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Lot Essay
"Pictorial expression achieved [its] greatest perfection and effectiveness in the Renaissance." - Salvador Dalí
Depicting the idealized classical form of a fragmented female nude materializing into flesh above a calm sea pierced by a rhinoceros horn, Salvador Dalí’s Chair de poule rhinocérontique is an image of mystical transformation evoking the story of the birth of Venus. Deliberating emulating both the style and imagery of famous Italian Renaissance works of art, Dalí’s memorable image exemplifies a famous sequence of ambitious paintings of the 1950s that champion the artist’s post-war aesthetic of “Nuclear Mysticism.”
“The atomic explosion of the 6 August 1945,” Dalí was to record, “shook me seismically [and] thenceforth, the atom was my favorite food for thought” (quoted in R. Descharnes and G. Neret, Dali 1904-1989, Cologne, 1994, p. 407). Particle physics, the Atomic Bomb and scientific concepts of matter and anti-matter awoke in Dalí a new concern for the nature of physical existence in the post-war era. The dawning of a new Nuclear age prompted in him an appreciation of the immateriality of matter and an understanding of how, as Heraclitus had once explained, all matter existed in a constant and mysterious state of flux and disintegration.
This revelation affirmed for Dalí what he subsequently declared to be “the spirituality of all matter,” and led to his embracing of an innate mysticism that he believed lay at the heart of existence—a mysticism which in turn began to manifest itself in his paintings through traditional, Roman Catholic imagery and reinvocations of Classical myth. Dalí’s “divine” vision, as he called it, had led him to the realization, he said, that “pictorial expression achieved [its] greatest perfection and effectiveness in the Renaissance, and that the decadence of modern painting was a consequence of skepticism and lack of faith” (ibid.).
Accordingly, throughout the late-1940s and early 1950s, Dalí created a startling sequence of visionary “Nuclear Mystic” paintings depicting subjects common to Italian Renaissance art, as if seen through the lens of a twentieth century understanding of relativity, particle physics, the molecular structure of DNA, and the mystical transmutation of matter. From Leda atomica of 1949 (Dalí Museum, Figueras), a depiction of his wife Gala in the guise of Leda, and La Madona de Port Lligat of 1950 (Fukuoka Museum, Japan), in which she is enshrined as the Holy Virgin, to Chair de poule rhinocérontique with its take on the “Birth of Venus,” these paintings translate the iconic imagery of biblical and classical myth into a Dalínian universe of Nuclear Mysticism.
In Chair de poule rhinocérontique, Venus, traditionally born from the foam of the waves on the shores of Cyprus and shown carried to the beach in a half-shell in Botticelli’s iconic masterpiece, here materializes in the form of a classical Greek sculpture-become-flesh on the shores of the bay of Dalí’s home village of Port Lligat. The sea, appearing to be enclosed in the half-shell of a scallop, drawn directly from both Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, is calm and flat, pierced only by the horn of a rhinoceros set at the hovering Venus’s feet. The materialization of Venus here in the bay of Port Lligat echoes the Virgin in Dalí’s La Madona de Port Lligat paintings, as does the appearance of the scallop shell and the rhinoceros horn.
Traditionally, the horn of the rhinoceros has been associated with that of the unicorn, a mythical creature often associated with the Virgin. For Dalí too, the rhinoceros, as an image of strength and virility that ultimately manifested itself in the phallic projection of its horn, also stood as a complementary symbol to the Virgin, whom Dalí regarded as being both the target and the recipient of the rhino’s virility.
In addition, the horn of the rhino was also heavily embroiled in Dalí’s new understanding of the inner, immaterial, and mystical, molecular nature of matter. Having studied the properties of the rhino horn, after having been given one by the poet Emmanuel Looten in 1950, Dalí began to understand the rhinoceros as a “cosmic” animal whose horn underpinned, he believed, the inner structure of all reality.
In a lecture he gave on the subject at the Sorbonne in 1955, Dalí asserted that the rhino’s hide had “plenty of divine granulations,” and its horns, he had been delighted to discover, were “the only ones in the animal kingdom constructed in accordance with a perfect logarithmic spiral” (quoted in H. Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge, 1998, p. 433). Like both matter and anti-matter, therefore, the combination of the rhinoceros and the Virgin symbolized a cosmic union of opposites and a harmonious whole.
Evidently, something of this mystical sense of cosmic union and of the division of matter is also being expressed here in Chair de poule rhinocérontique with its image of the birth of Venus with the rhino horn. The title of the painting refers to another of Dalí’s obsessions: his long-held fascination with the phenomenon of goose-bumps or gooseflesh, whereby the skin responds to the cold or certain emotions by causing the smooth muscles of the dermis to contract into bumps and its hair follicles to stand erect.
Following his revelation with rhinoceros horns, in the 1950s Dalí began to equate the erect hair follicles and undulating skin of gooseflesh with minuscule rhinoceros horns. He is also known to have believed that sea urchins were drops of water that get goosebumps at the very moment they come into existence from fear of losing their original purity of form. In addition to evidently playing a significant role in this work, these interpretations of the relationship between the “cosmic” rhino horn and a microcosmic phenomenon inherent to human flesh also gave rise to several other major paintings from this period. These works include the paintings Creazione dell'uomo of 1954 (Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres) and Goddess Leaning on her Elbow of 1960 (Generaltariat de Catalunya, Barcelona).
Depicting the idealized classical form of a fragmented female nude materializing into flesh above a calm sea pierced by a rhinoceros horn, Salvador Dalí’s Chair de poule rhinocérontique is an image of mystical transformation evoking the story of the birth of Venus. Deliberating emulating both the style and imagery of famous Italian Renaissance works of art, Dalí’s memorable image exemplifies a famous sequence of ambitious paintings of the 1950s that champion the artist’s post-war aesthetic of “Nuclear Mysticism.”
“The atomic explosion of the 6 August 1945,” Dalí was to record, “shook me seismically [and] thenceforth, the atom was my favorite food for thought” (quoted in R. Descharnes and G. Neret, Dali 1904-1989, Cologne, 1994, p. 407). Particle physics, the Atomic Bomb and scientific concepts of matter and anti-matter awoke in Dalí a new concern for the nature of physical existence in the post-war era. The dawning of a new Nuclear age prompted in him an appreciation of the immateriality of matter and an understanding of how, as Heraclitus had once explained, all matter existed in a constant and mysterious state of flux and disintegration.
This revelation affirmed for Dalí what he subsequently declared to be “the spirituality of all matter,” and led to his embracing of an innate mysticism that he believed lay at the heart of existence—a mysticism which in turn began to manifest itself in his paintings through traditional, Roman Catholic imagery and reinvocations of Classical myth. Dalí’s “divine” vision, as he called it, had led him to the realization, he said, that “pictorial expression achieved [its] greatest perfection and effectiveness in the Renaissance, and that the decadence of modern painting was a consequence of skepticism and lack of faith” (ibid.).
Accordingly, throughout the late-1940s and early 1950s, Dalí created a startling sequence of visionary “Nuclear Mystic” paintings depicting subjects common to Italian Renaissance art, as if seen through the lens of a twentieth century understanding of relativity, particle physics, the molecular structure of DNA, and the mystical transmutation of matter. From Leda atomica of 1949 (Dalí Museum, Figueras), a depiction of his wife Gala in the guise of Leda, and La Madona de Port Lligat of 1950 (Fukuoka Museum, Japan), in which she is enshrined as the Holy Virgin, to Chair de poule rhinocérontique with its take on the “Birth of Venus,” these paintings translate the iconic imagery of biblical and classical myth into a Dalínian universe of Nuclear Mysticism.
In Chair de poule rhinocérontique, Venus, traditionally born from the foam of the waves on the shores of Cyprus and shown carried to the beach in a half-shell in Botticelli’s iconic masterpiece, here materializes in the form of a classical Greek sculpture-become-flesh on the shores of the bay of Dalí’s home village of Port Lligat. The sea, appearing to be enclosed in the half-shell of a scallop, drawn directly from both Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, is calm and flat, pierced only by the horn of a rhinoceros set at the hovering Venus’s feet. The materialization of Venus here in the bay of Port Lligat echoes the Virgin in Dalí’s La Madona de Port Lligat paintings, as does the appearance of the scallop shell and the rhinoceros horn.
Traditionally, the horn of the rhinoceros has been associated with that of the unicorn, a mythical creature often associated with the Virgin. For Dalí too, the rhinoceros, as an image of strength and virility that ultimately manifested itself in the phallic projection of its horn, also stood as a complementary symbol to the Virgin, whom Dalí regarded as being both the target and the recipient of the rhino’s virility.
In addition, the horn of the rhino was also heavily embroiled in Dalí’s new understanding of the inner, immaterial, and mystical, molecular nature of matter. Having studied the properties of the rhino horn, after having been given one by the poet Emmanuel Looten in 1950, Dalí began to understand the rhinoceros as a “cosmic” animal whose horn underpinned, he believed, the inner structure of all reality.
In a lecture he gave on the subject at the Sorbonne in 1955, Dalí asserted that the rhino’s hide had “plenty of divine granulations,” and its horns, he had been delighted to discover, were “the only ones in the animal kingdom constructed in accordance with a perfect logarithmic spiral” (quoted in H. Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge, 1998, p. 433). Like both matter and anti-matter, therefore, the combination of the rhinoceros and the Virgin symbolized a cosmic union of opposites and a harmonious whole.
Evidently, something of this mystical sense of cosmic union and of the division of matter is also being expressed here in Chair de poule rhinocérontique with its image of the birth of Venus with the rhino horn. The title of the painting refers to another of Dalí’s obsessions: his long-held fascination with the phenomenon of goose-bumps or gooseflesh, whereby the skin responds to the cold or certain emotions by causing the smooth muscles of the dermis to contract into bumps and its hair follicles to stand erect.
Following his revelation with rhinoceros horns, in the 1950s Dalí began to equate the erect hair follicles and undulating skin of gooseflesh with minuscule rhinoceros horns. He is also known to have believed that sea urchins were drops of water that get goosebumps at the very moment they come into existence from fear of losing their original purity of form. In addition to evidently playing a significant role in this work, these interpretations of the relationship between the “cosmic” rhino horn and a microcosmic phenomenon inherent to human flesh also gave rise to several other major paintings from this period. These works include the paintings Creazione dell'uomo of 1954 (Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres) and Goddess Leaning on her Elbow of 1960 (Generaltariat de Catalunya, Barcelona).