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In 1958, Dalí wrote, "Paradoxically, this painting, which has an erotic appearance, is the most chaste of all." [ 5 ] The painting was formerly in the collection of The Playboy Mansion . Playboy Enterprises sold the painting at a Sotheby's auction in London in 2003 for £1.35 million , equivalent to £2,220,000 in 2023.
The painting depicts the child star Shirley Temple as a sphinx. Shirley Temple's head, taken from a newspaper photograph, is superimposed on the body of a red lioness with breasts and white claws. On top of the head is a vampire bat. Surrounding the sphinx are a human skull and other bones, suggesting her latest kill.
Before painting Corpus Hypercubus, Dalí announced his intention to portray an exploding Christ using both classical painting techniques along with the motif of the cube, and he declared that "this painting will be the great metaphysical work of [his] summer". Juan de Herrera's Treatise on Cubic Forms was particularly influential to Dalí. [3]
The centre of the painting has a distorted human face in profile looking downwards, based on the shape of a natural rock formation at Cap de Creus along the sea-shore of Catalonia. [1] A similar profile is seen in Dalí's more famous painting of two years later, The Persistence of Memory .
The year prior to painting the Persistence of Memory, Dali developed his "paranoiac-critical method," deliberately inducing psychotic hallucinations to inspire his art. He remarked, "The difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad." This quote highlights Dali's awareness of his mental state.
The painting was first sold by Julien Levy at an exhibition of Salvador Dalí's work in 1936. The Julien Levy Gallery was a prominent venue for Surrealists and avant-garde artists in the 1930s and 1940s. Levy sold the painting to Mr. Thomas Hart Fisher and Mrs. Ruth Page Fisher, who owned the painting until at least 1969.
According to Dali, these cubes also represent the cubic structure of one of the most familiar substances, table salt or sodium chloride. However, the crystal structure of NaCl is cubic all-face centered rather than cubic primitive, thus there is a scientific inconsistency.
The Sacrament of the Last Supper is a painting by Salvador Dalí.Completed in 1955, after nine months of work, it remains one of his most popular compositions. Since its arrival at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1955, it replaced Renoir's A Girl with a Watering Can as the most popular piece in the museum.