Salvador Dalí a tergo: Sublime Backsides and Divine Anality

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2025

Publication Title

Personified Body Parts in Cinema Literature and Visual Culture

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Dalí’s controversial idée fixe of subliming buttocks, which afforded them their own visual and narrative agency while simultaneously sublimating his own sexuality. Holcombe suggests that in Dalí’s decades-long fixation on buttocks – the artist’s own buttocks and those of select artistic figures – Dalí objectified them as sexual fetish and evoked sociopolitical commentary.Dalí explained the importance of his own anus, describing it as “the Divine Dalí’s asshole” when reflecting upon his relationship with the gay Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Holcombe reveals how the artist rendered buttocks as fetishized representations of what Haim Finkelstein considers “Objets surréalistes,” or surrealist objects of desire that continue to engage beholders long after their creation.

First Page

48

Last Page

63

DOI

10.4324/9781003541882-4

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