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Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man

Artwork Details

Title
Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man

Maker
Salvador Dalí
Date Made
1943
Materials
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
Image: 18 in x 20 1/2 in
Accession ID Number
2000.9
Credit Line
Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA); Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse 2000.9
Location
ON VIEW
Copyright
In the USA ©Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2023 / Worldwide rights ©Salvador Dalí. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2023.

Supplemental material

Description

The artist’s notes for the painting read: “1. Parachute, paranaissance (sic), protection, cupola, placenta, Catholicism, Egg, earthly distortion, biological ellipse. Geography changes its skin in historic germination.” Unlike his work from the 1930s, this painting is perhaps easier to decipher because its symbolism is more canonical, downplaying the enigmatic mystery and visual contradictions of his Freudian surrealist period.

The “new” man pushes his way out of the large egg/globe in the center. He is emerging out of the “new” nation/world power, the United States, Dalí’s temporary home at the time. The enlargement of Africa and South America represents the growing importance of the Third World, and the draped cloth represents the placenta (odd mix of reptile/bird and mammal). An androgynous figure points to the emerging “new man,” showing the cowering “geopoliticus child” the new historical period he will represent.

Exhibition History:
1943, New York, Knoedler Gallery, “An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Dalí”
1946, Boston, The Institute of Modern Art, “Four Spaniards : Dali, Gris, Miro, Picasso”
1965, New York, Gallery of Modern Art, “Salvador Dalí, 1910-1965”
1999, Fukuoka, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, "Dali Exhibition 1999"
1999, Shinjuku(Tokyo), Mitsukoshi Museum of Art, "Dali Exhibition 1999"
2006, Tokyo, Ueno Royal Museum, “Dalí Centennial Retrospective”
2007, St. Petersburg, Fl., Salvador Dalí Museum, “Dalí and the Spanish Baroque”
2008, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, “1930: The Making of a "New Man"
2012, Paris, Centre Pompidou, “Dali: Retrospective”
2013, Madrid, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, “Dalí. Todas las sugestiones poéticas y todas las posibilidades plásticas”
2018, Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, "Monsters and Myth: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s (Trans-Atlantic Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s)"

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