Great Masturbator
1929
Surrealism
Oil on canvas
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
A depiction of a shoreline scene similar to Dali’s home in Catalonia with a large, distorted face at its centre. A nude female representing Dali’s muse Gala rises from the head symbolizing the male fantasy conjured when engaging in the activities suggested by the painting’s title. Her position suggests impending fellatio while he is cut and bleeding at the knees signifying a stifled sexuality and may represent Dali’s lifelong phobia of female genitalia. The painting also includes the motifs of a grasshopper as a beacon of sexual anxiety, ants symbolising decay and death, and an egg to represent fertility.
Salvador Dali
Surrealism, Surrealist Sculpture, Biomorphism, Assemblage
Born: 11 May 1904, Catalonia, Spain
Nationality: Spanish
Died: 23 January 1989, Catalonia, Spain
Dali was a surrealist artist known for his technical skill, precision draftsmanship, and the striking and often bizarre nature of his images. Initially influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance he became increasingly interested in Cubism and the avant-garde movements of the time. By the late 1920s, he joined the Surrealist group of artists and became one of its leading exponents
Jezzie G 
My very best friend, whom I have known since I was 18 & he was 26, is a collector of Dali art … he has thousands of dollars invested in Dali art, books, all kinds of Dali stuff. He has lung cancer & is now selling off his Dali collection, but nobody wants to pay his asking prices LOL Recently he gave me a lovely little square dish with a Dali painting on it, original Dali work. He says he has the Dali tarot, he plans to give that to me & if he dies before that happens, it’s been willed to me.
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Bless your friend, I totally get the fixation on one particular artist, for it is Waterhouse. I don’t want to think how much I have spent on him – that’s scary. A Dali Tarot sounds interesting. My dad gave me my Tarot because it is Lord of the Rings, Tolkien being another one of my fixations and as it predates the movies it’s not commercialized. Just got to learn how to do the Tarot as my inclination was, and still is, to use runes. Maybe one day
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I received my first tarot deck in 1988; it was a Rider-Waite; I now have seven tarot decks, five oracle decks & four Lenormand decks. I really love the tarot; I’ve been working on my own collage deck/set of poems for several years now (it’s gone through several incarnations). I’ve collected thousands of tarot images; I have over 600 images of the fool alone 🙂
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I think I acquired my first set of Runes about then, 87/88. Now I feel old
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