‘The Enigma of my Desire’: How Salvador Dali was shaped by mummy issues
Salvador Dali was an enigma, and that’s just the way he liked it.
There’s an interesting dichotomy at the heart of the Spanish master. For all of his eccentricities and the fact that the strangeness of his art was only matched by the strangeness of his behaviour, none of this was by accident. He wasn’t bizarre because he was this one-off who had to express his divinely gifted uniqueness because that’d just be the way he was wired; Dali was a savvy operator who knew if he did weird shit, it would get him attention.
This is, after all, the man who would do quite literally anything for a paycheque. The last decades of his life were spent doing as much work in commercials as in an art studio. That, combined with the bizarre stunts like taking an anteater for a walk through the streets of Paris, spoke to a man who wanted nothing more than to be defined on his own terms. After all, if all anyone is talking about is your moustache and your melting clocks, no one has to actually get to know the real you.
Because the real person, the man born Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí Doménech in Figueres, Catalonia, was a lot more complicated than the legend suggests. Dali wasn’t the leering eccentric he built his persona around; he was a human being like all of us. He had his traumas, and the art spoke to that. Perhaps that’s also why the art itself was so strange and surreal, to distract from the hurt and suffering that was present at the heart of it.
A hurt and suffering that centred around the loss of Dali’s mother at an early age.
Which Dali work was dedicated to the memory of his mother?
Dali lost his mother, Felipa Domènech Ferrés, when he was 16 to uterine cancer. Ferrés wasn’t only a more caring, understanding presence in his life compared to his strict, bad-tempered father, she also encouraged his artistic pursuits in a way that he didn’t. In his autobiography, Dali said her passing “was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her … I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.”
In tribute to her, Dali began to pour the pain of losing her into his art. The most clear homage to her is the extraordinary The Enigma of My Desire. Although perhaps the more emotionally honest name for it is its subtitle, My Mother, My Mother, My Mother. In typical Dali fashion, its a desert vista with what looks like a large, yellow rock dominating the canvas, with several craters pressed into it. Two go straight through it, looking out into the horizon, but the rest seem to have dark letters written within them.
A closer look at the canvas shows that in each of them is written the words “ma mere”. If that wasn’t clear enough, tucked away to the left of the canvas is something that looks like a misshapen dried-out tree-trunk, adding to the desert feel of the piece. When looked at a little closer, you can see that there are shapes hidden within it. The shape of a small figure hugging a larger one and holding as hard as it can.
With everything that surrounds this piece, it’s not hard to guess what Dali saw himself in most.