Description of the painting by Salvador Dali “Hand” (“Pangs of Conscience”)

Description of the painting by Salvador Dali Hand (Pangs of Conscience)

Despite the fact that this picture is in St. Petersburg, the Russians see it is unlikely to succeed: this town “Petersburg” is located in the United States, in the state of Florida. And the masterpiece itself is in a private collection. Very much on the picture of Salvador Dali featured the image of the hand. The most famous “Hands” – “The worker’s hand and the ants” and here is the canvas, “Remorse of conscience.” It was written by the artist – who had not yet become great – in 1930.

But one person had already foreseen Dali’s future world fame – of course, “Gala”, Elena Dyakonova. It is this year that she leaves her first husband, Paul Eluard, and leaves to live with Dali. It is possible, therefore, that the “Hand: remorse of conscience” canvas indeed reflects this state of spirit, which is not typical of the Great Surrealist.

Moreover, one of the two figures, sitting on a kind of dollar sign above the border of the geometric rectangle of the “city” and the chaos of the “desert” is clearly the face of “Gala”. The second figure is a stretched hand “over the desert of past feelings”, most likely Dali himself, although he cannot be identified so precisely. Dali’s face in the picture is gloomy, the color of a cloud, under which he substitutes a giant palm of a hypertrophied arm. He either catches raindrops, or does not allow a cloud to awaken the desert. It is characteristic that on this canvas sitting next to “Dali” and “Gala” look in different directions.

Apparently, the picture reflected not only the “remorse of conscience”, but also the artist’s long-standing fears of women, because Dali remained a virgin until the age of 25. But, in addition to trying to transfer the confused state of the soul, this picture of the artist draws attention to himself by Dali’s experiments with color and geometry, to which he will resort more boldly in the years to come. A greenish yellow desert, a caricatured twisted character with an outstretched hand, a tangible wind in the folds of his cloak, and the strict geometry of the city wall do not allow us to immediately move away from the canvas filled with a deep blue color.


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Description of the painting by Salvador Dali “Hand” (“Pangs of Conscience”)