What is Landscape with Butterflies by Salvador Dali about?

Answer 1

Here is what I think Dali was thinking about in doing this painting: his sister, his wife, his father, and his mother-all from a Freudian perspective.

First, his sister. She is the upper butterfly. The wings are her back and buttocks or buttocks and thighs. Compare them with the shadows on the back and buttocks of his "Figure at a Window" (1925, his sister was the model) and "Figure Climbing a Stair" (1967; he coated the model's back and buttocks with paint and had her lie down on the canvas). The body of the butterfly is her spinal column and his own virile member. Compare with his "Lover" and "Devil" tarot cards. (Unless otherwise indicated, all these images are accessible on the Web.) The shadow of this butterfly forms a phallus pointing at the butterfly, as the rhino horn does in "Devil." He wants to penetrate his sister's anus. A clearer example is his 1954 "Young Virgin Auto-sodomized by her own Chastity," a redoing of his 1925 painting, done in anger at his sister. Even more explicit-too explicit for art sites on the internet--is his "Untitled," 1966 (also called "Seven Figures," numbered 1281 in Descharnes and Neret, Dali). The butterfly's body is also a turd. See his story "Reverie" (1930, in Descharnes, ed., Oui-the Paranoid-Critical Method) and the buttocks of the lower right-hand figure in "The Lugubrious Game."

Now, Dali's wife. The shadow of the lower butterfly is less phallic and aggressive. In the wings are her buttocks, to be sure, but also two faces in profile kissing. Dali wrote fondly about the first time he kissed his wife on that beach. Compare with his "Diurnal Illusion" (1931). The turd- and phallus-like body of the butterfly adds sexual compulsion and nausea to the scene, complementing its bliss.

In general, butterflies are the elusive object of desire. In Greek the word "psyche" meant a type of moth, and is today popularly considered equivalent to "butterfly" (as well as "soul"). The girl Psyche of the myth of Cupid and Psyche was depicted in statues with moth or butterfly wings. She is also symbol of transformation.

Dali's father is the rock and its shadow, bisecting the painting both vertically and horizontally: between fantasy (the butterflies) and reality, and between darkness and light (on the ground). The line is his father's strong phallus, Dali's superego, drawing clear lines between right and wrong in the traditional sense. Compare to his "Enigma of William Tell," with its giant phallus held up by the crutch of tradition. William Tell is Dali's father, who risked his son's life for the sake of his values. Dali's own clear lines, in reaction to impressionism, are his father's positive contribution to his psyche.

Finally, his mother. Dali's mother died when he was 16, around the same time as his obsession with is sister's and other females' buttocks (she wrote that he would have her pose for hours at the family beach house, always with her back to him) and his father's affair with his aunt (whom his father, like Hamlet's mother, later married). I see Dali's mother very vaguely in the right and bottom of the clouds, reclining in the posture of Velasquez's "Venus at her Mirror," one of Dali's favorite paintings. But this Cupid (i.e. the infant Dali) is not facing her, but reclining on her lap, with a giant golden-tipped erection. Similarly, in some versions of the Venus myth, Venus's son is Priapus.

Dali wrote that he had sex with both his mother and his sister. But all of Dali's work is art and metaphor. Dali did not actually perform such acts, any more than he engaged in anal penetration (he had a Horror of infection). He is making the Freudian unconscious conscious, the irrational rational, and the personal universal. omg how long did this take you