Roger,
A thing I most appreciate in many of Dali's works is how they put my imagination to work (and I can hardly imagine how Dali's own imagination worked!). In the case of the Nuclear Cross, for example, he seems to not only have been interested in the religious and the nuclear themes but also (and beyond that) in how a Divine Center and the nuclear energy originated in it have jointly caused (and keep perpetually causing), in both time and space, the so-called material world or reality that we can perceive with our eyes at present.
And going even beyond that, he seems to have conceived how this Absolute Origin of all things could be represented so that the observer could, in turn, realize what he was trying to convey: In the cross below, for example, its center (the atom's immovable nucleus) representing, on the one hand, the "Center of the World", or God; and the cross' arms (all the atom's other minute particles) representing the rest of the universe with its myriads of galaxies, planets, and more, on the other. And all this in an orderly way, as shown by the perfect symmetry and the perspective by which he represented that central immobility, on the one hand, and this perpetual movement on the other. Hence his horror at the nuclear explosions in Mururoa and other places.
In the other painting below its very name, Explosion of Mystical Faith, says it all, but here it is as if Dali was conjuring up all negative implications by contrasting a real nuclear explosion with an explosion of the faithful's faith radiating from a place under the cross that is hanging on the wall, this latter explosion seen approximately at the center of the painting. What is incredible is the beauty with which Dali has probably expressed all this.
Hugs,
Miguel
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Another Dali's leit motiv: the religious theme
Salvador Dali - Nuclear Cross (oil on canvas, 1952)
Salvador Dali - St. Peter's in Rome (Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral)
(oil on canvas, 1960)
What wonderful images again here. The first one is a wonderful mixture of observation and imagination with his favourite nuclear theme. The second is alike, a wonderful painting of the location and the wonderful imagined religious image. The colours of the palette are well chosen and beautiful. I could happily own that painting. Roger
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