The Great Masturbator

Most of the world is unified right now through the unprecedented and very surreal experience of a global pandemic. Why not take some time to inspect a great artist of the past, and his own Surrealism?

Surrealism has made its way into popular language as an adjective for something outlandish. In a way, this effectively describes the overall aesthetic of Salvador Dali’s artwork in the early 20th century, and especially his painting, the Great Masturbator. Surrealism was a movement in reaction to the societal chaos of Modernity initiated in the previous century. Modernity was riddled with the dualities of personal experience that resulted from a distinct change in discourse and way of life, and this motivated artists to seek out ways to more intimately represent the human experience. These attempts were most successful between 1900 and 1939, in the period of artistic experimentation known as Modernism. This moral and philosophical response to Modernity encompassed movements in science, philosophy, spirit, anything avant-garde, and conveniently answered the question: what new forms of art are needed to accurately represent modern life? Dali was interested in thinking, memory, and how individuals experienced reality. Not only Great Masturbator, but nearly all of his pieces are attempts to encapsulate the fragmentation of the world that he observed, and with an echo of Marcel Proust – the 20th century French novelist – in Remembrance of Things past, Dali is interested in the fickle yet authentic phenomenon of memory. Just as the Great Masturbator painting was inspired by a dream, lots of his works were based on the recreation of memories. Pieced together by our brains, and uniquely ours, he felt there was no better way to document the personal and resonant human experience. 

Surrealism itself was “born in the social, cultural, and intellectual ferment that followed the First World War.” The younger middle-class demographic had just endured an unprecedented period of suffering, and for the first time in history, they were not only physically broken, but mentally fed up. This “crisis of consciousness” was deep enough to spur movements like Surrealism. Still, Surrealists wanted to steer away from their movement being seen completely as a form of “artistic revolt” because they felt this would insight unnecessary scrutiny, and risk their validity being reduced. The movement didn’t flatter itself with existing as anything more than a preliminary stage that advocated the “need for a new collective sensibility.” Their declaration of 1925 stated: “[Surrealism] is a total means of complete liberation of the mind”, encouraging members to highlight the confrontations between internal and external reality with a particular aim to expose the fragility of people’s thoughts. Similar to the ephemeral qualities and ambiguity surrounding other intellectual institutions, such as the Bloomsbury Group, Surrealism is difficult to define, and it was more so determined by the activities of its adherents and the specific environments in which it existed. It was loosely related to a movement known as Dadaism that began in 1915, renouncing the bourgeois and declaring war on society’s values. Surrealism evolved out of Dada, but asserted a need to differentiate itself from the constraints of literature or the poetic form. Surrealists felt Dadaism was part of the “developing European avant-garde, now reified as modernism”, and wished to be seen as less radical and pretentious. This is why context is crucial when understanding Surrealism. In its recent past, each new discovery seriously impacted the way the world worked, and modern constructs were so drastically different from traditional societal ways that things seemed to accelerate sharply. As Michael Fijalkowski establishes in Surrealism Against the Current, “every discovery changes nature”. This statement relates the conditions of Modernism to the Surrealist movement and orients it within a historical context.

Returning to Dali and his Great Masturbator, the Surrealist characteristics and their direct relation with artistic reactions to modernity can be observed. The Great Masturbator was done by Dali in 1929 – at the peak of his involvement with the Surrealists. The painting is based on the shape of a natural rock formation along the coast of Catalonia, which also resembles a distorted human face in profile. The focal point of the painting is a woman’s mouth, poised around a man’s crotch in a very suggestive manner. The man’s knees are bloodied with fresh cuts, and the clash between pain and sex that is communicated in the painting is thought to represent Dali’s conflicted attitudes towards intercourse. There are a few other noteworthy features in the piece: ants which are known to represent sexual anxiety for Dali, an egg which commonly symbolizes fertility, and the precariously balanced potted plant/rock combination on the back of the figure which alludes to Dali’s escape-from-reality, a theme found in other works. There are three figures on the ground below the rock formation (two casting long shadows and the other hurrying off-canvas), on which Dali is recorded to have said “[i]n that privileged place [of dreams], reality and the sublime dimension almost come together.” This painting was kept in Dali’s personal collection until after his death, but it is often likened to The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting was completed much earlier by the 14th century artist Hieronymus Bosch. Both are often interpreted to represent either the admonition of wordly, fleshy indulgences, or the ultimate joys of sex – these two contrasting views encapsulate the essence of modernity. This comparison makes sense given Dali’s complicated relationship with sexuality. Experiences of his childhood left him scarred, and he was known for associating the sexual act with venereal diseases, yet he was also deeply sexually attracted to his muse and wife, Gala. She stars in many of his paintings.

Dali displayed talent from a young age, and his mother encouraged him to “indulge in his eccentricities” and create art. On a trip to Paris in the 1920s, Dali met artists like Pablo Picasso who were massively influential on the constructs surrounding artwork. The arrangement of objects, textures, colors, spatial ratios, and layout in communicating the consciousness and human experience was the new focus of artists, and an emphasis on these characteristics represented the attempt to convey the human psyche; this is something that artists felt wasn’t adequately expressed in previous periods, and thus required new methods to be developed. This triggered Dali’s Surrealist phase. He was heavily influenced by metaphysics, Cubism, as well as an avid reader of Sigmund Freud. As Surrealists sought to channel unconscious thought as means to unlock the power of the imagination, Freud provided a motivating psychoanalytic perspective. These influences culminated in Dali’s significant contributions to the Surrealist movement, all central to his “paranoiac-critical method”, which was a mental exercise in accessing the subconscious to enhance artistic creativity. His Surrealist phase peaked in the mid 1930s, just after he finished the Great Masturbator. By then, he was notorious for the destructible nature of time and the colorful personality he conveyed through his art. 

If Modernism was an effort “to break away from traditional ways of seeing, thinking about, and representing the world”, as Kimberly Reynolds argues in her own contemporary book on the topic, then Dali’s Surrealist paintings fit her definition almost perfectly. Dali’s popularity and artistic production peaked in the first half of the 20th century, in time with other movements that certainly broke from tradition. Reynolds also mentions Baudelaire, the famous French writer responsible for many poems and essays just ahead of the modernist period, and how he championed the interest “in the ideas of play, the untrained eye, and intense, intuitive perceptions [...] almost childlike in nature.” Dali’s works were intense, controversial, provoking, and he did his best to communicate intuitive and subconscious experiences. Although the sexuality in many of his pieces, the Great Masturbator in particular, may not seem childlike in nature, his combination of seemingly unrelated details, and the creation of subject matter meant to inspire questions rather than answer them reflects the unbashful curiosity of a child’s mind. It is this “extraordinary seductiveness of the subversive” that accounted for the nearly frightening intensity of modernist writing and art. This isn’t surprising considering some of the historical events leading up to the 1930s, when Dali created this piece specifically. The globe had rapidly industrialized, been struck by epidemic and disease, gained access to new places in record time due to advances in technology and transportation, had just experienced the first world war, and was only a few years away from the next. On smaller scales, communities and businesses were expanding and people had much more personal freedom – this heavily influenced the traditional gender spheres and means of socialization – resulting in highly seductive and subversive content and activity.

These dynamics provided the ideal impetus for Dali and the content he is known for: man’s universe and sensations, sexual symbolism, and ideographic imagery. Just as ‘surreal’ is used to describe the slightly disturbing, the word ‘modern’ is often used to describe movements that are unconventional and distilled to their foundation. Modernism is really about the rejection of the traditional, in Dali’s case, the “enemy of complacency in art and thought.” Modernists were committed to newness, and Dali was no exception on several levels, from pure technique to the expressions of sexuality and his artistic commentary on societal constructs like time, war, and emotional repression. Dali was intent on articulating the instability of society and how it mirrored the instability of our minds. He focused on dreams and the beauty of the unexpected, or uncanny. His paintings were strange, but he hoped that upon further inspection, his unprecedented combinations of familiar features would encourage people’s subconscious experiences to surface.

André Masson was yet another French artist known for work in Surrealism, Cubism, and Modern Art during the period just preceding Dali, and he once asserted that Surrealism is “the collective experience of individual thought.” This unique dualism of the larger, collective movement with the individual relates to Dali. For his Great Masturbator piece especially, individual thought commonly meant grappling with the trauma and conflict of Modernity. The struggle to interpret some of Dali’s work reflects the struggle to define the Surrealist movement. There are extensive analyses of his paintings, and some may appear to be closer to the truth than others, but in the end they all just represent a well-formulated surmise. Dali himself couldn’t succinctly gloss all of his works – even if possible, doing so would defeat the purpose. They originated from his unconscious, his dreams, and the individual results of him piecing together his memories in a visual form for public consumption.

! Although I did not originally factor this into my consideration of Dali, I think it makes for an interesting discussion: What will artists do to communicate the human experience in terms of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic? We have all seen our fair share of memes, Tik Toks, and other forms of virtual media that have been created as a consequence of lockdowns, quarantines, and political actions against the virus, but what more traditional forms of art will be made… or has our society changed since Dali’s age of Surrealism such that paintings will no longer be a popular medium for such expression?

*As always, for anyone interested in further reading, here is the link to my original paper with all of the footnotes and sourcing