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D A L I

Apparatus and Hand, 1927
Oil on panel
24 1/2 X l8 1/4 inches (62.2x46.3 cm)
Collection of Mr and Mrs A Reynolds Morse,
on loan to Salvador Dali Museum, St Petersburg, Florida

In October 1926 Dali was expelled from the School of Fine Arts in Madrid. Shortly after, in February 1927, he commenced nine months of military service. During this time he painted only one painting but the experience appears to have afforded him the opportunity to take stock of his artistic direction. In the autumn of that year Dali wrote to his friend the poet Federico Garcia Lorca: 'Federico I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a very profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly'.

Apparatus and Hand is one of the first works which Dali completed when he recommenced painting. It demonstrates Dali's assimilation of the Surrealist ethos of fidelity to unconscious imagery unfettered by aesthetic, moral or intellectual forces. The 'apparatus' is a geometric structure with the suggestion of some human attributes: legs, torso, head, an eye and, most obviously, a hand. The latter is a recurrent motif in Dali's iconography around this time and refers to masturbation, a theme which he pursued obsessively during the next five years. The means of auto-eroticism - the 'ever-dis- satisfied hand' - is depicted here as fumescent, veined and in place of a brain. In this way, the 'apparatus' is a self-portrait in which Dali depicts himself, with brutal frankness, as an automaton in the grip of onanistic obsession. The apparatus is depicted surrounded by the causes of this obsession. To its right a female bather is depicted as a cut-out, an image conveying Dali's contempt for, and also his fascination with, the Cadaques bathers' sexuality. Other ghostly images, including a naked female torso, float around the head of the apparatus, suggesting a delirium of erotic imaginings. To the left, a donkey rears on its hind legs, reaching for a fish. The Surrealists often used a fish to denote female genitalia and Dali employed it in this way in his painting Barcelonese Mannequin (1927). The donkey's behavior thus evokes sexual desire. Its swollen belly is eaten by flies, suggesting putrefaction. This, and the fish skeleton inside the donkey's head, evoke Dali's fear of sexual intercourse, a neurosis which accounts for the apparatus's obsession.

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