La Brouette

Material

Iron, bronze and silvered bronze; length: 160 cm

Dating

1960

About the artwork

Salvador Dalí created ‘La Brouette’ in 1960 while going through an experimental phase. Inspired by Surrealism and later early Pop Art, he combined an unusual selection of different, at first sight incoherent objects – the iron wheelbarrow is decorated with a bolt cutter, a candelabrum, three cauliflowers and the figure of an angel.
The dominant part of this object, the wheelbarrow, captivated Dalí since he had become obsessed with Jean-François Millet’s painting ‘Angelus’ from 1859 and which greatly influenced his pictorial mythology for years to come. The painting shows a peasant couple, who pauses for a prayer during potato harvest. A pitchfork is stuck into the ground next to the man, while in the background, partly hidden by the peasant’s wife and fully laden with potatoes, stands the aforementioned wheelbarrow. While he attended the Catholic school in Figueres, a print of the painting was hanging in the corridor in front of his classroom, where it equally impressed and disturbed him.
This fascination, which initially had been triggered by an innocent childish sensation, led to a profound, paranoiac-critical obsession with the Angelus-painting. Over the years, Dalí has incorporated the motif into several of his own works. He radically reinterpreted the religious scene of the praying peasant couple and discovered an abundance of sexual innuendoes. For example, he construed the positioning of the peasant’s hat as a cover for his erection and the bent over posture of the wife as a signal for sexual longing. In Dalí’s opinion, the wheelbarrow laden with potato bags and the pitchfork next to the tree increased the erotic symbolism additionally. The artist’s latently sexualised interpretation of the Angelus-couple, which did not focus on the two characters solely, but took the couple’s surroundings into account as well, finds its expression in ‘La Brouette’.
The shown sculpture is a single casting, formed accordingly to a real model. During the time the sculpture was made, Dalí was occupied with a film project, but he never realised it. He was collecting material about rural eroticism and planned to use it for a film called ‘La brouette de chair’ in which he wanted to show, how peasants tend to eroticise their tools and working materials. In this regard, he credited the wheelbarrow with a strong symbolic force. The artist illustrated his claim with the help of an American cartoon, which shows a woman who grabs her husband by the ankles and pushes him like a wheelbarrow. With his hands the farmer holds the axle of a wheel while his erect penis ploughs the soil.
Therefore the bronze wheelbarrow-sculpture can be understood as a visualisation of Dalí’s never realised film project. In his opinion, the eroticised basic form of the wheelbarrow displayed a complex allegory of libido and impotence and additionally, Dalí decorated it with no less symbolically charged objects and small scale sculptures – The bolt cutter refers to the fear of castration, the oak stands for the environment and the angel, holding his hand to his mouth, appears as cupid who commands silence. Finally, the cauliflowers remind us of the rural work on the fields but additionally, Dalí associated the shape of the cauliflower with the female genitals which, again, shows the artist’s intense erotic imagination.

About the artist

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish painter, graphic designer, author, sculptor and stage designer. Although he passed the entrance examination for the Royal Academy San Fernando in Madrid in 1921, he preferred to self-study and eventually in 1926 got expelled from the Academy due to his rebellious nature. He moved back to Figueras and focused on painting. At that time, his style was a mixture of Futurism and Surrealism, which he had gotten to know when he had visited Paris for the first time in 1926. During his next trip to Paris in 1929 he became acquainted with the Surrealistic Group and, as a driving force of Surrealism, rose to one of the most prominent painters of the 20th century.
Sigmund Freud’s work had a big influence on Dalí’s oeuvre and had fascinated him since his years of study, as Dalí had always suffered from strong hallucinations. Over the years Dalí had developed a pictorial language, which combined elements of dreams and the subconscious in a way that was reminiscent of the Old Masters.
Eventually, his eccentric behaviour and his controversial opinions led to a break with the Surrealistic Group. But Dalí was not only a gifted painter but also a clever businessman. He had already planned his next career move and had higher ambitions: he wanted to take the United States by storm. In the U.S. he ultimately reached superstar heights and expanded his field of activity to ballet, opera, film, fashion, jewellery and advertising.