Dali's Best Painting

No, it’s not the one with the melting clocks. Or the crazy elephants, though those are pretty cool. In fact, Salvador Dali’s best painting is not even in the worthless surrealism school he was known for.

It was his Woman at the Window, painted in 1925.

The difference between this work and his more famous pieces is striking. Here, instead of deranged shapes and animals and dreamy desert landscapes we see a serene, human portrayal.

Everything about this painting is human and realistic. It conveys peace of mind, focus, and consciousness. The images he is known for convey the opposite: conflictions, hallucination, and unconscious nightmare.

The use of color is down to earth and accurate as opposed to the bright and exaggerated colors of his fantastical surrealism, and the effect is to bring the viewer back down to reality. Obviously Dali knew how to use aesthetics to enhance his subject matter and meaning, whether it was sane or not.

There isn’t much to fault Dali on when it comes to his actual painting ability. Even his impressionistic early work before the age of ten is better than what most people could ever manage.

Vilabertrin by Dali at age nine.

But in years later he must have lost his mind or something. He started upholding craziness instead of the calm intelligence and order shown in Woman at the Window.

In that painting we see a glorification of all things rational and progressive. The woman is enjoying the view and feel of the ocean, but she is doing it from inside a manmade habitat that allows her to live in comfort. This is not an ode to despicable naturalism or primitivism.

Notice how the manmade wall takes up more of the image than the natural environment outside. Dali, whether he realized it or not, was making an important point about the value of nature. He was pointing out how it is only a value to the degree that it helps man achieve his happiness. Nature is seen through the eyes of man in this painting, literally and figuratively. No doubt modern environmentalists will be disappointed with this.

Instead of lame naturalism, Dali upholds mankind controlling the earth around it and taking pleasure in the accomplishment. This is the kind of stuff a rational artist would feature. It boggles my mind how the same man could go from this to any of his nonsensical later paintings.

People of course mistakenly call the portrayal of beauty and order in Woman at the Window out of date or unoriginal. They regard it as a nice picture but an unimportant one. Some of them, like a weak commenter on a previous Dali post, call it something they’ve seen a million times.

The irony is that you won’t find any artists these days making work as great as this. What you will find are a million poseurs producing the same paint-splattered-against-a-wall pretentiousness that is modern art. A painting like this is extremely rare, and the rationality it conveys will never be out of date.