This post is part of a larger deep dive
Curious about the role of Freud's theory of the psyche in The Anthropomorphic Cabinet? Check out The Anthropomorphic Cabinet Explained!
Or read the full The Anthropomorphic Cabinet article!
Artist: Salvador Dalí
Year: 1936
Medium: Oil on wood
Location: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany
Dimensions: 25.4 x 44.2 cm
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Ever since I was a teenager, I have always felt drawn to surrealistic paintings.
Surrealism is not about painting accurately. The emphasis is not on making life-like figures or objects with the aim to replicate what we observe in nature.
Quite the contrary.
Surrealistic art is less bound to rules on how and what you should paint. It encourages free association and juxtaposition of images as a means to express what goes on inside the (unconscious) mind.
Despite my passion for surrealisim, I must confess I feel awkward hanging surrealistic works in my flat. I dunno, everytime I looked at them I kind of feel daunted, as if the painting were engulfing me inside its weird realm (even paintings with non-intimidating elements but a wee bit of distorted reality already makes me unease).
Now, if I asked you to come up with the first name of a surrealist that comes to mind, I bet that 99% of you would choose Salvador Dali.
Despite his eccentric (he had a pet ocelot that he took to restaurants) and often controversial (apparently he was a consummate scammer) character, Dali is deservedly one of the greatest surrealistic artists that the World has ever seen.
Similar to the effect David Lynch had on my thinking about movies, Dali had a profound influence on how I viewed the Arts in general.
I’ve seen my share of Dali’s original paintings in various museums, and, in all occasions, I was mesmerised. Call me a philistine, but I find Dali’s technique superb in comparison to most of his contemporary painters.
Not only was he able to paint big and detailed, but his works are smooth, graceful and brim with mindly – and downright bizarre – symbolism.
Dali was endowed with a phenomenal technical ability and a way of teasing us intellectually. It’s as though he were the conflation between a Renaiscence painter and a mischievous Psychologist.
Among Dali’s numerous paintings, the Anthropomorphic Cabinet is one of my favourites, and I’ll be analysing it in this article.
The Anthropomorphic Cabinet was painted in 1936 and shows a naked female figure reclining on one hand on the floor.
The most noticeable elements of this painting are the various drawers protruding from her torso. From one of those drawers a piece of clothing is hanging out.
Her head is lying low and long hairs occlude any facial features. The body looks slightly disfigured and wrinkled, and the posture is one of despair. In the background we see what appears to be a typical street during daylight.
Visually, what captivates me most about this painting are the (almost) monochromatic colour scheme that Dali employed. The effect is not boring or repetitive at all, but rather dynamic, partly because of the manner Dali employed shadows.
But, of course, what really gets me going about this painting is it’s latent message.
Dali was influenced tremendously by the theories of Sigmund Freud, and this influence permeates several of Dali’s works.
As I will explore in detail below, the Anthropomorphic Cabinet is as much an artistic masterpiece as it is a visual description of the unconscious mind as envisioned by Freud.
The combination of skillful strokes coupled with a deep psychological meaning is the reason I am giving the Anthropomorphic Cabinet a well-deserved 4.5 stars.
Most of Dali’s works are surrealistic, so our Bizarrometer is bound to hover the top of the scale with any of them. Interestingly, most of the canvas is empty space really, which shows that you don’t need myriad of aberrant colours and juxtaposed elements for a painting to look bizarre. This particular painting gets a score of 4.
Undoubtedly, one of Dali’s major source of inspiration for several of his works was Psychoanalysis, a discipline founded in the late 19th century by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud.
Psychoanalysis was initially developed primarily as a therapeutic method for treating mental afflictions such as the infamous hysteria.
The goal of Psychoanalysis was to bring to light conflicts present in the patients’ minds that, so Freud believed, were the source of their psychopatologies. These internal conflicts were always somehow connected to unconscious wishes or repressions that had mostly taken place during the patient’s childhood.
As a young student, Dali was an avid reader of Freud’s writings, and yearned to meet the then-widely popular psychoanalyst on numerous occasions.
That event finally came to fruition on the 19th of July 1938, at Freud’s house in London. Even though Dali was 48 years Freud’s junior (Freud was 82 years old), they were both eminent personalities in their respective fields.
Of Freud’s theories, Dali wrote: “[they are] a kind of allegory which serves to illustrate a certain insight, to follow the numerous narcissistic smells which ascend from each of our drawers”. By drawers, Dali was referring to the reservoir of ideas, thoughts, wishes and memories which were unknown to the person – the unconscious mind.
The painting “The Anthropomorphic Cabinet” was painted two years before that memorable 1938 meeting, but it already shows how Freud’s ideas had a huge impact on Dali’s work.
The most distinctive feature of the painting, the drawers, was portrayed in numerous other paintings and scultpures by Dali, and he made sure the public knew what they represented: the drawers of our unconscious.
In this article, I will thus concentrate on the unconscious mind as seen by Freud, as this is, by most art expert accounts, the main theme of the painting “The Anthropomorphic Cabinet”.
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