Dali, Learning, and Making Meaning of the World

Below is a painting by Jean-Francois Millet, called The Angelus; it was completed in 1857.  It depicts two peasants during the potato harvest, and arrayed around them are a pitchfork, a basket of potatoes, and a wheelbarrow; there's a church steeple in the background, and the figures and objects are portrayed against a fairly featureless plain. 

This painting was of enormous significance to Salvador Dali.  As a child, he saw a reproduction of the painting hanging on the wall of his school.  It's clear that the picture struck a chord with him, as it is the explicit subject of several of his paintings, and there are suggestions of its elements in many others.

In some of the paintings, the picture is reproduced almost exactly:

Salvador Dali, Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of the Conical Anamorphoses (1933)

Notice, though, that the painting does not show the church steeple seen in Millet's painting.  Interestingly, Millet's first version of the Angelus did not include the steeple--it was added later. 

In other of Dali's paintings, the two figures of the man and woman are clearly present and there is some modification of them and the objects and landscape around them: 

Dali, Archeological Angelus of Millet

And:

Atavism of Twilight

In other of Dali's paintings, there are dramatic modifications of the original Millet painting, and the reference to Millet is easy to miss if you aren't aware of the significance of the painting to him and its repeated appearance in his work:

Salvador Dali, The Architectural Angelus of Millet

Dali, The Spectre of the Angelus

Those are just a few examples.  Once you're aware of the significance of the painting to Dali, you can find references to it throughout his work.

Dali, The Hallucinogenic Toreador

In The Hallucinogenic Toreador, Dali incorporates many of the visual themes that occur throughout his work, and if you look closely you can find elements from The Angelus. 

Because I've spent some time looking for it in his work and noticing the different ways that elements of it can be modified while still remaining suggestive of the original, I now see it and modifications of it in the world around me.

There are two very large rocks at the end of the field beyond our pasture.  Every time I see the pair of them I'm reminded of Dali and his variations on Millet's Angelus (photos by Mike Lewinski):  

 When I first started to look at Dali's art, it all seemed very random and arbitrary, as if he just picked objects without regard to their meaning and combined them in paintings in a haphazard way.  The more time I spend looking, though, the more I see the repetition of specific objects and variations of them.  These objects had significance to Dali, significance that is not the same as they have with me.  In some places Dali talks about what he takes these objects to mean, but at the heart of his approach to art was the idea that, for each of us, there are objects from our experience that now appear in our dreams and imaginations, and that they have some significance to us, and this significance is not always something entirely rational or representational.

The Angelus and the variations of it that appear in Dali's work have come to have significance to me in the sense that they are now part of my experience; that is, sometimes the things I see in the world  evoke the Angelus and Dali's variations of it, and patterns that would otherwise be meaningless, such as a cluster of boulders, have some significance they did not before. 

I think this is one value of education, or learning.  Because I learned about Dali's work and some biographical information about his life, some of the things I ordinarily encounter as I go about my daily life in the world come to have meanings.  The cluster of boulders at the end of the field by my house, for example, means something to me (that is, it calls to mind other things that I know and have experienced) that it did not before I had learned such things. 

The more that I learn, the more educated that I become, the richer and more complex the meanings become that I am able to attach to my experiences in the world.