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surrealism:

Sunday Dalí: Skull with its Lyric Appendage Leaning on a Night Table which should have the Exact Temperature of a Cardinals Nest, 1934.

Oil on panel, 9.5” x 7.5”. On loan to the Salvador Dalí museum in St. Petersburg, Florida from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. A Reynolds Morse.

During this period in the mid-1930s Dalí was working with miniaturist technique to develop an intense realism that more effectively expressed the subconscious in tangible form. Dalí said he wanted to create “instantaneous and hand-done color photography of the super-fine, extravagant, extra-plastic, extra-pictorial, unexplored, super-pictorial, super-plastic, deceptive, hyper-normal and sickly images of concrete irrationality.”

The skull was a recurring image during this time period. Dalí believed that man’s most philosophical organ is his jaws. He said, “For it is at the supreme moment of reaching the marrow of anything that you discover the very taste of truth, that naked and tender truth emerging from the well of the bone which you hold fast between your teeth.” Dalí believed that which is the most edible is the most real because it is the most tangible. Dalí said “I like to eat things with well-defined shapes that the intelligence can grasp.” The jaws, representing the instrument of intellect here, combine with the piano keys, the instrument of lyrical thought, as the result of a paranoiac processes upon formal associations. The skull is leaning on a night table because, according to Dalí, the image floated to the surface of his mind, fully formed, during a siesta.