Sunday Dalí: The Phenomenon Of Ecstasy, 1933. Collage.

Sunday Dalí: The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 1933. Collage.

From Ego Is A Rat On A Sinking Ship:

The woman sought by the Surrealist, then, was not conceived of as one who would avoid exploitation at all. It was just that Surrealism offered what it thought was an alternative exploitation to that of bourgeois society. One expression of this alternative can be seen in Salvador Dalí’s Phénomène de l’extase, a collage showing various enraptured female faces, many of which were taken from Charcot’s photographs. The image originally followed a text by Dalí on the apparently irrational component of art nouveau architecture, parts of which alluded to sculptural details of girls and angels in rhapsodic abandon on the buildings of Antoni Gaudí. “Continuous erotic ecstasy,” wrote the artist, leads to “contractions and attitudes without precedent in the history of statuary.” He continued in a subsection also entitled “Phénomène de l’extase” that “the repugnant can be transformed into the beautiful” through such ecstasy.1 The transformation of the perception of art, architecture, and most other forms of modern life was thus dependent upon the continuous excitation of ecstasy. The sexual abandon of the female hysterics in the collage was one way of accommodating such a desire.2

Salvador Dalí, “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture Modern’ style,” Minotaure 3-4 (12 December 1933), 69-76. ↩

Robert James Belton, The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art, 249. ↩