Salvador Dalí painted a woman with drawers in her body, a giant made of loose limbs and a face built from floating spheres with the finish of an old master, so that each impossible scene looks solid enough to touch. One of them changed the mind of Sigmund Freud, who had written the Surrealists off as cranks.
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How These Were Chosen
What draws people to these pictures is a contrast. The scene makes no sense, yet every detail is painted as carefully as a still life, down to the ants and the drops of water.
Dalí was born in Catalonia in 1904. In Paris in 1929 he joined the Surrealists, writers and painters who drew on dreams and the unconscious. That year he also met Gala, his future wife, model and manager, whose face comes back across this page.
The twelve paintings here, dated 1929 to 1955, are the ones people recognize on sight and search for by name. They run from the least known to the most famous, and behind many of them lies the same rocky coast near his home.
12. The Burning Giraffe, c. 1937
A woman stands in the foreground of The Burning Giraffe with her arms and face stripped down to the muscle. A pair of crutches holds her upright, and small drawers open out of her body. A second figure stands behind her, and far off, under a blue evening sky, a giraffe burns along its back.
Those drawers come out of the reading of Salvador Dalí, who painted this small panel around 1937. From Sigmund Freud, the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis, he took the idea of an unconscious full of hidden compartments, and he pictured it as a chest of secret drawers.
In this panel he built that chest into a human body, so that the woman opens like a piece of furniture.
The title, oddly, goes to the smallest figure. The giraffe that names the panel is only a burning shape far in the distance, while the foreground belongs to the woman whose drawers carry the image borrowed from Freud.
At a Glance
Artist: Salvador Dalí (1904 to 1989)
Painted: c. 1937
Medium: Oil on wood panel
Size: 35 x 27 cm (13.8 x 10.6 in)
Where to see it: Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, on permanent loan)
11. The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1952 to 1954
Twenty years after The Persistence of Memory, number 1 on this list, Salvador Dalí went back to its landscape and broke it apart. In The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, painted from 1952 to 1954 on a canvas of almost the same small size, the Catalan coast of 1931 is cut into rectangular blocks that float beneath a sheet of water. What had changed in his painting since then had nothing to do with dreams.