Portrait of an Artist
On Salvador Dalí’s The Metamorphosis of Narcissus
I n March 1938, a meeting took place between two giants of the twentieth century: the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Dalí, whose obsession with dreams and the subconscious mind permeates his artistic works, had long admired Freud and his landmark study, The Interpretation of Dreams. For years, he had pursued a personal meeting with the eminent man, without success. Finally, the Austrian author and playwright Stefan Zweig persuaded Freud to receive Dalí at his home in London, where Freud had fled from Vienna to escape the German Anschluss (annexation) of Austria. Dalí was then 33 years old, Freud 81. (Freud died the following year.) By way of introduction, Dalí brought with him one of his paintings, titled The Metamorphosis of Narcissus.
The story of Narcissus comes down to us by way of the Roman poet Ovid, who published a collection of such ancient tales called the Metamorphoses (“changes” or “transformations”). Narcissus, a young man of surpassing beauty, spurns all romantic advances, whether male or female. For this, the love goddess Aphrodite punishes him by making him fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to unite with the object of his affection, he sits pining by the waterside until Aphrodite takes pity on him and releases his suffering by turning him into a flower.
This, then, is the painting Dalí chose to bring to his long-awaited meeting with his idol. To me, it’s a poignant self-rendering of Dalí’s peculiar combination of genius and madness. In the figure of Narcissus at the left of the painting I see a projected self-portrait of the artist, Dalí himself. Hopelessly in love with the image (his own) that he beholds in the waters of the pool, Narcissus yearns eternally to embrace and merge with it, only to be eternally frustrated in the attempt. Likewise the artist, in each new work, strives to capture the self-image reflected back to him by his art but is doomed to failure. Dali’s contemporary, the poet T. S. Eliot, expressed much the same thought in East Coker, the second of his Four Quartets:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years —
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres [“between two wars”] —
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again…
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
For Dalí, as for Eliot, every attempt is a wholly new start and a different kind of failure; hence the posture of frustration and defeat expressed in the figure of Narcissus. And yet, the miraculous metamorphosis: in the right half of the canvas, he is transfigured into the hand holding the egg, symbol of birth and renewal, from which springs the flower bearing his name. An elegant and deeply moving portrayal of the condition of the artist and his creations.
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“Portrait of an Artist: On Salvador Dalí’s The Metamorphosis of Narcissus” by Stephen Chernicoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
