Dali – Trilogy of the desert: mirage

Art about art. Dali reacts against popular abstract art of his time, with this call to appreciate the classical art of antiquity.

A maiden, cross-gartered on one leg like a Greek Olympic goddess, her golden hair resplendent, summons forth ancient beauty in architecture and art. The major piece of art she points towards is a bust of the Apollo Belvedere – the most ‘sublime expression of Greek art that has survived’. She looks hungry, her soul starved from the meagre pickings of this arid landscape.

In the cultural desert of American art (as Dali saw it) she points back to the beauty of what has been before, to the human body captured perfectly in stone by old masters, to classical gardens, to architects who created floating arches out of heavy stone, and to a golden tower glinting in the sunlight. And there at the back – very early – what looks to be a ziggurat, perhaps the tower of Babel, the earliest symbol of man reaching toward the heavens under his own power, striving to place himself on a higher plane.

Between her hands is the Desert Flower (the name of the perfume the painting was commissioned to promote). Of all the beauty of art, the strivings of mankind, the building to the heavens, of all our works and soaring architecture from then until now, glorious as they may be, it is the flower in the desert that is the most unexpected beauty and provides the most resonant focus at human scale.

The National Gallery of Victoria has recently acquired this painting, its first Dali, for an undisclosed sum.