Pușculița Sarei: Apel umanitar: "Puşculiţa Sarei"

Pușculița Sarei: Apel umanitar: "Puşculiţa Sarei": Claudia Trifan este colega noastră de la Departamentul de Lingvistică Romanică, Limbi și Literaturi Iberoromanice și Italiană de la Unive...

Dali

"Painters, do not fear perfection. You will never achieve it! 
If you are mediocrities, you may try as you will to paint terribly 
badly, but people will still see that you are mediocre."

Salvador Dali

Diving into nothing

Diving into nothing

Acrylic and charcoal  on canvas
60x60cm

Narrow paths

 Narrow paths

Acrylic on canvas
60x70cm

Something about Freud and dreams

According to Freud the dream has  two parts. 

The manifest and the latent content. 

The manifest content is what a person would remember as soon as they wake up. Freud gives little importance to this part.

The latent content holds the true meaning of the dream – the forbidden thoughts and the unconscious desires. These appear in the manifest content but are disguised and hard to be understood or recognized. 

Symbolism in dreams 

Objects such as tree-trunks, ties, all weapons, sticks, balloons, rockets and other elongated objects were all symbols for the male organ/an erection. 

Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards, ovens, suitcases and other hollow objects represented the female genitalia.

A room means a woman but so could the whole house, a door or the whole dream landscape. 

Walking up a staircase, steps or ladders could also signify a sexual act.

Provence memories

Acrylic on canvas

                                                                                      

The Lobster Telephone

The Lobster telephone 1936

Plastic, painted plaster and mixed media

The work was comissioned by the  Edward James (1907-1984). He was  a wealthy and eccentric poet and collector who had inherited a vast English estate and fortune at the age of five.

A great supporter of the Surrealists, James financed the early issues of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure, and was also a follower of the Belgian artist René Magritte, whom he met through Dalí. 

James spent a small fortune on Dalí, and eventually owned between forty and fifty of his best works, all from the 1930s (his greatest period). He started to turn his country manor into a fantasy palace filled with every kind of strange and exotic objects. 

At this point Dali conceived a truly strange object, by placing a lobster atop a phone, which was also called the Aphrodisiac telephone at the time. James replaced the telephones in his house with Dali's ones.

Dalí's Lobster telephone was not 'absolutely useless',  but a perfectly functioning telephone. 

Edward James purchased four Lobster telephones from Dalí as well as  three of Dalí's sofas in the shape of Mae West's lips and placed them  into his living quarters. The wood-and-satin sofas were shaped after the lips of actress Mae West, whom Dalí apparently found fascinating.

One of the lobster telephones, partially reconstructed is now at Tate in London. One is in Frankfurt at the German Telephone Museum. One is owned by the Edward James Foundation and the forth is in the National Gallery of Australia.