The Anthropomorphic Tower

1930 · Drawing and Watercolor

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Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, Stati Uniti

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Verificato: l’altro ieri
Ultimo cambio di stato: 19 ago 2026
Fonte: I dati di collezione del museo stesso

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Salvador Dalí created Anthropomorphic Tower at a time in his career when he aligned himself with the Surrealists and began to produce dreamlike images charged with sexual desires and anxieties. This pastel relates to a painting of the same year called The Great Masturbator (now in the Museo nacional centro de arte Reina Sofia, Madrid). While in the painting the torso is clearly male and the head female, the pastel obfuscates each form’s sexual identity. Here the palette on the right is more subdued, in contrast with the color of the tower-penis in the upper left, which is so bright as to appear almost spot lit. Dalí used the motif several times during this period. Could the figure with closed eyes on the right be dreaming or hallucinating the image of the Anthropomorphic Tower? Dalí’s image is open to interpretation, which is at the heart of Surrealist art.

Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0

Scheda

Numero di inventario: 2018.308

Che cosa raffigura

Landscape

In catalogo

Disegni e acquerelli Pastello Modernismo XX secolo Surrealismo Spagna

Fonti

Art Institute of Chicago: i dati aperti del museo · acquisita 8 giorni fa
Immagine: Art Institute of Chicago — © the artist or rights holder

Nel frattempo, nella vita di Salvador Dalí

Tutta la vita

1928
Scandal: “Dialogue on the Beach” is rejected
The Barcelona Autumn Salon rejected “Dialogue on the Beach (Unsatisfied Desires)” as unfit for a gallery visited by “the numerous public little prepared for certain surprises”. The scandal was widely covered in the Barcelona press, and a Madrid illustrated weekly interviewed Dalí.
August 1929
Meets Gala
Dalí met his lifelong muse and future wife Gala, born Elena Diakonova, a Russian émigrée ten years his senior, then married to the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard.
November 1929
First Paris show; joins the Surrealists
Dalí's first Paris exhibition, eleven works at the Goemans Gallery, was a commercial success; André Breton called his new work “the most hallucinatory that has been produced up to now”. That year he officially joined the Surrealist group, who hailed what he would call his paranoiac-critical method.
28 December 1929
His father throws him out
His father disapproved of his romance with Gala and his Surrealist friends, and on reading that he had exhibited in Paris a drawing inscribed “Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait”, demanded a public recantation. Dalí refused and was thrown out of the family home, told he would be disinherited and must never set foot in Cadaqués again.
summer 1930
A fisherman's cabin at Port Lligat
Dalí and Gala rented a small fisherman's cabin in the nearby bay of Port Lligat; he soon bought it and over the years added the neighbouring ones, gradually building his beloved villa by the sea.