Dalí, Salvador (1904-1989)
La Solitude (Loneliness)
1931
Oil on canvas, 35.2 x 27.2 cm
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
“Solitude” was the first painting by Dalí to enter a museum collection anywhere in the world, and it is typical of his earliest, often morose, surreal compositions. A solitary figure by the seashore suspended between the animate and the inanimate, presses into, or emerges from, the surface of a rock. For Dalí, hair was a mysterious and disturbing growth, and here he shows the figure’s curls metamorphosing into seashells. (WA)