Salvador Dalí

Emilio Terry, Paris (probably acquired from the artist by 1936 and until at least 1956)

Galerie André Petit, Paris

Daniel Filipacchi, Paris

Acquired from the above by 1977 by the present owner

(possibly) Casino de Knokke le Zoute, Salvador Dalí, 1956, p. 21 (titled Personnage dans un paysage and dated 1934)

London, Hayward Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, 1978, no. 11.6, p. 267, illustrated

Paris, Centre Pompidou, Salvador Dalí: rétrospective, 1920-1980, 1979-80, no. 89, p. 164, illustrated in color

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, vol. I, no. 43, p. 97, illustrated in color

Salvador Dalí, Dalí par Dalí, Paris, 1970, pp. 32-33, illustrated (detail; in incorrect orientation)

Sarane Alexandrian, Dictionnaire de la peinture surrealiste, 1973, p. 14, illustrated in color 

Jacques Baron, Anthologie plastique du surréalisme, Paris, 1980, p. 78, illustrated in color (detail)

Robert Descharnes, Salvador Dalí: The Work, The Man, Lausanne, 1984, p. 117, illustrated in color

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Il Fantastico hidalgo don Chisciotte della Mancia illustrato da Salvador Dalí, Milan, 1986, pp. 162-63, illustrated (in incorrect orientation)

Robert Descharnes and Gilles Néret, Salvador Dalí, 1904-1989, Cologne, 1994, vol. I, no. 375, p. 169, illustrated in color; vol. II, p. 749

Marco Di Capua, Dalí, Paris, 1994, p. 116

Alice Stašková and Paul Michael Lützeler, eds., Hermann Broch und die Künste, Berlin, 2009, p. 48

Roger Rothman, Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Aesthetics of the Small, Lincoln, 2012, p. 94 

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, ed., Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, 2019, no. P 273, illustrated in color, https://www.salvador-dali.org/fr/oeuvre/catalogue-raisonne-peinture/obra/273/symbiose-de-la-tete-en-coquillages (accessed on 2 March 2025)

Will Atkin, Surrealist Sorcery: Objects, Theories and Practices of Magic in the Surrealist Movement, London, 2023, fig. 1.6, p. 36, illustrated in color

Painted at the height of Surrealism in 1931, Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages is an exquisite rendering of Dalí’s power of imagination, giving visual form to the intangible images from his subconscious mind.

The present work was created during a crucial moment in Dalí’s personal and professional life. In the summer of 1929 he met Gala, the Russian émigrée who was at the time married to the poet Paul Eluard. Dalí became infatuated with Gala, who would become his lifelong companion and muse. That same year, Dalí officially joined the Surrealist group in Paris, which propelled him to the innermost circle of the European avant-garde, and had his first Paris solo show at Galerie Goemans. In the text written for the exhibition catalogue, Breton pronounced Dalí’s art to be “the most hallucinatory that has been produced up to now.”

Dalí’s liaison with Gala—divorced, ten years his senior—and his alignment with Surrealism provoked fierce opposition from his father. Outraged by an artistic act of provocation, Dalí’s father disinherited his son and ousted him from the family home. The melancholic atmosphere of deserted landscapes, such as the one depicted in the present composition, may well be a reflection of the sense of solitude and rejection the artist felt in the aftermath of this episode. Yet, from this rupture emerged a time of profound artistic accomplishment: in June 1931 Dalí exhibited at Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris; two years later his show at Julien Levy’s New York gallery announced the beginning of his international fame.

It was in 1930, the year before he painted Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages, that Dalí formulated his “paranoiac-critical method,” which involved self-induced hallucinations that would ignite his imagination and inspire his art. The resulting compositions, which are now among the most celebrated in the artist’s rich oeuvre, are distinguished by their double imagery, playing optical tricks on the mind of the viewer by creating worlds in which one object or figure is seamlessly suggested by the constellation of other objects. The present work depicts a haunted, sleepy landscape dominated by craggy rocks inspired by geological formations of his native Catalonia. With their fissures and ragged surfaces, the rocks acquire an anthropomorphic quality, resembling human heads, their eyes closed and facing towards the sky. Dalí’s anthropomorphic rocks became a key element of his art during this time, most notably featuring in what is arguably his most iconic oil, The Persistence of Memory, painted the same year as the present work.

The melancholic and eerie stillness of Dalí’s 1931 landscapes reflects a strong affinity with the deserted piazzas of Giorgio de Chirico, whose metaphysical paintings were foundational to the genesis of Surrealist imagery and sensibility. Yet, where de Chirico’s spaces remain fixed in silence, Dalí’s imagery comes into existence as a result of movement, of shifting perspectives.

Recalling a boat journey with a group of Catalan fishermen, Dalí observed: “All the images capable of being suggested by the complexity of their innumerable irregularities appear successively and by turn as you change your position. As we moved forward with the characteristic slowness of a row boat, all these images became transfigured. What had been the camel's head now formed the comb of a rooster” (quoted in Dawn Ades, Dalí, London, 1982, p. 121). The dynamic of the present composition is masterfully achieved by contrasting the timelessness of the rocks with the fleeting moment in which they are transformed, in the painter’s eye, into anthropomorphic images.

Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages belongs to a small group of works created in 1931, the majority of which now belong to museum collections. In these paintings, Dalí explores the anxieties and fantasies of his childhood, with the mysterious long shadows producing a sense of foreboding. Like Dalí, artists including Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy also explored the world of dreamscapes, reaching for imagery from their subconscious mind, their childhood memories and placing them in desolate settings.

It was the hallucinatory atmosphere and evocative power of Dalí’s landscapes, painted with meticulous, sometimes hyper-realist precision, that impressed Sigmund Freud, whom Dalí would meet in 1939. The enigmatic figures appearing in these landscapes are usually depicted nude, with heads inexplicably made out of seashells—a motif that particularly fascinated Dalí at the time. In 1932-33, together with Brassaï, he created a group of photographs known as “involuntary sculptures;” including a seashell in close detail, presumably chosen for its suggestive qualities.