Sunday Dalí: Phantasmagoria, 1930. Oil on panel, 69 x 44 cm. Property of Jack Nicholson, Beverly Hills, CA.
The keys on the stand that support the image of Dalí’s mother-as-recepticle suggest that there are secrets in this painting to be unlocked. That standard interpretation, as with most of Dalí’s works from this time, is a Freudian analysis. The lion represents Dalí’s father, who gazes with sexual desire at Dalí’s mother. Dalí’s face is shown as The Great Masturbator to which a grasshopper clings. The grasshopper mounts Dalí’s mouth in the sexual act signifying Dalí’s mute terror and sexual anxieties. Dalí’s pain is shown by his bleeding nose.
The bird is in reference to Da Vinci’s memory of a vulture that visited the renaissance master’s cradle and opened his mouth with its tail feathers. Da Vinci might have hidden the anecdote in his painting Virgin and Child with St. Anne, in which Freud found a hidden bird.1
- Dawn Ades and Michael R. Taylor, Dalí, (Venice: Rizzoli, 2004), 128. ↩
It’s a little bit funny that we’re called Surreal Football and also hate Barcelona, when the most famous surrealist of all time was Catalan, and childhood friends with early day Barcelona star players at that. But then, we don’t have to explain ourselves to anyone. Especially you, fuck you.

