Freud was also among Dalí’s obsessions
At the Limonaia del Belvedere in Vienna 150 works tell of the profound impact that psychoanalysis had on the artist
It is July 19, 1938 when the writer Stefan Zweig, the poet Edward James and Salvador Dalí knock on Sigmund Freud’s door. The father of psychoanalysis succeeded a few weeks earlier in re-entering Vienna and taking refuge in London from Nazi oppression. He is passionate about Zweig’s proposal to receive the 34 Spaniard who is so enthusiastic about scientific theories, read at the beginning of the 1920s. The young Dalí, Zweig wrote to Freud to convince him, is “the only genius painter of this era … I think you should see the artist on whom you influenced more than any other and whom I consider a privilege to know“.
The meeting is not the personal success that Dalí hoped for, but later he will say he is convinced of having “forced the patron of the unconscious to revise his vision of art“. And indeed, even if on the day he had called the young Spaniard a “fanatic”, Freud wrote to Zweig that he had at least revised his idea that “the surrealists are crazy“. The fruitful influence of Freud on Dalí is at the center of the exhibition «Dalí-Freud. An obsession ”, open at the Limonaia del Belvedere from January 28th to May 29th.
150 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films and letters tell the profound impact that psychoanalysis had on the great surrealist: “Thanks to his readings of Freud’s works, Dalí has found and finds himself in many of his fantasies, his obsessions, his longings of his fears that accompanied him since childhood», Explains the curator Jaime Brihuega, who in the exhibition also gives space to Dalí’s crucial encounters with other leading exponents of his time: in particular Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel and the Nobel Prize-winning histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal.
-
Vienna
-
-
Belvedere
Prinz Eugen-Strasse 27 | +43 1795570
-
Dalì-Freud. An obsession
From January 28th to May 29th 2022
-
Other articles by Flavia Foradini