SALVADOR DALÍ | Visage perdu or Le grand masturbateur

Renou & Colle, Paris (acquired from the artist)
Jean Tronche, Paris
Arnold Herstand & Co., New York
Sale: Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 15th May 1974, lot 158
Galerie Beyeler, Basel (purchased at the above sale)
Private Collection, Germany (acquired from the above in 1985)
Ansorena, Madrid
Private Collection (acquired from the above by 2004)

Paris, Galerie Pierre Colle, 1931
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Paysages après l'Impressionnisme, 1975, no. 15
Cologne, Galerie Bargera, Spanische Avantgarde Zwischen Krieg und Bürgerkrieg 1920-1938, 1976, no. 27
Paris, Galerie Les Arts Plastiques Modernes, Grands Maïtres du Surréalisme, 1977, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne & London, The Tate Gallery, Salvador Dalí, Rétrospective 1920-1980, 1979-80, no. 72 (in Paris); no. 54 (in London), illustrated in colour in the Paris catalogue
Bochum, Museum der Stadt, 'Das Prinzip Hoffnung', Aspekte der Utopie in der Kunst und Kultur des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1983-84, no. 69
Paris, Artcurial, Les Noces catalanes, 1985, no. 38, illustrated in the catalogue
Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Evocations d'Espagne, 1985, no. 6
Paris, Artcurial, L'Aventure Surréaliste autour d'André Breton, 1986, no. 69
Paris, Artcurial, Méditérranée, Sources et formes du XXe siècle, 1988, n.n., illustrated in the catalogue

Please contact the Impressionist and Modern Art Department (Phoebe.Liu@sothebys.com) for the condition report for this lot.
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‘It must be said once and for all, to art critics, artists etc. that they can expect nothing new from the new Surrealist images but disappointment, distaste and repulsion.’ (Salvador Dalí, ‘L’Ane Pourri’ in Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, no. 1, July 1930) Blending ideas from psychoanalysis, surrealism and natural history, Dalí’s works of 1929 and 1930 mark the artist’s entry into the Surrealist movement and the apogee of his career. Dalí’s relationship with the Surrealist group, in particular with André Breton, was intensifying, and he designed the frontispiece for Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto. In June of the same year the artist made the acquaintance of Alfred H. Barr who encouraged him to visit the United States, resulting in Dalí exhibiting some of his works at the first Surrealist exhibition held in America at the Wadsworth Athenaeum.

Created between Dalí’s two major works in film - Un chien andalou made with Luis Buñuel in 1929 and the L’Age d’or released in 1931 - Visage perdu or Le grand masturbateur artfully continues this cinematic surrealist poetry through its treatment of metamorphoses. In the foreground lies an amorphous shape reminiscent of the head of a man balanced on his nose. Dalí’s use of pastel highlights the softness of a form in flux and echoes the thematic treatment of transformation in Un Chien andalou. Oscillating between form and formlessness, the head hovers between states resisting dissolving into the soft organic shape redolent of the rocks amongst which it was first conceived. Its power of metamorphosis reached its most complex expression in the celebrated oil Le Grand masturbateur (fig. 1) which was exhibited in Dalí’s first one-man show at the Goemans Gallery in Paris.

The evocation of softness in Visage perdu, Dalí’s ‘preoccupation with malleability, his passion for softness’ (James Thrall Soby, Salvador Dalí: paintings, drawings, prints, New York, 1941, p. 19), demonstrates the artist’s continuation of key themes from Le Grand Masturbateur whilst introducing a refinement of elasticity and an emphasis on the isolating expanse of time and space that is explored in greater depth in La persistence de la mémoire (1931). This hallucinatory beach scene with its anthropomorphised form draws inspiration directly from the landscape of the artist’s beloved Cadaqués, where as a child he spent holidays with his family and would later visit with Federico García Lorca. Cadaqués was to have a profound impact on Dalí for the entirety of his prolific œuvre. Enchanted by the phantasmagorical rock formations that lined Cape Creus, in particular the Rock of Cullero from which his reoccurring head-like figure draws a direct likeness, Dalí used this panorama to shape his mental landscape. Echoing this primordial atmosphere, the beach in Visage perdu stretches on empty and immutable to the passage of time. Dalí’s obsession with the concepts of time and space would continue to haunt him and drive his fixation with converting hard objects into soft, be it the hard rocks of the beaches of Cape Creus, the seemingly unalterable passage of time or the unapproachable subject of sex.

Shaking the viewer from this mirage is the introduction of colour through the incongruous eruption of fauna around the prone head. Suggestive of the cyclical nature of life and death, Visage perdu exemplifies Dalí’s fascination with morphology, the study of shapes and metamorphoses of form: ‘Form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter – the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst from its life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction’ (Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, London, 1968, p. 2). This blossoming further alludes to the birth of new ideas arising from Dalí's changing approach as a result of developments in psychoanalysis and literary theory. Dalí was becoming increasingly familiar with Freud’s work and when the pair finally met in 1939 Freud said of Dalí: ‘Your mystery is manifested outright. The picture is but a mechanism to reveal it’ (Sigmund Freud quoted in Simon Wilson, Salvador Dalí, London, 1980, p. 10). Visage perdu is replete with Freudian elements, such as the fluorescent splash of pink alluding to the bleeding eyes of Œdipus. Dalí often returned to this emblem as he associated himself with the fictional character, steeped in Freudian theory, having suffered persecution at the hands of his father who greatly disapproved of his relations with the married Gala Eluard, who would later become his wife.

Executed in pastel and demonstrating a high level of finish, Visage perdu emanates an immediacy that demands the viewer’s attention. Dalí used pastel rarely in this period, and in the present work makes use of the grainy texture to create the illusion of depth and emulate a beach-like surface. Dalí sought to give his art an illusory quality, a practise of paramount importance for his exploration of the unconscious. Breton remarked that ‘It is perhaps with Dalí that for the first time the windows of the mind are opened fully wide’ (A. Breton quoted in Simon Wilson, Salvador Dalí, London, 1980, p. 15), and through its hypnotically oneiric imagery and equally elusive title, Visage perdu situates itself as a masterwork of Dalí's new direction within Surrealism.

Fig. 1 Salvador Dalí, Le grand masturbateur, 1929, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Fig. 2 Salvador Dalí, Le grand masturbateur, 1930, pastel on paper, The Dalí Museum, Florida



The authenticity of this work was confirmed by Robert Descharnes.