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Portrait of My Dead Brother
Date: 193
Material Used: Oil on canvas
Size: 69 x 69 inches
Dali was 59 years old when he painted Portrait of My Dead Brother, concerning one of the essential stories of his life. Salvador was named after his father, Salvador Dali Cusi, yet he also shared this first name with his dead brother, who died as a toddler just nine months prior to the artist's birth. The artist said that his "despairing parents…committed the crime of giving the same first name to the new Dali that their dead son had borne."
The face emerges from a shower of dark and light cherries falling from the heavens, resembling the printing dots associated with newspapers and Pop Art. According to Dali, "the cherries represent the molecules, the dark cherries create the visage of my dead brother, the sun-lighted cherries create the image of Salvador living." The face is not only a portrait of the absent brother, it is a composite portrait of both brothers. This is emphasized in the center of the face where two cherries share a single stem, and a molecule on the nose links both dark and light cherries into one structure.
Curiously, Dali described his absent brother in ways that don't apply to a toddler. "My brother and I resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections. Like myself, he had the unmistakable facial morphology of a genius …. My brother was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute." Asserting that his parents wanted him to be a replacement for his dead brother, this specter became a threat to Dali, compelling him to cultivate eccentric behavior to prove that he was different from the first, perhaps better-loved version of Salvador.
In this painting, the soldiers holding lances at the bottom right assist Dali with dispelling the visage of the former Salvador. Although Dali's brother was dead, he still remained a constant theme in his life. The artist said, "Every day, I kill the image of my poor brother. . . I assassinate him regularly, for the 'Divine Dali' cannot have anything in common with this former terrestrial being."
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