The Great Masturbator

Infobox Painting|

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backcolor=#FBF5DF
painting_alignment=right
image_size=320px
title=The Great Masturbator
artist=Salvador Dalí
year=1929
type=Oil on canvas
height=110
width=150
height_inch=43.31
width_inch =59.06
diameter_cm =
diameter_inch =
city=Madrid
museum=Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

"The Great Masturbator" (1929) is a painting by Salvador Dalí executed during the surrealist epoch, and is currently displayed at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

The center of the painting has a distorted human face in profile looking downwards, based on the shape of a natural rock formation along the sea-shore of Catalonia.Fact|date=July 2008 A similar profile is seen in Dalí's more famous painting of two years later, "The Persistence of Memory". A nude female figure (resembling Dalí's then new muse, Gala) rises from the back of the head; this may be the masturbatory fantasy suggested by the title. The woman's mouth is near a thinly-clad male crotch, a suggestion that fellatio may take place. The male figure seen only from the waist down has bleeding fresh cuts on his knees. Below the central profile head, on its mouth, is a locust, an insect which Dalí had an irrational fear of. (The insect has sometimes been misidentified as a grasshopper due to poor translations of Dalí's early writings.)

The painting represents Dalí's severely conflicted attitudes towards sexual intercourse. In Dalí's youth, his father had left out a book with explicit photos of people suffering from advanced untreated venereal diseases to "educate" the boy. The photos of grotesquely damaged diseased genitalia fascinated and horrified young Dalí, and he continued to associate sex with putrification and decay into his adulthood.

Dalí kept the painting in his personal collection, willing it to the national collection of Spain upon his death.

External links

* [http://www.csulb.edu/~karenk/20thcwebsite/438final/ah438fin-Info.00049.html The Great Masturbator on csulb.edu]