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Metamorphosis of Narcissus
Artist	Salvador Dalí
Year	1937
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	51.2 cm × 78.1 cm (20.12 in × 30+3⁄4 in)
Standort	Tate Modern, London

External videos
Dali's Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Smarthistory

Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí. Originally titled Métamorphose de Narcisse, this painting is from Dalí's paranoiac-critical period and depicts Dalí's interpretation of the Greek myth of Narcissus. Dalí began his painting in the spring of 1937 while in Zürs, in the Austrian Alps.

Myth of Narcissus

According to Greek mythology, Narcissus's beauty made him attractive to nearly everyone who saw him and both men and women pursued him, but he rejected all advances. One of his admirers, a nymph named Echo, fell so madly in love with him that, after he rejected her, she wasted away until only her voice remained. The goddess Nemesis, taking pity on Echo, convinced Narcissus to gaze into a pool. Upon seeing his own face reflected in the water, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. Because he was unable to reach his own reflection, Narcissus too wasted away and in his place grew the flower that bears his name, the narcissus.

Dalí's Interpretation

In Dalí's painting, he depicts the figure of Narcissus on the left side of the canvas crouched by a lake, with his head resting on his knee, and a stone hand clutching an egg mirroring the shape of his body on the right. From out of the cracked egg, a narcissus flower sprouts. In the mid-ground of the painting stand a group of Narcissus's rejected suitors. Among the mountains in the background rests a third Narcissus figure.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus differs from Dalí's other double-image paintings, which there are multiple images hidden in one, because Narcissus's figure is doubled in the stone hand.

Poem

Dalí composed a poem, that he exhibited alongside his painting in 1937, which reads:

"Under the split in the retreating black cloud

the invisible scale of spring is oscillating in the fresh April sky. On the highest mountain, the god of the snow, his dazzling head bent over the dizzy space of reflections, starts melting with desire in the vertical cataracts of the thaw annihilating himself loudly among the excremental cries of minerals, or between [sic] the silences of mosses towards the distant mirror of the lake in which, the veils of winter having disappeared, he has newly discovered the lightning flash of his faithful image. It seems that with the loss of his divinity the whole high plateau pours itself out, crashes and crumbles among the solitude and the incurable silence of iron oxides while its dead weight raises the entire swarming and apotheosic plateau from the plain from which already thrust towards the sky the artesian fountains of grass and from which rise, erect, tender, and hard, the innumerable floral spears of the deafening armies of the germination of the narcissi.

Already the heterosexual group, in the renowned poses of preliminary expectation, conscientiously ponders over the threatening libidinous cataclysm, the carnivorous blooming of its latent morphological atavisms.

In the heterosexual group, in that kind date of the year (but not excessively beloved or mild), there are the Hindou tart, oily, sugared like an August date,

the Catalan with his grave back well planted in a sun-tide, a Whitsuntide of flesh inside his brain,

the blond flesh-eating German, the brown mists of mathematics in the dimples of his cloudy knees, there is the English woman, the Russian, the Swedish women, the American and the tall darkling Andalusian, hardy with glands and olive with anguish.

Far from the heterosexual group, the shadows of the avanced [sic] afternoon draw out across the countryside, and cold lays hold of the adolescent’s nakedness as he lingers at the water’s edge.

When the clear and divine body of Narcissus leans down to the obscure mirror of the lake,

when his white torso folded forward fixes itself, frozen, in the silvered and hypnotic curve of his desire, when the time passes on the clock of the flowers of the sand of his own flesh,

Narcissus loses his being in the cosmic vertigo in the deepest depths of which is singing the cold and Dyonisiac siren of his own image. The body of Narcissus flows out and loses itself in the abyss of his reflection, like the sand glass that will not be turned again.

Narcissus, you are losing your body, carried away and confounded by the millenary reflection of your disappearance your body stricken dead falls to the topaz precipice with yellow wreckage of love, your white body, swallowed up, follows the slope of the savagely mineral torrent of the black precious stones with pungent perfumes, your body ... down to the unglazed mouths of the night on the edge of which there sparkles already all the red silverware of dawns with veins broken in ‘the wharves of blood’.

Narcissus, do you understand? Symmetry, divine hypnosis of the mind’s geometry, already fills up your head, with that incurable sleep, vegetable, atavistic, slow Which withers up the brain in the parchment substance of the kernel of your nearing metamorphosis.

The seed of your head has just fallen into the water.

Man returns to the vegetable state by fatigue-laden sleep and the gods by the transparent hypnosis of their passions. Narcissus, you are so immobile one would think you were asleep. If it were a question of Hercules rough and brown, one would say: he sleeps like a bole [sic] in the posture of an Herculean oak. But you, Narcissus, made of perfumed bloomings of transparent adolescence, you sleep like a water flower.

Now the great mystery draws near, the great metamorphosis is about to occur.

Narcissus, in his immobility, absorbed by his reflection with the digestive slowness of carnivorous plants, becomes invisible.

There remains of him only the hallucinatingly white oval of his head, his head again more tender, his head, chrysalis of hidden biological designs, his head held up by the tips of the water’s fingers, at the tips of the fingers of the insensate hand, of the terrible hand, of the excrement-eating hand, of the mortal hand of his own reflection.

When that head slits when that head splits when that head bursts, it will be the flower, the new narcissus, Gala –

my narcissus".

Metamorphosis of Narcissus and the poem, which was published by Éditions surréalistes, that accompanied it were the first works of Dalí's to be completed by utilizing Dalí paranoiac-critical method. In a book that Dalí published in 1937, also titled Metamorphosis of Narcissus, the painter instructs viewers of his painting to observe it in a state of "distracted fixation". He writes:

"If one looks for some time, from a slight distance and with a certain 'distant fixedness', at the hypnotically immobile figure of Narcissus, it gradually disappears until at last it is completely invisible,"

implying that Narcissus will fade into the stone hand until he completely disappears.

Dalí and Sigmund Freud

On July 19, 1938 in London, Dalí met Sigmund Freud, whom the painter had admired since the 1920s after reading Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams. During their meeting, Dalí brought his painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus in hopes of using it to discuss the psychoanalytic theory of Narcissism and his concept of critical paranoia, which he developed based on Freud's concept of paranoia. He also was given permission to sketch Freud. The meeting was arranged by writer Stefan Zweig and Dalí's benefactor, Edward James, who was also in attendance and ultimately gained ownership of Metamorphosis of Narcissus.