Salvador Dali's Sculpture Retrospective Bust of a Woman,

1933

Man Ray's photograph of Surrealist artist Salvador Dali's Retrospective Bust of a Woman documents an earlier version of a sculpture-now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art-composed of such found objects as a porcelain bust decorated with ants, a baguette, an inkwell based on a mid-nineteenth-century painting by the French Realist Jean-Francois Millet, corn, and a strip of images from a zoetrope, a pre-cinematic device that Dali repurposed as a necklace. Death, decay, sexuality, and consumption collide in this evocative and disturbing work. As Dali once said about Surrealist sculpture, it is "absolutely useless and created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character."