Swans Reflecting Elephants

Artist: Salvador Dali
Title: Swans Reflecting Elephants
Media: Oil Paint
Dimensions: 1' 8" x 2' 6" (51 cm x 77 cm) 
Date: 1937

About the Artist:
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol , known as Salvador Dalí, was a prominent Spanish Surrealist painter born  on May 11, 1904 in Figueres, Spain.  Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.  His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose
behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of his critics.

Artist's Statement: Dalí explained his process as a "spontaneous method of irrational understanding based upon the interpretative critical association of delirious phenomena."

Background Information on Work:  This painting is from Dalí's Paranoiac-critical period. Painted using oil on canvas, it contains one of Dalí's famous double images. The double images were a major part of Dalí's "paranoia-critical method," which he put forward in his 1935 essay "The Conquest of the Irrational." Dalí used this method to bring forth the hallucinatory forms, double images and visual illusions that filled his paintings during the Thirties.

As with earlier Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Swans Reflecting Elephants uses the reflection in a lake to create the double image seen in the painting. In Metamorphosis, the reflection of Narcissus is used to mirror the shape of the hand on the right of the picture. Here, the three swans in front of bleak, leafless trees are reflected in the lake so that the swans' heads become the elephants' heads and the trees become the bodies of the elephants. In the background of the painting is a Catalonian landscape depicted in fiery fall colors, the brushwork creating swirls in the cliffs that surround the lake, to contrast with the stillness of the water.

How it Relates to the Theme: I chose this piece, because to me Surrealism is the epitome of our theme, Landscape of the Mind.  Dalí's character and personality carry into his work, regardless of the medium he chooses to express himself in.  The twisted and melting landscapes he produces are far from unoriginal, they are the product of a unique mind, and a reminder that reality is only how we perceive it.