The Great Masturbator

The Great Masturbator
Salvador Dalí, 1929
Oil on canvas
110 × 150 cm, 43.31 × 59.06 in
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

The Great Masturbator (1929) is a painting by Salvador Dalí executed during the surrealist epoch, and is currently displayed at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

The center of the painting has a distorted human face in profile looking downwards, based on the shape of a natural rock formation along the sea-shore of Catalonia.citation needed A similar profile is seen in Dalí's more famous painting of two years later, The Persistence of Memory. A nude female figure (resembling Dalí's then new muse, Gala) rises from the back of the head; this may be the masturbatory fantasy suggested by the title. The woman's mouth is near a thinly-clad male crotch, a suggestion that fellatio may take place. The male figure seen only from the waist down has bleeding fresh cuts on his knees. Below the central profile head, on its mouth, is a locust, an insect which Dalí had an irrational fear of. (The insect has sometimes been misidentified as a grasshopper due to poor translations of Dalí's early writings.)

The painting represents Dalí's severely conflicted attitudes towards sexual intercourse. In Dalí's youth, his father had left out a book with explicit photos of people suffering from advanced untreated venereal diseases to "educate" the boy. The photos of grotesquely damaged diseased genitalia fascinated and horrified young Dalí, and he continued to associate sex with putrification and decay into his adulthoodcitation needed.

Dalí kept the painting in his personal collection, displayed at the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres, willing it to the national collection of Spain upon his death, when it was removed to Madrid museum.

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Salvador Dalí
List of works
Selected
paintings
Landscape Near Figueras (1910) • Vilabertrin (1913) • Fiesta in Figueres (1914-16) • Port of Cadaqués (Night) (1918-19) • The Artist's Father at Llane Beach (1920) • The Garden of Llaner (Cadaqués) (1920-21) • Cabaret Scene (1922) • Cubist Self-Portrait with "La Publicitat" (1923) • Self-portrait with L'Humanitie (1923) • Portrait of Luis Bunuel (1924) • Siphon and Small Bottle of Rum (1924) • The Basket of Bread (1926) • Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood (1927) • The Lugubrious Game (1929) • The First Days of Spring (1929) • The Great Masturbator (1929) • The Persistence of Memory (1931) • The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table (1934) • Morphological Echo (1934-36) • Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus (1935) • Autumn Cannibalism (1936) • Lobster Telephone (1936) • Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936) • The Burning Giraffe (1937) • Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) • Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) • Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938) • The Sublime Moment (1938) • Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (1939) • The Face of War (1940) • Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) • Honey is Sweeter than Blood (1941) • Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944) • Galarina (1944-45) • Basket of Bread (1945) • The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1946) • The Elephants (1948) • Leda Atomica (1949) • The Madonna of Port Lligat (1949) • Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951) • Galatea of the Spheres (1952) • The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952-54) • Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954) • Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (1954)  • The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955) • Still Life Moving Fast (1956) • The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1958-59) • Tuna Fishing (1966-1967) • The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968-1970) • La Toile Daligram (1972) • The Swallowtail (1983) •
Other works
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