Dali and meat

Salvador Dali and wife Gala, 1964

NARIQUE MENESES/REX FEATURES

Salvador Dali who inspired Elsa Schiaparelli's lambchop hat and jacket, painted in early 1930's a portrait of his wife Gala with a pair of raw chops poised on her shoulder.

Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops in Equilibrium Upon Her Shoulder, 

Salvador Dali 1934

© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Image: Copyright Whitney Museum of American Art

Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder, 

Salvador Dali 1933

© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2004.

"I painted a portrait of Gala with a pair of raw chops poised on her shoulder.
The meaning of this, as I later learned, was that instead of eating her, I had decided to eat a pair of raw chops instead. The chops were in effect the expiatory victims of abortive sacrifice - like Abraham’s ram and William Tell’s apple. Ram and apple, like the sons of Saturn and Jesus Christ on the cross, were raw - this being the prime condition for the cannibalistic sacrifice.

In the same vein I painted a picture of myself as a child at about the age of eight, with a raw chop on my head. I was trying thus symbolically to tempt my father to come and eat this chop instead of me.”

Salvador Dali from his 1942 autobiography "The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí"