Salvador Dali Statue Portrait of Picasso (1947)

About Salvador Dali Statue Portrait of Picasso (1947)

This Parastone resin three-dimensional representation shows the Spaniard Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí­'s original work Portrait of Picasso in the Twenty-first Century in 1947, painted twenty-one years after meeting the co-founder of Cubism, the Spaniard Pablo Picasso. Some scholars interpret Dalí's Portrait of Picasso is a direct assault on the artist, while at the same time representing their relationship. In his work, Dalí challenges Picasso's reputation as well as the permanence of his artistic stature. Dali­ used his remarkable hyper-realism to create a deeply contradictory portrait. Mocking Picasso's prestige by showing him as an antique bust covered in melting flesh, Dali­ nonetheless evoked his genius by showing liquid metal flowing through Picasso's head to shape an attenuated spoon, which encloses one of Picasso's signature and most polymorphous subjects, the guitar. Dali gave the oil painting a long name in order to qualify Picasso as a genius but placed in the Twenty-First Century, as it appears on the canvas in Roman numerals appear. The carnation, the goat's horns or the mandolin refer to values such as intellectualism, the exaltation of ugliness or the sentimentalism present in Picasso's work. The mutual rivalry and admiration of Dali­ and Picasso spanned more than four decades, ending only with Picasso's death in 1973 (Dalí died in 1989). Dalí said: "I believe that the magic in Picasso's work is romantic, in other words, the root of its upheaval, while mine can only be done by building on tradition. I am totally different from Picasso since he was not interested in beauty, but in ugliness and I, more and more, in beauty; but ugly beauty and beautiful beauty, in extreme cases of geniuses like Picasso and me, can be of an angelic type."