Vestiges ataviques après la pluie (1934) is an extraordinary example of Dalí’s singular artistic idiom. In 1932, the artist was seized by a sudden obsession with Jean-François Millet’s painting L’Angélus (1857–59). He remembered from childhood that a reproduction of the work had “produced in me an obscure anguish, so poignant that the memory of those two motionless silhouettes pursued me for several years” before disappearing from his mind. [1] Decades later, using his paranoic-critical method, the artist sought to uncover what he saw as the true meaning of the painting— developing a complex narrative of interpretations and associations around Millet’s work. One of these saw Dalí connect the couple in the painting to stones he played with on the beach and from which he transformed the two figures into fossilized white stone forms. In the present work, a single white bone-like central form arches across the picture plane, supported by a crutch. To Dalí, a crutch represented the need for emotional support. Two cypresses emerge in the background, the trees were rife with symbolism for the artist—for whom they were both erotically charged yet also emblematic of mourning. In the foreground, a father and son hold hands. Paternal relationships were a fraught subject for Dalí, as his own with his father had been severely fractured since 1929. Meticulously rendered and symbolically layered, Vestiges ataviques après la pluie exemplifies the highly personal nature of Dalí’s oeuvre in the 1930s.

[1] Salvador Dalí, quoted in Dalí: The Centenary Retrospective, exh. cat. (Thames & Hudson, 2004) p. 190