Salvador Dalí - Allegory of an American Christmas
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Exploring the meaning of Salvador Dalí’s ‘Allegory of an American Christmas’
The ultimate aim of the surrealist movement was to create illogical scenes that allowed the subconscious to dictate its art. Sometimes, this involved whimsical scenes; other times, commonplace objects removed from their original contexts. With Allegory of an American Christmas, infamous surrealist Salvador Dalí did both. He took an egg, set it in stone and blew its size up to ridiculous proportions. Its proximity to Christmas, as you might expect, is basically non-existent.
But as the surrealists would argue, that only elevates its value. Yes, a gigantic egg doesn’t say anything explicitly – about Christmas or otherwise, but you’re left to draw your own conclusions. Dalí himself advised: "Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision." As it turned out, eggs were a great vehicle to break down long-held perceptions about worthy art.
Dalí often used them in his paintings, and they were right up there with clocks as one of his favourite motifs, and these giant egg-shaped stones appear in his work often. In Allegory of an American Christmas, it’s cracked to reveal a shape similar to the North American continent. Art critics have pointed to this as proof of his disappointment with his native Spain and his hope that a new country might rise.
Dalí was always fascinated by America, and it seemed the perfect place to tolerate his particular brand of showmanship. "New skin, a new land!" he wrote joyously in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. "And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America". He moved there in 1940 and completed the painting some years later.
"I travelled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armour of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac," he declared. In that sense, the cracking egg reflects his travels, opening up his worldview as he cruised through what he called the "promised land".
If the egg symbolises his newfound love of America, the painting’s warm palette could be a nod to the country he left behind. The way he toys with size compounds that idea, and the one human figure whose features are somehow overly elongated but dwarfed by the egg. It reflects Dalí outgrowing the European art scene and breaking free from convention even more following his American move.
While the Christmas element the title suggests is entirely absent, it served as a mission statement more than anything. His work, as he put it, was there to ask questions of its audience, not provide an easy answer. "What is important," he once said: "Is to spread confusion, not eliminate it."
