Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge, 1998, p. The rhino’s hide, Dalí asserted, had ‘plenty of divine granulations’, and its horns, he had been delighted to discover, were ‘the only ones in the animal kingdom constructed in accordance with a perfect logarithmic spiral’ (Dalí quoted in H. For Dalí the rhinoceros was a ‘cosmic’ animal that belonged in the heavens - even more than the elephants of his famous painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony. This revelation, for Dalí, affirmed what he subsequently declared to be ‘the spirituality of all matter,’ and led to his embracing of an innate mysticism at the heart of existence – a mysticism which in turn began to manifest itself in his paintings through predominantly Roman Catholic imagery.Įmbroiled also in these concerns, was Dalí’s obsession throughout the early 1950s with the rhinoceros. The dawning of a new Nuclear age had prompted in him an appreciation of the innate immateriality of matter and an understanding of how, as Heraclitus had once explained, matter existed in a constant and mysterious state of flux and disintegration. Particle physics, the Atomic Bomb and scientific concepts of matter and anti-matter had awoken in Dalí a new concern with the nature of being in the post-war era. Centring on the image of a rhinoceros suspended in space and in the process of disintegrating under the mystical spell of a divine, heavenly being, the work is an invocation of the new personal form of mysticism that Dalí was to outline one year later in his ‘Mystical Manifesto’ of 1951. Rhinocéros en désintégration is a remarkable watercolour painted by Salvador Dalí in 1950 that invokes several of the key themes in the artist’s work of the immediate post-war era.
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