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Date: 1965

Medium: pen and ink drawing

Aphrodisiac Rhino Horns, Monde fantastique, cornes de rhinoc

Salvador Dali's massive impact on 20th century culture and the history of painting saw him go through several key artistic periods. In his formative years he experimented with realism, impressionism, and cubism, among other styles.

The great art movement of Surrealism found Dali emerge as the father of that school, and Sigmund Freud as its patron saint. Through the late 1920s; the decade of the 30s; and into the 1940s, Dali's surrealism was characterized by a personal mythology melded with psychoanalytical symbols inspired in large measure by Freud's important book, Interpretation of Dreams.

After WWII, Dali embarked on his atomic or Nuclear-Mystical period, his art now highly informed by mathematical tenets, nuclear physics, and themes of Christianity. One outgrowth of this period was his obsession with rhinoceros horns, whose symbolic meaning can be seen in works like Aphrodisiac Rhino Horns.

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This original pen and ink drawing, Aphrodisiac Rhino Horns of 1954, is representative of an extremely important phase in Dali's post-war creative direction. The dropping of the atomic bomb changed the world forever; Dali's world was no exception. The artistic arena once inspired by Freud and the subconscious was now succeeded by a world informed by nuclear physics, the discontinuity of matter, and the important role of mathematics and other scientific principles.

In studying the treatises of mathematicians and logicians such as Matila Ghyka and Ramon Lull, respectively, Dali became aware of how very few things in nature represented the perfect logarithmic spiral. That endlessly perpetuating pattern could be found in the florets of a sunflower, but more noticeably, more dramatically in the curve or espiral, as Dali would pronounce 'spiral, of the horn of a rhinoceros.

Of course, mythology has long held the rhino horn (and that of the unicorn) to be a symbol of chastity, which Dali considered a noble condition, since people overly concerned with procreation and 'making embryons' simply would lose the discipline necessary to concentrate on making great art! Dalinian reasoning was always a bit strange, of course, and that is part of the man's mystique and 'managed madness.'

Yet Dali's sometimes outrageous, seemingly nonsensical pronouncements almost always had a solid basis in reality and logic, once the flamboyant window dressing was pushed aside. For example, Dali created quite a storm when in 1955 he arrived at the prestigious Sorbonne in Paris, France, in a Rolls Royce filled with cauliflower!

Outrageous at first sight - but not so fast! It turns out the morphology of a cauliflower (see the large one Dali painted in Nature Morte Vivante of 1956) captures the logarithmic spiral with which Dali was so focused at the time, and which was more poignantly portrayed in the horn of the rhino.

His Sorbonne lecture also included discussion of rhino horns, as he attempted to explain how great art that stands the test of time must rest on timeless traditions of mathematical laws handed down by the Renaissance masters. They understood the Golden Section and other rubrics that ensured an ideal sense of harmonious composition in a masterfully painted canvas. In particular, that lecture gave Dali a platform from which to examine connections between the rhinoceros and another obsession of Dali's at the time: Vermeer's iconic painting, The Lacemaker.

Aphrodisiac Rhino Horns thus dwells entirely on this conical shape that, for Dali, not only held symbolic importance due to logarithmic spirals and chastity, but undeniably to its phallic nature as well. Indeed, one's imagination doesn't require too much stretching to see that some of the rhino horns here bear unmistakable resemblance to a phallus. And this notion was most dramatically represented in Dali's marvelously erotic little oil painting of 1954, Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity. The very title of this work captures both the chastity and phallic ideas inherent in the lore and layout of the rhino horn.

Salvador Dali was so obsessed with the rhino horn at this point in his career, that some scholars have referred to it as his rhinocerotic period. It's not hard to see why. Indeed, one of his most spectacular masterpieces. Assumpta Corpuscularia Lapislazulina (1952) shows an ascending Virgin figure (Gala) virtually sheathed in a convulsion of rhinoceros horns, attesting to the importance Dali placed on the forms mathematical symbolism and what would be its role in his future production of large-scale, mathematically exacting paintings.

Aphrodisiac Rhino Horns joins an impressive array of works of this period, many of whose primary subject matter and composition consist of rhino horns: Metaphysical Madonna; Rhinocerotic Disintegration of Illissus of Phidias; and The Maximum Speed of Raphael's Madonna, all of 1954; and Paranoiac-Critical Painting of Vermeer's Lacemaker, 1955, among many others. Dali's design for a scarf, Blue Horns, of the same year, consists entirely of rhino horns - making it one of the best works with which Aphrodisiac Rhino Horns may be compared.

Dali expert Robert Descharnes writes, Expressing himself through the rhinoceros horn permitted Dali to respect the demands of chastity which, at the time, had become 'an essential requirement of the spiritual life."

Spiritual&metaphysical&hallucinatory&.surrealist&.Salvador Dali always managed to create a sensation! In Aphrodisiac Rhino Horns, we have one of the most important representations of Dali's extraordinarily creative mind, constantly synthesizing real-world elements with those of his fertile imagination, to produce a result far greater than the some of its parts and worthy of being called an original Dali.