Spectre du soir sur la plage (Nocturnal Spectre on the Beach), 1935

Painted in 1935.

In this powerful dreamscape Dalí depicts the beach near his native Figueres in Catalonia. Dominated by the expanse of sand and a large sky with almost anthropomorphic clouds, the composition conjures up memories of the landscape in which the artist spent many summers of his childhood. Rendered with a precision and finesse that Dalí owed to his admiration and study of European old masters, the miniature figures accentuate the vastness and melancholic atmosphere of the beach.

This eerie landscape, with its craggy rocks, sea and sand haunted the artist’s subconscious mind, providing the setting for many of his most important and groundbreaking compositions. The melancholic, disquieting atmosphere of the present work reflects a strong affinity with the still, deserted piazzas pioneered by Giorgio de Chirico in his metaphysical paintings, which played an important role in the development of the Surrealists’ imagery and sensibility.

In a lecture delivered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1934, Dalí said of the themes that preoccupied his art during this time: “The subconscious has a symbolic language that is truly a universal language for it does not depend on education or culture or intelligence but speaks with the vocabulary of the great vital constants, sexual instinct, sense of death, physical notion of the enigma of space these vital constants are universally echoed in every human being.” [1]

[1] Salvador Dalí, quoted in Salvador Dalí, exh. cat. (Tate Gallery, 1980), 15–16.