Haunted by grasshoppers? Salvador Dali wasn't afraid to stand out, but what was he afraid of?
Salvador Dali used his bizarre imagination to conjure incredible surreal images. But Dali's
imaginative offerings were not random, they were attempts to explore the human mind at a
time when Sigmund Freud had just introduced the world to the concept of the human unconscious.
As in a dream, our hopes and fears are relayed back to us in Dali's paintings through his
confusing and sometimes frightening imagery. They also give us a chance to psychoanalyze
the man himself, who boldly splashed some of his own fears across the canvas.
"Dalinian ideas possess one tremendous power of germination."
Ants and grasshoppers are particularly common motifs in Dali's work and they feature time
and again, hidden in his many paintings as dark symbols. For example, you may or may not have
noticed that amid the oozing clockfaces in Dali's best-loved painting, "The Persistence of Memory,"
a pocket watch in the corner is covered in a swarm of tiny ants. This is no accident — Dali
was petrified of insects to a degree that went way beyond ordinary squeamishness.
Like many of us, Salvador Dali was horribly traumatized by creepy crawlies as a child,
and it saddled him with a lifelong fear and odd fascination. Dali wrote about several
unsettling incidents involving bugs in his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador
Dali, a book that serves as a useful compendium for decoding his paintings.
For example, as a young boy, Dali took in an injured bat, which he and his cousin put
in a tin pail. One day, Dali, who loved the furry-winged biped, was horrified to
discover that the unfortunate creature had been attacked by some unwanted visitors. He recalled:
"The bat, though still half-alive, was bristling with frenzied ants,
its tortured little face exposing tiny teeth like an old woman's."
The ant incident upset Dali, but far worse than ants were grasshoppers — a bug Dali
described in the most dramatic language imaginable. After noticing that the tiny
faces of grasshoppers resembled those of a scary-looking fish he had once caught,
Dali was permanently disturbed by them. He wrote,
"I saw them everywhere, even where there were none: a grayish paper, suddenly seen,
and looking to me like a grasshopper, would make me utter a shrill cry which delighted everyone."
Dali's fear was made that much worse by other children,
who had their fun by scaring him with the insects at every opportunity.
As an adult, Dali never did get over his fear of bugs. According to the Smithsonian,
he may even have suffered from Ekbom's Syndrome, a rare psychological condition
in which patients feel as if invisible bugs are crawling all over their skin.
Dali received this posthumous diagnosis due to his recollection of a particularly gruesome
incident that occurred after spotting some bugs in a Paris hotel room. Upset by the creatures,
Dali became convinced a spot on his back was a tick and resorted to violently
scraping it off with a razor. By the time a doctor arrived, Dali realized,
"It was neither a bedbug nor a tick nor a cockroach nor a siamese-twin that had
been stuck to my skin — all this had existed only my imagination.
It was simply a small birthmark that I had seen a hundred times before."
Grasshoppers in particular would continue to haunt Dali throughout his life,
although they also continued to give him spooky inspiration. He wrote,
"I am thirty-seven years old, and the fright which grasshoppers cause me has
not diminished since my adolescence. On the contrary. If possible. I should say
it has perhaps become still greater. Even today, if I were on the edge of a
precipice and a large grasshopper sprang upon me and fastened itself to my face,
I should prefer to fling myself over the edge rather than endure this frightful 'thing.'"
Understanding Salvador Dali's lifelong terror of bugs serves as a useful key
to unlocking the meanings behind many of his works. According to an article
published in Surreal Entomology, roughly 10% of Dali's 1,176 paintings feature insects.
Often, the canvases that feature insects have disturbing or upsetting themes,
such as death and decay. On the other hand,
ants and grasshoppers also regularly feature in paintings related to Dali's sexual anxieties,
including his famous "The Great Masturbator," in which a giant distended face is embraced
by a giant ant-covered grasshopper. Similarly in "The Font," another painting which features
Freudian sexual allusions, a woman's sealed mouth is depicted covered with ants.