The Meeting & The Outcome

Salvador Dalí met Freud on 19 July 1938, a few weeks after Freud had arrived in London as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria.

The Viennese writer Stefan Zweig arranged the meeting, and Dalí was accompanied by his patron and friend, Edward James.

They took Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) to show Freud.

Dalí sketched Freud throughout the visit and claimed that the drawings showing ‘the morphology of Freud’s skull’ in the spiral shape of a snail were from life. Later he created the striking portrait that belongs to the museum.

Dalí hoped to impress Freud as a ‘universal intellectual’ during their meeting but learned later that the effect he produced was exactly the opposite.

In fact Freud’s response was not as harsh as Dalí imagined. “I was inclined to look upon the surrealists as absolute cranks.” Freud wrote to Stefan Zweig the following day, “The young Spaniard, however, with his candid fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has made me reconsider my opinion.”

According to Dalí, Freud told him that what interested him in the paintings of the old masters was the search for hidden, unconscious ideas, but in Dalí’s paintings it was the conscious, because he had already done the work of interpretation himself.