Color lithograph with relief (textured embossing) and gold highlights (gold dust/leaf) on Arches Velin handmade paper; 47 x 64 cm (inner dimensions of the composition), framed in a frame measuring
Prestige Edition, limited and numbered in pencil 127/300 l.d.;
A blindstamp depicting a tree (The Tree of Life (L'arbre de vie)) and Dalí’s name;
A relief die embossed within the print’s texture.
Publisher: Artis Group; the legendary Parisian artisan workshop Ateliers Rigal was responsible for embossing the intricate dies .
This unique combination of structural embossing on the “Masturbator” itself, gold bullion, and an authorized stamp featuring a tree makes this lithograph an extremely rare, luxurious variant. Objects of this type represent the pinnacle of 20th-century French printmaking craftsmanship.
This work was created at a pivotal moment in Dalí’s life—in the summer of 1929, he met Gala, his future wife, muse, and the love of his life (at the time, she was still married to the poet Paul Éluard). The image captures the intense psychological tension, sexual fears, desire, and obsessions that were tormenting him at the time.
The large, pale, rock-like structure with a closed eye and long eyelashes is a distorted self-portrait of Dalí himself. This face seems to be “melting” or collapsing under the weight of his own visions. A grasshopper attachedto the lower part of the face (where the mouth should be)—Dalí had a panic-stricken, even phobic, fear of grasshoppers since childhood. In his personal mythology , this insect symbolized pure fear, self-destruction, and paranoia. The lithograph shows ants gathering on the grasshopper’s abdomen. For Dalí, ants always signify decay, decomposition, transience, and subconscious anxiety. The female figure is Gala: Emerging from the upper part of the head is a bust of a woman sensually resembling a male groin (hidden within a sandy column). This is a direct reference to Gala—she symbolizes an escape from fears, and at the same time, a powerful, almost paralyzing sexual desire.
