Salvadore Dali’s surrealist homage to science
A bouquet of flowers bursting out of a human head, a man holding a piano like a drape, ants crawling out of a hand or pillaging a pocketwatch. Irrationality speaks a universal language. The Spanish surrealist painter Salvadore Dali used it as a vessel to take his viewers into a journey to the inner depths of their own minds.
It is often said that how one interprets the works of Dali is a reflection and definition of oneself. The images produced by the artist can also irrevocably disrupt a viewer’s thought process and spur new dimensions. “Dalinian ideas have the tremendous power of germination,” he said in an interview in London. No wonder his The Persistence of Memory (1931) is one of the most recognisable works of modern art, with its melting clocks becoming an enduring symbol of fluidity of time and the subconscious, and finding place in popular culture.
The artist, whose Argillet Collection of works are on display in India till March 16, 2025 at the Massarat Gallery by Bruno Art Group after moving from the India Habitat Centre on February 12, was obsessed with the human mind, especially the unconscious as defined and analysed by Austrian neuroscientist Sigmund Freud.
The early artistic development of Dali, an admirer of impressionist art, was profoundly shaped by Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Published in 1899, Freud’s text introduced the idea that dreams are a manifestation of unconscious desires, fears and repressed memories. Dali saw himself as a visual interpreter of this hidden world, using his paintings to explore the murky depths of the human psyche.
In his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942), he wrote about his obsession with Freudian theory, describing how his earliest works sought to unlock the subconscious through symbolic imagery. He perfected a method he called the “paranoiac-critical” approach — an attempt to consciously induce hallucinations and capture them on canvas. This technique allowed Dali to create his famous double images, hidden figures and dreamlike distortions that mirrored the shifting, elusive nature of the unconscious mind.
Rather than dreams, Dali said in an interview, he reproduced the visions he saw 10-15 minutes before sleep.
Dali’s works from the 1920s and 1930s reflect this psychoanalytic influence. Paintings such as The Persistence of Memory and The Great Masturbator (1929) contain clear Freudian symbols: Distorted timepieces representing the fluidity of time in dreams, sexualised figures reflecting repressed desires and vast empty landscapes (the desolate beach was a recurring backdrop) symbolising the unconscious void.
His meeting with a very old Freud in London in 1938, facilitated by mutual friend and Austrian author Stefan Zweig, left him disheartened because he felt he failed to make an impression on the revolutionary thinker he has been so enchanted by.
Dali’s perception of the meeting was not entirely far removed from reality because during the time, Freud had developed an aversion for surrealists following an unpleasant interaction with Andre Breton who "had shown up uninvited on his doorstep" and wrote unflattering things about the neuroscientist, according to an account of the meeting published by the Freud Museum London.
Dali’s had gone prepared. He brought with him The Metamorphosis of Narcissus to impress upon the scienstist his unique style, a blog by the museum noted. But Freud is reported to have said, “in classic paintings I look for the unconscious, but in your paintings I look for the conscious”, that sank Dali’s heart.
No matter how bizarre the subjects in his paintings or his antics were, Dali was endlessly fascinated by scientific research. Since childhood, he has devoured books and scientific journals on mathematics, quantum theory, human evolution and psychology. Carme Ruiz, deputy director of the collections and exhibitions department at the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dalí, wrote, “By following the work of Salvador Dali, we traverse an important period in 20th-century science, at least in relation to the scientific advances that particularly affected him.”
Even when he had packed a limousine with 500 kilogrammes of cauliflower to arrive to speak at Paris’s Sorbonne University in 1955, an antic mocked for being desperately avant-garde, he explained it with mathematics. He said the cauliflower reminded him of the logarithmic spiral of the rhinocerous horn, which he found exciting. “Everything departs from the rhinoceros horn! Everything departs from Jan Vermeer’s The Lacemaker! Everything ends up in the cauliflower!” he would say later that night during the lecture.
After the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Dali’s scientific interests shifted to atomic theory. The explosion in Hiroshima shook him seismically, he wrote in The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (1976). “Thenceforth, the atom was my favourite food for thought.”
In the same London interview, he explained his new phase of artwork: “Now my interest in only about the tremendous progress of nuclear research; my works are inspired by one new kind of atomic and nuclear mysticism.”
From the final years of the Second World War, Dali strived for unity between his intuitions regarding the truths of the natural world and the rapidly evolving scientific understanding of physical reality. He felt that “a monstrous progress of specialisation, without any synthesis” has wedged a gap between physics and metaphysics. In his ‘Nuclear Mysticism’ paintings from 1945, they found a common ground.
In Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll (1945), he used his iconic soft, malleable shapes to represent the overpowering impact of the nuclear explosion within the mind, and transparent, evocative faces and blobs that provide a view of the ‘outside’ world of realities.
He believed that nuclear energy and subatomic particles held the key to understanding reality at its most fundamental level. Just as Freud had unraveled the mysteries of the mind, Dali sought to unravel the mysteries of existence itself.
His paintings from this period reflect this fusion of science and spirituality. Leda Atomica (1949) portrays a floating, fragmented Leda, referencing both Greek mythology and atomic disintegration. The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955) combines Christian imagery with mathematical symmetry, reflecting Dali’s belief in the divine nature of scientific principles. This phase was not merely an artistic shift but a complete philosophical reorientation — one in which Dali saw the divine manifesting itself through the structures of the universe.
The Argillet Collection on display in India at the moment is no different. In these etchings, engravings, and drawings, curated by his longtime publisher and friend Pierre Argillet, culminated his exploration of psychoanalysis, surrealism and nuclear mysticism.
Bovine animals, sadhu-like figures, symbolic flowers and musical instruments mark a series of drawings called The Hippies (1970) that is part of this collection. The series was inspired by Argillet’s travels to India and the photographs he had brought back.
An interest in genetics followed his decade of exploration of the atomic sciences. “In the period between 1962 and 1978, his work was most influenced by the staggering impact made on him by genetics, DNA and its structure and, later still, holography,” Ruiz wrote.
His 1963 painting Galacidalacidesoxiribunucleicacid was a tribute to Francis Crick and James Watson, who discovered the double-helical structure of DNA a decade earlier. About the work, part of a series on the same theme, he wrote: “It is my longest title in one word. But the theme is even longer: long as the genetical persistence of human memory.”