The Great Masturbator

The Great Masturbator (1929) is a painting by Salvador Dalí executed during the surrealism 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 felatio 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 horror 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 facinated and horrified young Dalí, and he continued to associate sex with putrification and decay into his adulthood.

The painting is oil on canvas, measuring 110 x 150 cm. Dalí kept it in his personal collection, willing it to the national collection of Spain upon his death.

External link

• The Great Masturbator on cslub.edu