Barcelona Sphinx, 1939 by Salvador Dali

Barcelona Sphinx, 1939 by Salvador Dali
Barcelona Sphinx, 1939 by Salvador Dali

Dali created Barcelona Sphinx, 1939 by Salvador Dali in gouache, pastel and collage on cardboard.

The painting depicts the child star Shirley Temple as a sphinx. Shirley Temple's head, taken from a newspaper photograph, is superimposed on the body of a red lioness with breasts and white claws. On top of the head is a vampire bat. Surrounding the sphinx are a human skull and other bones, suggesting her latest kill. At the bottom of the painting is a Trompe-l'oeil label that reads: "Shirley!. at last in Technicolor."

The painting has been described as a satire on the sexualization of child stars by Hollywood. In the painting, Temple is represented with the red naked body of a lioness, complete with prominent breasts and claws. Beneath her on the desert ground are the skeletal remains of her last kill, on which she languidly rests. Dali suggests a highly sexualized form of idolatry that circumnavitates Temple's image. The zoomorphic quality of the image suggests a grotesquery as well - a collision of binary opposites (human and animal, adult and child, savagery and passsivity, sex and innocence) that also marks the incoherent body of the revolting child.