Art: A Mystic Feeling

Beyond heaving an occasional rhetorical rock at his fellow artists for misunderstanding him, Salvador Dali has been strangely quiet for the past six months, living in seclusion in his villa at Port Lligat, north of Barcelona. Surrealist Dali has been working, and last week he was ready to unveil what he regards as his masterpiece. It is a large (7½ft. by 4⅔ ft.) Madonna which Dali calls in Latin Assumpta Corpuscularia Lapislazulina (The Bodily Assumption in Blue). At the summit of his elongated Madonna is the head of his wife, Gala, gazing heavenward; her body is being reconstructed in a sunburst of softly colored atomic corpuscles. The body is still transparent and through it, Christ can be seen floating above an altar in a crystal cathedral. At the base of the altar lap the waters of Port Lligat, and rising out of them are huge rhinoceros horns.

What does it all mean? Dali believes that the two deepest preoccupations of mid-century are religious mysticism and atomic physics. His picture combines the two: the Roman Catholic dogma of the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption to Heaven as seen by an age newly aware of nuclear physics. But why the rhinoceros horns? Most important, says Catholic Dali. “The rhinoceros horn embodies a mystic feeling similar to that of bullfighting. The bull is a Spanish god who sacrifices himself. Bullfighters are his priests. ” Says Dali, who plans to show his Madonna in Manhattan this Christmas season: “I have reached the maximum of expression and neo-mysticism.”