Salvador Dalí “Birth of Liquid Desires” (La Naissance des Désirs Liquides) at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in Italy

Birth of Liquid Desires Painting - Oil and Collage on Canvas (96.1 x 112.3 cm) 1931-32

One of Salvador Dalí's hallucinatory obsessions was the legend of William Tell, who represented for him the archetype of paternal aggression.

It must be remembered that Salvador Dalí was born nine months after the death of a brother named Salvador.

His dead brother Salvador was like a rival who will haunt Dalí all his life and be found in his works.

His father, also named Salvador, is also found in Salvador Dalí's work as an overwhelming being.

Salvador Dalí defined himself as a “Great Paranoid” and stated:

“I made the sublime mutation of evil into good, of madness in order, and I even managed to have my contemporaries admitted and shared my madness.”
Salvador Dali

Birth of Liquid Desires In this painting, the father, son and mother are merged into the hermaphrodite being located in the painting's centre.

It is a terrifying, threatening person, with a bread phallus lying on his head, pressing against him a flower woman who suffers his anger.

This bread gives life to a dark form topped by a chest of drawers from which overflows linen, and a source emerges from it.

On the left, we see a naked man leaning in a hole in the rock.

At the bottom of the rock flows a fountain.

His right arm is immersed in the water of the fountain.

On the right of the scene stands a half-transparent woman who turns away and hides her face while pouring a liquid in a cup and on the foot of the central creature.

A foot that seems to be petrified from brown to grey.

Birth of Liquid Desires