multiple possible symbolic meanings and created paintings like this one that explored those complexities. Often, as in Dream, Caused by the Flight of a Bee, sexuality was a central theme in these works.