Oil on canvas
1951
The Exhibition: Dalí. The Christ of Portlligat, centred on the oil on canvas The Christ by Salvador Dalí, an exceptional work from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, enables the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí to go beyond its own collection and in so doing to expand and enrich our understanding of the artist.
“Dalí. The Christ of Portlligat” The Craft of Painting History and Provenance
As for Dalí, at the end of the 1940s he was engaged in a radical reformulation of his thinking, his interests ranging from Freud and nuclear physics to the Italian Renaissance. In many of his paintings from the 1940s, his ruminations on the structure of the atom and the disintegration and discontinuity of matter are an integral part of his vocabulary. At the same time, he gradually incorporated religious elements.
“One of the first objections... Nuclear mysticism The Mystical manifesto Dalí and His Models
Dalí’s working process was intense. The artist reveals himself to be a tireless and meticulous worker who uses a richly varied range of technical resources to achieve the definitive painting.
“In artistic texture and technique, I painted the Christ of St. John of the Cross, in the manner in which I had already painted my Basket of Bread, which, even then, more or less unconsciously, represented the Eucharist for me”.
“This drawing [by John of the Cross] so impressed me the first time I saw it that later in California, in a dream, I saw the Christ in the same position, but in the landscape of Portlligat”.
The Christ
1951
Oil on canvas
204,8 x 115,9 cm
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
© CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection
