Provocative and enigmatic, Buste
rétrospectif de femme (1933/77) represents one of Dalí’s most impactful
contributions to art of the twentieth century, the "Surrealist object.” Of
the artist’s many critical advancements of Surrealism, his development of the
“Surrealist object” was among his most radical as he expanded the principles of
the movement into three-dimensions. As seen in the present work in
combining familiar objects in an irrational manner, Dalí achieved a form of
pure thought, devoid of any pragmatic function, whose sole purpose was
furthering the human imagination. As Dalí commented: “These new objects,
which could be considered dream objects, satisfy, as Breton says, our
perpetual desire for verification; [Breton] adds that, to the extent that it
is possible, there should be constructed some objects that one can encounter
only in dreams, and that appear to have little justification when considered
in terms of their usefulness or in relation to pleasure.” [1]



Dalí’s preoccupations in both life and art encompassed the worlds of the
sacred and the profane. As seen in Buste
rétrospectif de femme, the artist’s heavily symbolic aesthetic language
is intrinsic to each element of the work. Dalí raised in Spain would have
been cognizant that bread once blessed literally becomes the body of Christ
for Catholics—only in the present work any reverence has been purposely
upended. Dalí’s motivations were purposely transgressive, meant to shock, as
he explained: “I was going to make a surrealist object with bread. Nothing
could be simpler than to cut out two neat regular bottles on the back of the
loaf and insert an inkwell into each one. What could be more degrading and
aesthetic than to see this bread-ink-stand become gradually stained in the
course of use with the involuntary spattering of “Pelican” ink?”[1] In Dalí’s
perhaps anachronistic retelling of the fate of the original version of the
sculpture, which boasted an actual baguette, he recalled that Pablo Picasso’s
dog ate the bread from atop the work.



Perhaps the most all-encompassing among Dalí’s obsessions of the 1930s was his
fixation on Jean-François Millet’s L’Angélus (1857–59). In the present work, Dalí
has incorporated a reference to the painting in the form of the inkwells at
the top of the sculpture. The Millet painting, portraying a peasant couple in
a field devoutly praying, had become one of the most well-known and readily
reproduced images in Catholic Europe. However in the early 1930s Dalí
interpreted the work using his paranoiac-critical method for an article in
the Surrealist publication Minotaure, placing his own associations on the
painting’s protagonists to bring about new meanings. For Dalí, L’Angélus
included both an immensely charged eroticism and an overwhelming fear of
death. Dali’s obsession with death and decay also presents itself through the
inclusion of ants on the forehead of Buste
rétrospectif de femme. In Dalí’s lexicon, the insects represent a dread
of his own eventual decay. The present work is a masterful example of Dalí's unique ability to communicate his own highly complex emotional state in psychologically charged artworks.

 

[1] S. Dalí, “Revista de tendències anti-artístiques” in L’Amic del les arts
4, no. 31, March 31, 1929, trans. Haim Finkelstein, 1998, p. 103



[2] S. Dalí in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. Haakon M
Chevalier, Dial Press, New York, 1942, p. 307