The Belvedere Museum Vienna shows »Dalí − Freud. An Obsession«

There have been plenty of art exhibitions on Salvador Dalí, and his reverence for Sigmund Freud has also been known for some time. But the current exhibition Dalí - Freud. An Obsession at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, which runs from January 28 to May 29, 2022, entices visitors with new research findings and intense insights into Dalí's self-conducted psychoanalysis of his youthful years. Some 150 exhibits, including letters, journals and other documents from the 1920s and '30s, present Dalí's extensive studies of Freud's writings and artistic interpretation of psychoanalytic theses. In particular, Dalí's processing of the then-supposed connection between the psyche and the physiology of nervous tissue is traced in the exhibition.

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) grappled with Freud's writings from the early 1920s onward and drew significantly on them as he developed his characteristic Surrealist stylistic language, for which he is famous today. Through Freud, Dalí found access to his own hidden fears and desires, which he addressed in numerous works of art. On one occasion Dalí and Freud met: in 1938 they arranged to meet in London. Dalí hoped for a scientific recognition of his work by Freud; however, this hope was not fulfilled. Freud, who until then had firmly rejected Surrealism, was, however, inclined to reconsider his stance. A year later, however, he already died.