'Hallucinogenic Toreador' Possibly Dali's Most All-Inclusive & Important Painting

Your humble blogger's favorite Dali painting has long been "Santiago El Grande." But if asked which Dali canvas captures, better than any other, the overall essence of Dali's inspirations, techniques, and Catalan sensibilities, my answer keeps locking on one work: the immense and dazzlingly colorful "Hallucinogenic Toreador" (1970, Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida).

I recently stopped off at the museum again, en route to Sanibel Island, Florida, accompanied by my wife, who's seen in the left foreground here. I never tire of this remarkable picture -- maybe the best double-image ever depicted by Dali's sure brush.

On Dali's easel in Spain for at least a year, "Toreador" includes, of course, an apotheosis of the bullfight -- an iconic Spanish spectacle Dali attended with some regularity (while wife Gala deplored the "sport". I do, too, but that's another story).

The work also features, at lower left, a nod to Spanish Cubist painter Juan Gris, as well as the legend of St. Narciso, symbolized by the large flies.

It's no surprise that an entire book was written about the painting, translated, "All Dali in One Painting." It is quintessentially Spanish and quintessentially Dali!

(Images used based on fair use/journalistic purposes only, and not for commercial use.)

Dali Gained Inspiration from Many of the Classics

Salvador Dali's art often was informed -- and made extraordinarily interesting -- by works of many of the great artists that came long before him.

Here, in his "Rhinocerotic Disintegration of Illissos of Phidias" of 1954, Dali paid homage to the Greek sculpture by Phidias that's owned by the British Museum and has recently been lent to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Dali reimagined the Greek river-god's morphology, now comprised of atomic particle-like "rhino horns" and exhibiting a discontinuity of matter that intrigued the scientifically minded Surrealist master.

For Dali -- consumed at this period in his career with new discoveries in mathematics and atomic physics -- the horn of the rhinoceros was a natural logarithmic spiral and inherent in the mathematical harmony of his exacting compositions. (Painting in the collection of the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, Figueres, Spain, and used in this blog for fair use/journalistic, non-commercial purposes only.)