Ma Mere' Oil Painting Telegraphs Dali's Anguish Over Loss of His Mother

'Ma Mere' Oil Painting Telegraphs Dali's Anguish Over Loss of His Mother

“My Mother” (“Ma Mere”), alternately known as “The Enigma of Desire,” is a strange, haunting, honest – and somewhat sad painting – by Dali, because it expressed the anguish he felt at losing his mother to cancer of the uterus when young Salvador was just sixteen. He adored her, and then fate abruptly took her away. Any wonder Dali had some issues swirling around in that ultra-creative head of his!

The primary imagery finds a large palette-like structure with numerous recessed areas, each repeatedly featuring the words “Ma Mere” – French for “my mother.”

This is a 25-year-old Dali literally crying out for the woman he missed so dearly. The large shape is supported at lower left by the well-known head of Dali himself, eyes closed, nose pressed to the ground, echoing the large rock formation at Cape Creus that inspired this peculiar configuration in the first place. It’s seen in numerous Dali paintings, including his most famous: “The Persistence of Memory” of 1931.

At left middle distance, a boy hugs his father – an unmistakable reference to Dali’s own relationship with his dad, which later became irretrievably strained – and this uneasy meeting between the two also reveals a woman’s face, a dagger, a fish’s head and a grasshopper – the latter element something of which Dali was literally frightened all his life.

In short, there are glimpses in “My Mother” of the angst, confusion, personal fears and sexual inadequacy that ran through Dali’s young world at the time with the fury of a tsunami, ironically giving him a kind of energy and motivation to avenge his mother’s untimely death by becoming what he had promised her he would be: a great world-famous artist.

In later falling in love with and eventually marrying Gala, was Dali subconsciously reconnecting with a much-needed mother figure? I don’t recall ever hearing such a theory, but, considering that Gala was 10 years Dali’s senior, it seems plausible. I wonder what Freud would have said.