kanamit:

Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963) - Salvador Dalí

Dalí’s brother, also named Salvador, died at the age of two, a year before his birth. He looked very much like his dead brother and said that his “forced identification with a dead person meant that my true image of my own body was of a decaying, rotting, soft, wormy corpse….” This is the only painting Dalí did of his brother, although the boy is older than his real brother was before he died. Dalí felt that he was exorcizing the spirit of his brother this painting.

The face of the boy is created by a dot matrix, a technique that was widely used in the Pop Art period of the Sixties. This technique emphasizes the ghost-like quality of the boy, he is insubstantial, yet his presence fills the landscape. The boy’s hair also forms part of the wings of a crow; a bird often viewed as a harbinger of death. Beneath the boy is a miniature depiction of Millet’s The Angelus. Dalí believed that through an X-ray of The Angelus, it would be proven that the basket over which the couple are praying was initially the coffin for a child.

- Kirsten Bradbury