'Myself at the Age of Six...' Reveals Dali as Both Surrealist and Nuclear-Mystical Painter

By 1950, Salvador Dali was at a kind of point of departure, moving from Surrealism to Nuclear-Mysticism. But even in his atomic period, Dali never lost touch with his surrealist roots. And all of his art is ultimately personal in nature, at least to some degree. The present remarkable work is a good example – a peculiar and rather unforgettable oil painting that marries Dali the surrealist with Dali the artist moved by the phenomenon of “levitation” inherent in nuclear physics.

This was a time, after all, when he ushered in his Nuclear-Mystical Period, which provided a new lens through which Dali viewed the world around him. His mind and brush were profoundly informed by discoveries in atomic physics and the nature of intra-atomic space, where nothing touches anything else. Where things are “rumping and jumping” about, as Dali colorfully put it about protons and electrons and neutrons. And where it makes perfect sense, in a painting like Myself at the Age of Six when I Thought I was a Girl Lifting with Extreme Precaution the Skin of the Sea to Observe a Dog Sleeping in the Shade of the Water that one should be able to lift the skin of the sea to observe a dog lying beneath it!

The dog – borrowed from Ayne Bru’s 16^th century painting, Martyrdom of St. Cucufa, and rediscovered in Dali’s 1950 work – is placidly well-anchored to the surface beneath the raised water, while young Dali – looking immodestly female – finds himself levitating, too, just as he might have found himself in a bizarre dream. And no doubt that was precisely how Dali came to paint such a subject; he’s likely to have dreamt it. The same dog also appeared in his 1954 canvas, Dali Nude….

By the same token, one has to wonder if the young Salvador at this age (i.e., age 6) didn’t in fact harbor some private doubts or confusion over just how comfortable he was in his own skin and with his sexual identity. Especially given that he was born in the shadow of the first Salvador Dali, who died at age 22 months and after whose death Dali the artist was born almost nine months later to the day.

But other interpretations and hypotheses aside, this painting is a wonderful example of Surrealism – Dali’s surrealism – where the impossible becomes possible, the odd becomes commonplace, the dream world finds pictorial expression in shockingly realistic ways.

It’s valid indeed to compare Myself at the Age of Six…with Dali’s 1963 painting, Hercules Lifts the Skin of the Sea and Stops Venus for an Instant from Waking Love. (Both works copyright Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, Figueres, Spain.)