The Great Masturbator

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The Great Masturbator
Salvador Dalí, 1929
oil on canvas
110 × 150 cm
Museo Reina Sofia

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. 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 adulthood.

Dalí kept the painting in his personal collection, willing it to the national collection of Spain upon his death.

[edit] Complete physical description

This piece has a flat plane that stretches into the horizon and runs along the bottom of the image. The background is a sky which fades from dark blue/purple at the top through light blues and yellow-greens, down to light yellow at the horizon. Small wisps of clouds are visible in the top left of the image. The light comes from the right, roughly at the level of a large face, a figure that takes most of the canvas and that is formed with an outlined scalp and nose. This face is of an orange skin tone color. The light causes thick black shadows towards the left and the horizon. The majority of the image is covered with a distorted man’s head in profile with its large nose resting on the ground. The face features a large closed eye with long eyelashes. There is also a large thin eyebrow to the left of the eye. There is a cheek shown to the right of the eye. Above the eye are colorful (pinkish red, light orange/yellow, and lime green), thin, leaf-like shapes in a semicircular formation facing out. To the left and under them are similar thin shapes in black facing left. To the left and top of these shapes is thin light colored hair that parts along a ridge to the left and right. There is a ridge of shadow extending from the tip of the nose along the left side of the eyebrow to the very top of the head-shape and goes through the left half of hair. Above this ridge, on top of the back of the head are stacked a large grey rock with a semicircular ridge, cork, a long conch shell standing on its tapered tip, a large horizontally oriented, smooth, dark grey rock, and a small, brownish, oval stone on top. To the right of the lowest rock of the column, on top of the head, is a smooth grey rock with some small round form and shell on top of it. There is a hook through the head at the left-most point. Attached to the other end of the hook is some sort of small thin shape attached by a knotted rope.

Below the hook is a small, simplistic, rounded man standing on the plain facing towards the horizon. He is made of a plain sphere head, with simple cylinders for arms, body, and legs. Above the cheek is a hole in the head from which numerous shells appear. To the right of the hole is a large figure of a woman’s shoulders, neck, face in profile, and hair attached to the face. She appears to be naked with smooth skin. Two ribs are showing to the right of her right shoulder. There is also a very small smooth white stone on her right shoulder. Her eyes are closed and her eyebrow is very thin and arched. Her lips are small and very red. Her nose is long. Her head is raised upwards. She has non-realistically formed hair made of simple shapes of an orange color. Most of her hair is to the right of her head, but one strand reaches below her chin, and another reaches towards the legs of the man on the right. Below her cheekbone, under her hair is visible the bottom part of her right ear. Her cheekbone is distinctly shown. Parts of her face are whiter than others, such as cheekbone, forehead, left shoulder, and nose. She has two blue veins visible: one running from her eye and one from her nose that both branch, but join together on the right side of the neck.

To the right of her face are the legs of a man starting at the waist going down to about upper calves. These legs have tight shorts on of a beige color with genitals showing through as distinct bulges. He has cuts along his thighs and knees. The legs connect to the form of the head at the bottom, but there is a hole in this connection between and below the knees. There is a spiral shape formed from the same mass below the hole. There are creeping thin smooth shapes along the rightmost leg. The spiral connects to a mass that extends down and to the right. It is parallel to the creeping shapes.

Below the woman’s left shoulder is a lily flower that is also connected at its bottom to the face. Below the lily are visible leaves that blend into the face. Below the woman’s right shoulder is a lion’s head with mane formed of thin creeping smooth shapes. It is formed of entirely one color, except for white teeth and long pink tongue which is extended and curls upward outside of mouth. Under the face is a large grasshopper or locust with grey upper body, yellow lower body, legs holding onto face, long transparent wing, and two long antennae. There are about four wrinkles in the face around where the grasshopper holds onto the face. At the rightmost wrinkle, which is below the lion’s head, are many small red ants. Many more black ants are found on the grasshopper’s lower body with most of them clumped in a large pile at the end of the body. Coming off the grasshopper’s lowermost leg is a thin strand. Below the grasshopper’s lower body is a man figure embracing a woman figure from behind. She appears very rocky shaped, and he is thin, but with developed muscles. Behind them, in the distance, is a small rocky shape. To the right of the figures and closer to the foreground is a small smooth egg-like stone. To the right and up of that stone is a flat grey-brown stone. Below the white stone is a small puddle that reflects part of the white stone and part of the grey stone.

Around where the wrinkles are, the man’s face takes a curve inward, then juts out into a chin, then comes back around into an inward curve that then goes down and to the right and forms a deep, but thin, gash to the right. This gash then goes outward to the left and forms a cylindrical shape that has a definite width that then goes down and rests along the plane. In the bottom of this cylindrical shape, which extends off the page, is a hole, through which the horizon is visible. A very small shape is visible through the hole along the horizon. There are many blue, branching, creeping shapes coming off from the right towards the face. These shapes are slug or snake-like, but run like thick veins up and to the right. They have no visible origin, but are thickest at where they come into the canvas. There is a curve from the left of the cylinder shape to the very right, under which the color turns bluer. Above the gash shape is a smooth curvilinear indentation of the face that is parallel to the curve to the right of the chin.