Buste rétrospectif de femme (Retrospective Bust of a Woman), 1933/77

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