Salvador Dali - Freud's Moses and Monotheism

Salvador Dali is a kind of magician whose sleight of hand is all his own: it takes the form of fanciful obfuscation, it plays with the audience’s expectations and confirms the long-held opinion that Dali’s art is ultimately more about Dali than the world it represents. Frequently, unashamedly and unselfconsciously, Dali will insert ideas and images derived from his early childhood experiences, or his dreams, or his self-professed obsessions into his artworks. Take his 1975 work entitled “Moses and Monotheism”, a set of ten lithographs which are based on his interpretation of Sigmund Freud's essay of the same title. Here, in each of the ten lithographs, two layers of material are superimposed onto the painted surfaces: the primary material, whose themes are suggested by the titles of the lithographs, and the secondary material, the intensely personal images, found again and again in Dali’s art but which bear no relationship to the primary work.

Ants, crutches, elephants with spindly legs and snails, four of his favourite recurring images, appear in the depictions of Moses and his travails. None appear in Freud’s text, none help to advance Freud’s radical proposals but a little bit of research into Dali’s meeting with Freud may explain at least one of the odder images. In “Moses Saved from the Waters”, Dali starts with the story of the three-month-old Moses, who in the Bible is placed by his mother and sister Miriam in a papyrus basket set afloat on the banks of the Nile. Dali paints water, sky and reeds in keeping with the traditional telling of events but substitutes a giant snail for the basket and adds crutches and bones to the scene. Moses is depicted as a baby with rays emanating from his head, one leg and arm are extended and he is lying in the opening of the giant snail which is being held up by bones. Crutches are holding the entire bizarre edifice above the water.

The snail does not, of course appear in the biblical telling of the Moses story, neither does it appear in Freud’s version of the story. It is wholly a Dali invention, borne, he tells us, of several moments where real-life snails produce epiphanies which involve Freud, at least tangentially.

One occurs on July 19th, 1938 during the much anticipated meeting between Dali and Freud. Dalí writes that he was captivated by the sight of a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house and connected the snail with the image of Freud’s head.

Dali also writes that while eating snails in a restaurant in France he notices a photo of Freud in a newspaper. "I uttered a loud cry. I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud! Freud's cranium is a snail! His brain is on the form of a spiral - to be extracted with a needle!"

The question of why a snail houses a baby in its shell still remains unanswered, of course. All we know is that Freud’s cranium is a snail, snails transport angels, they save babies from drowning and in Dali’s world, anything goes.

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