Retrospective Bust of a Woman by Salvador Dalí - 1933 - 73.9 x 69.2 x 32 cm Museum of Modern Art Retrospective Bust of a Woman by Salvador Dalí - 1933 - 73.9 x 69.2 x 32 cm Museum of Modern Art

Retrospective Bust of a Woman

painted porcelain, bread, corn, feathers, paint on paper, beads, ink stand, sand, and two pens • 73.9 x 69.2 x 32 cm
  • Salvador Dalí - May 11, 1904 - January 23, 1989 Salvador Dalí 1933
In 1931 Dalí described Surrealist sculpture as "absolutely useless and created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character." Made just a few years after this provocative statement, Retrospective Bust of a Woman not only presents a woman as an object, but explicitly as one to be consumed. A long phallic baguette crowns her head, cobs of corns dangle around her neck, and ants swarm along her forehead as if gathering crumbs. When this work was exhibited in 1933, Pablo Picasso's dog is reputed to have eaten the original loaf of bread.